In November of 2024, I found myself standing in front of a modest home on South Jackson Street in Montgomery, Alabama. It was once the parsonage of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and from 1954 to 1960 it was home to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his family. Today it is a museum. Back then, it was a place of prayer, fear, resolve, and courage.

This was the home where King lived as he emerged as the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was here that his house was bombed by segregationists while his wife and children slept inside. It was here that he received countless death threats. And it was here that a young pastor was shaped into a civil rights leader, an activist, and eventually the conscience of a nation.

I was in Montgomery with a group of faith leaders participating in a cohort with an organization called Living Undivided, focused on racial justice and solidarity. We were concluding our time together with a civil rights tour. Montgomery is a city heavy with history–both the cradle of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. It is where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, and where Martin Luther King Jr. first stepped onto the national stage.

Standing outside King’s home, I reflected on a passage from his book Stride Toward Freedom. King was exhausted. He had just received another death threat related to the boycott. He wrote:

“I was ready to give up… In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God… At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before… ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go.”

King is rightly remembered as an activist and a civil rights leader. But what resonates most deeply with me is that he was also a pastor–a spiritual leader. You cannot separate King the activist from King the preacher. Scholar Mervyn Warren wrote that King was profoundly shaped by the Black church, calling it his “conscious ancestral home,” continually feeding and forming his faith, vision, and public leadership.

It was King’s biblical convictions that shaped his vision for the flourishing of all humanity–Black and white, oppressed and oppressor. His faith grounded his commitment to nonviolence. It shaped his speeches, his posture toward enemies, and his courage to endure beatings, arrests, lies, and constant threats on his life.

I am a pastor too. For the past five years, I’ve had the privilege of serving City Alliance Church in downtown Williamsport. Dr. King’s legacy matters deeply to me, to our church, and to the broader movement of churches we are part of.

King’s commitment to justice flowed from a biblical vision of human flourishing. One of the passages that shaped him, and continues to shape me today comes from the prophet Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me… to proclaim good news to the poor… freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.”

Philosopher Cornel West famously said that “justice is what love looks like in public.” King understood this. Love was not merely sentimental for him–it was active, public, and costly. It meant paying attention to the poor, the oppressed, and the forgotten, and confronting systems of injustice that are easy to ignore.

In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King envisioned a nation where his children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. That dream was not naïve optimism–it was rooted in his faith and his understanding of the gospel.

For followers of Jesus, the gospel is central. It is the belief that God is at work rescuing and restoring not only individual souls, but people, communities, and ultimately all of creation. As my friend Troy Jackson writes in his book Becoming King, “Throughout his ministry, King preached a gospel grounded in an optimistic hope for the ultimate triumph of God in the face of any challenge.”

Every year around Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I reread one of his speeches. I find myself deeply grateful–and deeply challenged. We need courage today. And when we lack it, sometimes we need to borrow it. I borrow courage from King.

But perhaps what our culture needs most right now is King’s commitment to nonviolence and his insistence on loving our enemies. He took seriously one of Jesus’ most uncomfortable teachings: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

That teaching is often ignored or dismissed as unrealistic. King refused to dismiss it. He lived it–calling his followers to forgive, to resist violence even in the face of brutality, and to refuse dehumanization.

We desperately need that posture today. We live in an age of outrage, where social media profits from keeping us angry and divided. We are quick to dehumanize–whether immigrants and refugees, law enforcement, political opponents, or anyone we label as “the other.”

If Dr. King were alive today, I believe he would still march with the poor and the oppressed. He would name the evils inflicting our society today, without flinching. But he would also challenge us to love, forgive, and refuse hatred–even toward those we believe are causing harm. As King famously said, echoing the words of Jesus, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

I thought of those words as I stood outside his home in Montgomery. The house had to be rebuilt after it was bombed in 1956. But the message that emerged from that place still stands.

Perhaps if we, too, choose courage over fear and love over hate, we might begin to rebuild our neighborhoods, our communities, and our nation–so deeply divided, yet still full of hope.

Nithin Thompson is the lead pastor of City Alliance Church in downtown Williamsport. He moved to Williamsport from New Jersey in 2021 with his wife, Jackie, and their two children, Selah and Wesley.