Ebenezer Baptist Church: The Pulpit's Enduring Light

Lyrics

[Intro]
Sweet Auburn Avenue breathes slow on a Sunday morning.
Dust motes dance in the light from the tall arched windows.
You can feel the quiet, but it isn't empty.
It's full of echoes.

[Verse 1]
It started with a whisper in eighteen eighty-six.
Reverend John A. Parker and a handful of names.
Built not with granite, but with the tithes of dishwashers and laborers.
The scent of fresh pine and determined prayer.
A foundation dug deep, beside the city's iron veins,
but drawing water from a different well.

[Verse 2]
Then came the Kings.
Daddy King's voice, a resonant baritone in '31,
shaking the rafters, steadying the soul.
And in 1960, his son Martin, home from the wider world.
He said it himself, 'Before I was a leader, I was a preacher.'
This dark wooden pulpit, worn smooth by their hands,
became the conscience of a nation.
The scent of polished wood and fresh lilies on the altar.

[Chorus]
This is the light that doesn't go out.
The voice that speaks from the worn-down wood.
A promise made on a stretch of red brick road.
Ebenezer.
A house of God, a school for justice.
An anchor in the heart of the city's good.

[Verse 3]
The hard years came.
We felt the humid air of April, nineteen sixty-eight.
The whole world weeping outside our doors.
And then the unthinkable, a Sunday morning in June.
Seventy-four.
Alberta Williams King at the organ, her hands on the keys.
A hymn broken by a sound no one should ever hear in church.
A different kind of grief settled in these pews.

[Bridge]
We had to build bigger.
Nineteen ninety-nine, across the street.
The Horizon Sanctuary, with the smell of new carpet.
But the spirit just stretched, it never left the old brick.
And now, that same fire is carried by Reverend Warnock.
From this pulpit to the Senate floor.
A testament.
A continuation.

[Chorus]
This is the light that doesn't go out.
The voice that speaks from the worn-down wood.
A promise made on a stretch of red brick road.
Ebenezer.
A house of God, a school for justice.
An anchor in the heart of the city's good.

[Outro]
Sweet Auburn breathes.
The green canopy outside whispers against the glass.
Still drawing water from that deeper well.
The light holds.
The light always holds.