How many times we encounter...
Illustration
How many times we encounter people who have all but lost hope. Jobless, they wonder if anything else vocational awaits them. Now spouseless, they wonder if life will ever again offer joy and meaning. On the losing end of a contest, they wonder whether the future will again smile at them.
Vernon Johns must have felt like that. Johns, a black man, was pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 40s and early 50s. All through his ministry he was an outspoken critic of Jim Crow laws. One day in the summer of 1951, he got on a bus in Montgomery and in frustration decided to step across the line. He took his place in a seat near the front of the bus, a place for whites only. The bus driver stopped the vehicle and ordered him to move back. Johns refused. He was then ordered off the bus. Again Johns refused, insisting that the driver must first return his fare. Finally Johns stood in the aisle and asked if the other blacks on the bus would follow him off the bus and in that way demonstrate their feelings against the degrading laws that dehumanized blacks. None did. In fact they hooted at him. When word got back to his church about what he had done, he was censured by his own deacons. Johns, they said, should have known better. Shortly thereafter, Johns resigned his pulpit and moved to Maryland to farm, feeling he had completely failed.
When the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church mounted their search for a new pastor, the man they eventually called was completing doctoral work at Boston University and his name was Martin Luther King, Jr. John's supposed failure was not by far a final chapter. God's "new Jerusalem" was again breaking through.
Vernon Johns must have felt like that. Johns, a black man, was pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 40s and early 50s. All through his ministry he was an outspoken critic of Jim Crow laws. One day in the summer of 1951, he got on a bus in Montgomery and in frustration decided to step across the line. He took his place in a seat near the front of the bus, a place for whites only. The bus driver stopped the vehicle and ordered him to move back. Johns refused. He was then ordered off the bus. Again Johns refused, insisting that the driver must first return his fare. Finally Johns stood in the aisle and asked if the other blacks on the bus would follow him off the bus and in that way demonstrate their feelings against the degrading laws that dehumanized blacks. None did. In fact they hooted at him. When word got back to his church about what he had done, he was censured by his own deacons. Johns, they said, should have known better. Shortly thereafter, Johns resigned his pulpit and moved to Maryland to farm, feeling he had completely failed.
When the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church mounted their search for a new pastor, the man they eventually called was completing doctoral work at Boston University and his name was Martin Luther King, Jr. John's supposed failure was not by far a final chapter. God's "new Jerusalem" was again breaking through.
