Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Interfaith Service Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.

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The Interfaith Council of New Canaan is pleased to sponsor the 18th Annual Interfaith Service celebrating the life of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The Guest Speaker is Reverend Christian Peele, who has served as Executive Minister of Institutional Advancement at the Riverside Church in New York City, as well as in the Obama White House. There will be inspiring music, including the Serendipity Chorale of Southwestern Connecticut, featuring baritone Edward Pleasant. Refreshments will be served after the service, and donations of non-perishable food for the New Canaan Food Pantry will be accepted.

Around Town

‘A Little Better Than Yesterday’: Hundreds Attend Interfaith MLK Service in New Canaan

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A native of Memphis, the city where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, George Walker Jr. has felt a lifelong connection to the civil rights leader. 

An ordained minister himself, Walker attended King’s alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, pledging the same fraternity, then launched a career that’s included positions on the U.S. president’s Board of Advisors for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, a member of the American Leadership Council for Diversity in Healthcare and as vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. This past weekend, Walker recalled Monday while addressing a packed United Methodist Church as the guest speaker during New Canaan’s annual celebration of King’s life, a King quote that he had “decided to stick with love” because “hate is too great a burden to bear” came to Walker’s mind. Following a workout and lunch in Manhattan, Walker said, he and his husband were riding a subway back uptown when he spotted an “older black woman who caught my eye.”

“She had several ‘I love Jesus’ buttons and a placard I couldn’t read,” during the  17th Annual Interfaith Service of Worship, which drew more than 250 people on a freezing cold Martin Luther King Jr. Day. 

“When the opportunity came about, my spouse gestured for her to take a seat. I was standing. Her protest signs were signs about a Jesus that I do not recognize.

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Pastor Pushes Attendees to Realize Martin Luther King’s Dream in Powerful Remembrance Service

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“What would [Martin Luther King, Jr.] say about what’s going on in the world today?” asked Dr. Lindsay E. Curtis, a pastor at Norwalk’s Grace Baptist Church, as he addressed a crowd gathered in New Canaan on Monday morning to remember the late Reverend and civil rights leader. One of two first-hand witnesses of King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington to speak at the community’s annual service, held at the United Methodist Church, Curtis passionately reminded attendees that King’s presence in history is inherently political, and that, should the divide ever-present in today’s landscape ever be bridged, his legacy must be celebrated and upheld not only on his birthday, but year-round. At the center of Curtis’s speech, delivered during a remembrance service sponsored by the Interfaith Council of New Canaan, was a passage from King’s 1963 open letter, written from Birmingham Jail after his arrest. The quote reads as follows; “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere … He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.

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‘Handle Your Situation’: Stirring Sermon, ABC House Student Address at MLK Day Service

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In important ways, race relations in the United States in recent years recall the nation’s civil unrest of the 1950s and ’60s—the years during which Dr. Martin Luther King became most active, a New Canaan High School senior said Monday morning. After wrestling with issues such as police brutality and domestic terrorism, “from the Trayvon Martin case of 2012 to what took place in Ferguson [Mo.], Charleston and Dallas over the last three years, the country has an increasing desire to put such tensions to rest,” Rajon Mitchell, an ABC House of New Canaan student, said during a special service at United Methodist Church. “To sum up the issues of the ‘60s and today in a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King himself: ‘People fail to get along because they fear each other, they fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other,’ ” Mitchell told more than 200 people gathered at the South Avenue church for an annual “Service of Remembrance” on Martin Luther King Day. “While it is true for both eras, there is one thing that separates this day from the 1960s, and that is the means of communication. In an age where the entire world is your audience when you post something online, we have an opportunity to build bridges between communities, in an era where communities and cultures that may never have known that each other existed 350 years ago now know are able to connect and share in a cultural fusion.