05/25/2026
“It’s Been a Long Way From Then Until Now”
Ministry Matters
by Rev Dr J. Wendell Mapson Jr
May 18, 2026
On Thursday, May 14th, I stood at the podium in the chapel at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in chilly, downtown Rochester, NY, to preach for my school’s annual alumni/alumnae service, one of the events held during commencement weekend. My wife and I drove the scenic route under sometimes dreary skies, over rolling hills and mountains covered with giant trees planted in a carpet of green grass. As we neared Rochester, we passed the exit for Seneca Falls, NY, where in 1848 the first women’s rights convention was held, launching the women’s suffrage movement, which seven decades later ensured women the right to vote.
Fifty-six years earlier as a 25-year-old, I marched in a procession to receive my Master of Divinity degree in Crozer’s chapel when it was in Upland, Pa., a suburb of Chester. The school made famous by graduates J. Pius Barbour, Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Martin Luther King Jr., William Augustus Jones Jr., and others. I was a member of the last class to graduate on the Crozer campus in May 1970 prior to the school's relocation to Rochester to merge with Colgate Rochester, a union that has now been in place for 57 years.
Though I have visited the campus in Rochester several times while serving as a member of the board of governors, this was the very first time I had been invited to preach in the divinity school from which I graduated, an experience I will always cherish. An invitation extended by Dr. Angela Simms, the 13th president and first Black woman president in the 250-year plus history of the storied divinity school less than 100 miles from Niagara Falls.
Upon receiving this invitation, I could not resist the temptation to push the rewind button and return, though clouded by time, to the day when I first drove onto the old Crozer campus, just 15 miles from the church where I have been the minister for over 38 years. Nor could I resist thinking of the world in which I lived then and the world we live in now.
I entered those gates and onto the campus, a wide-eyed 22-year-old ready and eager to win the world for Christ, the call to ministry burning in me like “fire shut up in my bones.” I thought of myself as following the ministerial path of the giants of my day. Highly regarded preachers who came through the academic hallways of both Crozer and Colgate Rochester before me.
Added to the list of those whose paths I followed at Crozer are the names of noted ministers who matriculated at the Rochester campus: Mordecai Johnson, Joseph H. Jackson, Howard Thurman, Samuel B. McKinney, and Lucius Tobin, my religion professor at Morehouse, to name a few. Names you may not know. But names whose voices yet ring in my ear. Voices that have shaped my understanding of what God has called me to be and to do. At the time, I didn’t know where God was leading me, but I knew that God was leading me. And, like Abraham, by faith, I followed, not knowing where I was going. Just waiting for my assignment but preparing as I waited.
Two years prior to my enrollment in seminary, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed. Upon signing the bill, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a southerner from the state of Texas, declared, “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.” Which, according to a commentator recently reflecting on the signing, “put a final nail in the coffin of American apartheid and opened the door to something that looked worthy of the name democracy.”
Immediately, Black people felt a sense of political empowerment and my ancestors in Alabama, who had been denied the right to vote, were at least a step closer to living an American dream that for them had been a dystopian nightmare. Hope began to blossom across Black America. In the next three or four decades, the number of Black elected officials drastically increased, vindicating the blood and sacrifice of our civil rights heroes who now rest in their graves. In my second year in seminary,1968, a New Yorker, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, became the first Black woman elected to Congress.
Now 71 years later, on April 29, 2026, the US Supreme Court has yanked the nail from the lid of that coffin, exposing a co**se named Jim Crow who is alive and well. I reminded my chapel audience that from then until now, those of us who belong to Christ have wrestled with, struggled with, grappled with, agonized over, prayed over, this ministry to which we have been called, with disappointing Supreme Court decisions that erode our confidence in American democracy and postpone equal justice, a needless war in Iran, food insecurities, the rising cost of living, and chaos and incompetence in the White House. Through it all, we have this ministry…
While driving back to Philadelphia beholding once more the breathtaking, majestic scenery, I thanked God for an amazing opportunity that now belongs in my toolbox of precious memories. How they linger! It’s been a long way from then until now.
Grace and Peace,
Pastor Mapson
