Charles Adams knew he wanted to be a preacher. He didn’t know if he was old enough for the pulpit, though, so he asked his mom.
He wasn’t happy with the answer.
“I asked my mother when we came out of church one day, ‘How old am I?’ ” he remembers. “She said, ‘You're four.’ I said, ‘Is that all?’ She said, ‘Well, what's wrong with it?’ I said, ‘It's wrong because I can't preach at four. I wish I was 40!’ She said, ‘Wait your turn.’ ”
Now 80, the Rev. Dr. Charles Gilchrist Adams, BD '64, looks back on more than a half-century of ministry during which he was celebrated as one of the country's most influential preachers and African Americans. For this work—as well as a lifetime of scholarship and struggle for social justice —Adams’ fellow HDS alumni will recognize him this April as a 2017 Peter J. Gomes STB ’68 Memorial Honoree.
“When I heard that I was selected as an honoree, I rejoiced in God having brought me from so far down to so high up,” Adams said. “I just ask every moment to be worthy of it.”
Judging by his life and career, Adams has already proved worthy—and then some.
As the head of Hartford Memorial Baptist Church (HMBC) in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan, Adams strengthened and grew his congregation to over 10,000 members. As the president of one of the country’s largest chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Adams—a longtime friend of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy—led a successful campaign to give African Americans access to parks in neighboring Dearborn.
“People came up to Detroit out of the dust,” he says of the African Americans who migrated north. “They came up out of the lynchings, out of hatred and fire and attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Those people escaped Mississippi to get a good job and to move on to Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard. Those were the people in our congregation and in our community.”
When factory jobs started to disappear in the 1980s, Adams got directly involved in the effort to spur growth. He established the Hartford Economic Development Foundation, purchased property in his community, and then convinced businesses to locate there. Owned and operated by African Americans, the stores and restaurants provided hundreds of jobs for inner-city residents.
“I had been to Atlanta and seen what the Kings had done around Ebenezer Baptist Church,” Adams says. “That gave me an idea that we should own all the land we could around Hartford Memorial. As a result, most of the land around the church belongs to the church, so that it makes economic development all the more possible.”
Thanks to Adams, HMBC also has a thriving social service ministry. Through Hartford Agape House, members of the HMBC community can access programs for medical and legal referrals, college preparation, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, AIDS prevention and awareness, incarcerated mothers and children, senior citizens, and many others.
“I had HMBC itself becoming really the organ and the instrument of social reconstruction and social change,” Adams says. “A lot of strength in the church came out in the work we did in the ghetto and in the city.”
Adams’ time at Harvard Divinity School in the early 1960s played an important role in the work he’s done since then. He says he found himself in a cohort of people who shared his passion for justice and encouraged him to bring it into his ministry.
“It was such a fine gathering of human beings who really cared about racism, sexism, and that there are some people who have to ‘eat dust for bread,’ ” he says. “I just thought it was wonderful and I brought it home to church.”
Far from the stereotype of HDS as a place where aspiring clergy lose their faith, Adams discovered that the School’s critical approach to the study of religion yielded an especially resilient kind of spiritual formation—one that prepared him for leadership in the modern world. He found himself freed from literalistic interpretations of Christian scripture in a way that actually unleashed the full power of his faith.
“I loved it,” he says. “I was so excited that you didn't have to believe in a literal virgin birth. I found that there were flaws in my faith, but there was greatness in the midst of those flaws, and in the midst of the unanswered questions. The power is in the ambiguity.”
Adams returned to HDS in 2007 to teach for five years as the William and Lucille Nickerson Professor of the Practice of Ethics and Ministry. In class, the discussion often turned to theodicy, a question with which he has wrestled for much of his life. Why do people suffer if the world is in the hands of a “good” God?
“Kierkegaard, I believe, was right when he said that you just can't equate divinity with humanity, nor humanity with divinity,” Adams says. “I'm not God and neither are you. We just have to take a leap in the dark—and most days it will be very dark. So don't ask me when the kingdom is coming, just keep on living and working to make it happen.”
Today, Adams reflects on 50 years of achievement during which he has bridged the gap between the academy, the church, and the inner city. He has seen the first African American president—a man he numbers among his friends—and he has seen the tumult that followed and is neither elated nor discouraged. There’s always more to learn, more work to do.
“God's grace has made a way for me to stand in some of the most exciting social transformations that I've ever known to occur anywhere,” he says. “That project will go on. It's going to be a mighty thing.”
—by Paul Massari