Founding of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples

The founding of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples turned Howard Thurman’s religious and social concerns into a congregational experiment: a church intended for people of different racial and cultural backgrounds to worship and participate as equals. Rather than treating unity as an abstraction, Thurman made worship its keystone and used the life of the congregation to explore whether religious experience could overcome divisions that persisted in society and within churches.

The invitation and the decision

In 1945, a Presbyterian minister in San Francisco wrote to Thurman with a proposal for an intentionally intercultural church. The envisioned congregation would include white people, African Americans, Asians, and Latinos, with everyone equal and able to participate in all aspects of church life. The invitation asked Thurman to become its minister. It offered more than a new appointment: it placed before him a chance to test, within a local community, questions that had shaped his ministry.

Thurman did not accept immediately. He deliberated with his family before deciding to leave Howard University for the position. The choice followed years of work on worship and religious life at the university, where he had experimented with silence, meditation, prayer, liturgical dance, and visual art to engage students. At a service featuring staged reproductions of Madonna paintings, he had seen a congregation and its participants brought together in a shared spiritual experience. The new church offered a setting in which that search for unity could become an enduring communal practice rather than a single service.

A congregation as a test of belief

The church was to be called the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. Thurman understood the appointment as an opportunity to put his central concerns to the test: whether worship of God was the central act of the human spirit, and whether people could encounter one another in God’s presence without being defined by categories such as sex, age, or wealth. He also asked whether religious experience disclosed what a person ultimately amounted to. These questions gave the founding its intellectual and spiritual stakes. The aim was not simply to welcome a diverse congregation, but to discover whether worship could make equality real in the relations and participation of its members.

That aim carried particular weight in the setting of Thurman’s life and work. He had grown up in a segregated society, and his religious commitments had been challenged by the history of Christian complicity in slavery and racial oppression. During his 1935 journey to Asia, a college principal in Ceylon confronted him with that history and challenged him to account for his Christian identity. Thurman replied by distinguishing Christianity from the religion of Jesus Christ and by pointing to people in the United States who understood Jesus Christ’s spirit as a call to freedom, liberty, and justice. The intercultural church gave his convictions a concrete institutional form: it sought a community in which equality would shape participation rather than remain a claim made from a pulpit.

Worship, art, and shared participation

Worship became the keystone of the church. Thurman again drew on the arts, treating creative forms not as decoration but as part of how people might enter a shared religious experience. The congregation attracted social radicals, union members and leaders, people from the arts, and ordinary citizens. Its reach beyond a single social constituency reflected the founding aspiration to bring people together without requiring them to share the same background or public role.

The church’s cultural work also extended to children. It offered intercultural workshops intended to teach them about other cultures. After attending one, a boy told his mother that he had known Jesus Christ was a Baptist but had not known he was Jewish. The child’s remark captured, in an everyday exchange, the possibility and the limits of the work: inherited assumptions could be reconsidered, while religious belonging could be understood across familiar boundaries. The workshops made the church’s ideal part of children’s learning as well as its adult worship.

Public life and the church’s continuing influence

The congregation’s life met both spiritual and public settings. When Thurman was invited to offer an opening prayer at a meeting of the Cooks and Stewards Union, the union’s president responded warmly after the prayer. The incident shows the church’s contact with organized labor and the wider civic world, rather than an identity confined to its own services. At Thurman’s farewell dinner as he prepared to leave Howard University, Eleanor Roosevelt was the featured speaker; she later became an associate member of the San Francisco church, as did other people who lived far away. The community’s connections therefore extended beyond its immediate location.

After ten years at the church, Thurman accepted an invitation to become dean of the chapel and professor of spiritual disciplines at Boston University. He explained that a congregation in a university setting could bring his ideas to young people who would later carry responsibilities in communities around the world. His departure did not erase the founding’s significance: the church had allowed him to test his convictions through worship, creative practice, and an intercultural community, while his next appointment offered another means of extending that work.