• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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For awhile now, Jamaica has been lovingly encouraging me to read Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr. I finally took her advice and wow, what a book. It’s a collection of sermons that King re-assembled into book form, but he was clear that “a sermon is not an essay to be read but a discourse to be heard.” Strength to Love could perhaps best be summed up into King’s pursuit of “a tough mind and a tender heart.” “Never must the church tire of reminding men that they have a moral responsibility to be intelligent.” His clarity is poignant: “A nation or civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.”

King was a man of action, not one to let good intentions end there. “One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying.” He was also convinced that action by a few wasn’t enough, it would take everyone getting on board the justice train. “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

The “worship of bigness” is something King wrote strongly against. “Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.”

But King aimed some of his choicest words directly at the church. “Nowhere is the tragic tendency to conform more evident than in the church… the church has hearkened more to the authority of the world than to the authority of God.”

He continues: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”

Speaking about the significant progress being made in America, King doesn’t mince words. “Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but you have failed to employ your moral and spiritual genius to make of it a brotherhood.” “But, America, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress.”

Strength to Love is a great book, but it would be unfortunate if it stopped there. This is a call to action!

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