The Reverend Sam Teitel is minister at the First Unitarian Church — the Church of the River. Photograph by Running Pony.
There is a photograph hanging at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis that I have always found to be particularly striking. It was taken April 5, 1968, one day after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is a picture of 300 Memphis clergy people confronting the city’s mayor, Henry Loeb, in his office and asking him to negotiate with sanitation workers who had been on strike.
One of the gathered clergy, the Rev. Joseph P. Toney, is reaching across the mayor’s desk to shake his hand. The photo is taken from over Mayor Loeb’s shoulder, revealing a shotgun that he had hidden behind his desk. I respond to this picture because it communicates so much about the experience of being a person of faith in Memphis. The clergymen in the picture are collaborating and supporting each other as they engage with difficult and crucial work to confront the city’s most intractable problems. In this case they have taken this work directly to the highest seat of city government. And, underneath that high seat of government, there is a shotgun.
Memphis is beautiful and majestic and also deeply complicated, and that sometimes-harmony-sometimes-tension between the glamour and the grit is what has defined my experience as a religious Memphian during the two years that I have lived here. My wife, the Rev. Sandra Summers, and I moved here from the Boston area in August of 2017 when I began my work as the minister of the Church of the River, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Downtown Memphis. I had never even been to the city before I came here to interview for my current position.
There is a gracefulness to the Memphis energy, an undercurrent of care in the chaos.
To say that Memphis is not Boston is something beyond an understatement — Memphis is a place that is entirely unlike anywhere else. People in Memphis just have a different approach to life than people I have ever encountered before. Memphians are as energetic and passionate as you would expect from the city that gave us Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley, but there is more to it than that. There is a gracefulness to the Memphis energy, an undercurrent of care in the chaos.
And this is true for the religious experience as well — the love and ferocity that Memphians bring to their barbecue and blues is also present in our religious spaces. There is nothing in the world that is quite like a Memphis worship service. Nothing. This city has a very, very long list of places where you can worship, each with its own personality and culture, but the energy of Memphis is present no matter where you go. When a Memphis preacher really hits their stride, the love and the ferocity and the tears and the faith just seem to rain down from the rafters.
It is true that Memphis contains an astounding number of religious institutions — we have more churches than gas stations, or so I have been told. For many Memphians, the religious institution to which they belong is an important part of their identity. This is the first place I have ever lived where I can tell people that I’m a minister and they just accept it as a perfectly normal thing (which I suppose it is).
The Rev. Teitel addresses worshippers at the Church of the River.
Photograph by Running Pony
Memphis’ religious institutions span a wide spectrum, from liberal to conservative, from Christian to Jewish to Muslim to Unitarian Universalist and beyond. And still, we are all connected. The ecumenical and interfaith community in Memphis is very strong, and we often collaborate with each other. We worship and pray and organize; sometimes we celebrate together and sometimes we grieve together.
But whatever we are up to, we often do it together and we often do it in public. Even with all of our religious diversity and differences, we are able to come together when we need to. I am the minister of one of the more liberal churches in the city, but I have never had a conservative colleague give me a hard time or try to convert me to their way of thinking. I hope that my liberal colleagues and I have extended the same consideration back to them. I believe that this happens because of something deeper than just Southern manners. I think it has much more to do with how keenly aware we all are of how much is on our shoulders and how much our city is asking of us. We don’t have time to waste arguing with each other. There is work to do.
For the past two years my congregation has been engaging with this work through our participation in a community organization called the Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope. MICAH is a nonprofit organization made up of more than 50 partner organizations from across the faith spectrum, including places of worship, nonprofits, and unions, all working together for the good of our city. This work includes efforts around economic equity, immigration and intercultural equity, and educational equity.
Every month when I attend the MICAH meetings, I look around at the different people of faith in the room. Each person has their own experiences and perspective, but we are all present, all doing the best that we can to move our city towards a place that lives into our shared values as people of faith. I like to think that we are living up to the legacy of the group of preachers who confronted Henry Loeb on that day in 1968, that we are part of a long and proud tradition of faithful Memphians coming together to work towards transformation in this city that we love.
Church History
The First Unitarian Church of Memphis got its start in 1893 and was formally chartered in 1912. It opened the doors of its present-day sanctuary overlooking the Mississippi River in 1966, an ultra-modern structure designed by noted Memphis architect and church member Roy Harrover (1928-2016). There are five remarkable floor-to-ceiling windows in the sanctuary and everyone (except the minister) has a view of the river. The church, with its location on the bluff, is a popular site for weddings. Before the Reverend Sam Teitel came two years ago, the Reverend Burton D. Carley served as minister for 32 years until 2015, and the Reverend James Madison Barr led the church for 20 years before Carley.
