Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Rev. King ministered and preached

Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where King ministered, was renamed
Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in 1978.

Religion

King at the 1963 Civil Rights 

March on Washington, D.C.

 

 

 

As a Christian minister, King's main influence was Jesus Christ and the Christian gospels, which he would almost always quote in his religious meetings, speeches at church, and in public discourses. 

King's faith was strongly based in Jesus' commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself, loving God above all, and loving your enemies, praying for them and blessing them.

His nonviolent thought was also based in the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus' teaching of putting the sword back into its place (Matthew 26:52).

In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, King urged action consistent with what he describes as Jesus' "extremist" love, and also quoted numerous other Christian pacifist authors, which was very usual for him. In another sermon, he stated:

Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the Gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don't plan to run for any political office. I don't plan to do anything but remain a preacher. And what I'm doing in this struggle, along with many others, grows out of my feeling that the preacher must be concerned about the whole man.

In his speech "I've Been to the Mountaintop", he stated that he just wanted to do God's will.