A Legacy of Love
As heads of Community Ministries, Rev. Charles Black and Rev. Connie Lee helped reshape our church and the community
The Rev. Charles Black and Rev. Connie Lee overcame many obstacles to serve the congregation at First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta. Charles Black was a college janitor until an administrator suggested that he enroll as a student. Connie Lee had to overcome domestic abuse and single motherhood prior to entering the ministry.
Altogether, the two of them spent over three decades at the head of First Presbyterian’s Community Ministries, following Paul’s instructions to the Colossians and clothing themselves with “compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.”
And it hasn’t just been the congregation at First Presbyterian that has benefited from their work. Together, they have broken down racial barriers in both the church and the city, all while ministering to countless people with the most important resource available to them: love.
‘Reverend Black’s Church’
The late Charles Black was never the Senior Pastor at First Presbyterian, yet in many places throughout Atlanta, the church was known to those in need as “Reverend Black’s church.”
He brought his family from Kansas City in 1988 to work for the General Assembly Mission Board of the Presbyterian Church (USA). The denomination was planning to consolidate its headquarters in Kansas City, at which point the Black family intended to move back. However, in an upset vote, the assembly instead chose to relocate to Louisville, Kentucky. By then, the Blacks had laid down roots in Atlanta and decided not to follow. Black was called to a position then known as “Minister of Outreach” at First Presbyterian Church, becoming the first African American member of the church’s pastoral staff.
Rev. Charles Black helped to expand Community Ministries, forming strategic partnerships that served the church’s neighbors with love and respect.
Betty Sanders, a church member and colleague at the denominational headquarters, was the one who urged him to apply to replace Rev. Bob Bevis. Black didn’t think the church would hire a Black pastor, but he agreed to meet with the search committee. In a report to the congregation on December 13, 187, the committee recommended Black, writing, “He has been described, and we found it to be true, that he is the type of person to whom people are instantly drawn. He is a good team player, and at the same time, not afraid to stand up for what he believes.”
Overall, the congregation was “very welcoming,” said Black’s son, Christopher. But there were some who weren’t pleased by his appointment. Black tried to protect his three children from any controversy, but his daughter Erica said that they could still hear him and the mother talking about it from time to time.
In A Church on Peachtree, Black admitted that he was not surprised it took some people longer to accept him. “As I began to take communion to people in the hospitals and to people’s homes,” he said, “at first I would often be introduced as ‘the pastor for outreach.’ Then, in a year or so, people would say, ‘He is one of our pastors.’”
Mary Joe Dellinger, who was involved with the Sunday Morning Prayer Breakfast and the women’s shelter before Black was called, said he won over opponents “by being himself. He came in low key. He didn’t push himself on anyone. He really listened and tried to find out what was going on. You had to love him.”
Black himself said, “I had known this would not be just a job, but somehow or another I was called by God and this congregation to do ministry in this place.”
‘Someone Helped Him”
For a man who spent a quarter century as a minister in a prominent, mostly white southern church, Charles Black had an unlikely start. He was one of sixteen children born in Fulton, Missouri. His father, James Black, worked as a janitor at a state hospital. Charles would also work as a janitor at Westminister College— a predominantly white Presbyterian liberal arts institution—before a college administrator stopped to give him a word of encouragement. “You don’t have to sweep these halls,” the man told him. “You can walk them as a student.”
“This was a white man in a small town,” said Christopher Black. “That conversation changed the entire trajectory of his life.”
Black enrolled on scholarship, graduated, then went on to McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago before being ordained in St. Louis in 1971. Because of his time at Westminister College, Black, who was raised Baptist, had become solidly Presbyterian.
He married his wife, Ann, whom he had known since they “were in single digits” according to his son, Christopher. Black’s daughter said that he spent his life trying to pass on the encouragement he had been given. “He would always remind us that somebody helped him, so we should always help people.”
No job was too big or too small for Charles Black. He would cook hot dogs for the children of adults going through drug court or use his old truck to help women move from the church’s shelter into their own apartments. He crusaded for social justice in both the city and the denomination.
When he prayed at meetings and church services, he would begin with, “Oh kind and loving God.” And when he preached, he showed his Baptist roots by asking the congregation, “Can I get an ‘Amen”?” Or urging, “Come on, somebody!”
He often closed his sermons by bursting into hymns, such as “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” or “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” At home he sang as he gardened, his children remember.
Along with Dr. James Costen, dean of Johnson C. Smith Seminary and later president of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC), Black was instrumental in forming a partnership that brought a series of Kenyan students under the care of First Presbyterian Church. After retiring from the seminary, Costen served as a liaison with the Presbyterian University of East Africa. Black also helped another First Presbyterian associate pastor, Rev. Bill Rice, connect with a clinic in Haiti. As a result, First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta continues to have active international partnerships in both Kenya and Haiti.
Black was known among the church staff as a pastor’s pastor, said Senior Pastor Emeritus Rev. Dr. George Wirth. “With his deep faith and vision for the church, the staff trusted him.” Black ran the first hour of each weekly staff meeting, which was a time for prayer and sharing concerns and joys, Wirth said. He would ask, “What is God doing in this church and in your life today?”
“Charles had a way of knitting together all of the different people within this church,” said Wirth: “the families who were members, some of them for a long time and many of them wealthy; the young people; the international people; the thousands of homeless people who came for help.”
That may have been a result of his commitment to finding common ground. “He was adamant, even with us as children that there has got to be some way to see eye to eye,” said Christopher Black. “He would ask, ‘Would you rather be right or be kind? Would you rather be right or be helpful? Instead of arguing, lend a hand, help somebody.’”
That didn’t mean ceding one’s core beliefs, said daughter Erica. “Some things were worth fighting for, she said, “but not all things.”
Of the many roles he filled at First Presbyterian Church, Black’s favorite may have been presiding over the Sunday Morning Prayer Breakfast for our neighbors experiencing poverty. His son, Christopher, often accompanied him. At its peak, the weekly meal drew several hundred people into Fifield Hall for what was known widely as “the best grits in town,”
“We would wake up at 4:30 a.m. and listen to WSB radio on the drive into town,” Christopher Black said. “When we arrived at the church, the line would be forming. He’d greet everyone in line. I’d be kind of concerned for his safety, but he loved it. He absolutely loved it. If you wanted to really see him in his element, that was it.”
“I had known this would not be just a job, but somehow or another I was called by God and this congregation to do ministry in this place.”
Rev. Charles Black
Setting Up the Future
When Black was ready to retire in 2012, he had already chosen a successor for his role in Community Ministries: the Rev. Connie Lee. She had come to First Presbyterian Church as an intern while she was still a student at Columbia Theological Seminary. Then she was hired to manage a partnership between the predominantly Black Hillside Presbyterian Church in Decatur and First Presbyterian Church. The partnership had been founded by Black, Wirth, and Rev. Dr. Winston Lawson.
Members of the two churches worked together to help resettle refugees, visit prisoners, organize international missions to Jamaica, and work with organizations such as Hagar’s House family shelter. They shared Lenten Bible studies, tutored children at Snapfinger Elementary School, and held cookouts for participants in the DeKalb County Drug Court. Friendships developed outside the official events, and some members of the church began to socialize.
Like Charles Black, Lee is African American. Because Black had already paved the way, she encountered less resistance due to her race. However, people would still occasionally see her in the church and try to direct her to the women’s shelter, thinking that, as a Black woman, she must be a resident there. She had no such issues with members who partnered with Hillside.
“[The partnership] came together very easily for us because of the specific people who were involved,” Lee said. “The people who were a part of it were genuinely interested in trying to make things better. They were people who wanted to see the church live outs its mission in a more faithful manner. It was a way of addressing the call God has on our lives, which is to love one another as Christ loved us.”
Rev. Connie Lee was hired to manage the partnership with Hillside Church and went on to lead a new era of Community Ministries.
Black saw her as the natural choice to lead First Presbyterian’s Community Ministries. “She’s the right one,” he told Wirth. “She’s strong; she’s visionary; she’s compassionate.”
He was right, said Wirth. “Connie had all the gifts. She was much loved in the congregation and deeply admired by the staff—and she was a good preacher.”
Like Black, Lee had followed an unlikely road to her position at First Presbyterian Church. She was born Connie Hardin into a blue-collar family in Gastonia, North Carolina, where her father worked as a janitor in a local hospital and her mother was a presser at a dry cleaner. She was on only child until age ten, when her parents adopted her brother.
In seventh grade, she transferred from a Black high school to a predominantly white one across town. Sometimes, she would be the only nonwhite student in her class.
“I did not like it at all,” she said. But when she had to have open-heart surgery at Duke University Hospital, her classmates made cards for her and she began to make friends.
In high school, she fell in love, married, became pregnant and moved in with her husband’s family. After graduation, she worked in the textile industry, dyeing cloth and sewing labels onto T-shirts. Three more children followed. When her marriage became abusive, she moved into her parents’ home with her four children.
It was on her parents’ porch one night that matters with her husband finally came to a head. He followed her home from work one night yelling obscenities. Then he pulled out a gun and shot her four times.
“I remember falling over on the porch,” she said, “and I prayed: ‘Lord, please help me live to raise my children,’” Fortunately, her prayer was answered. The wounds weren’t fatal. She lived.
A Place to Heal
While she was recovering in the hospital, a cousin from Gainesville, Florida, came to visit and insisted that she return there with her. “I had four kids, and she had three,” Lee said, “but we packed up her Grand Prix, and I went to Gainesville. When I got there, I felt like the Lord was with me, and this was a place where I could heal.”
She found work at an archery equipment company but lost her job when her daughter, Dee, had to have open-heart surgery. She didn’t have enough leave to allow her to be with Dee, so she went on welfare, “to keep us going.”
After a stint at a Belk’s department store, she was hired as a clerk in the Entomology Department at the University of Florida, where she spent six years. “I learned a lot about bugs,” she said.
From entomology, she transferred to the Office of Graduate Minority Associate Dean. “All the graduate students got to know me, and I got to know them,” she said. “They would go out into the world, and I was still there. I realized I was just as smart as they were.”
She started taking classes, never making below a B. She was working at the University of Florida by day, cleaning doctors’ offices at night, studying for her college degree, and raising four children when she met Gentle Lee—the brother of a friend. She had little time to socialize and was cautious of intimacy following her escape from her abusive marriage, so she offered him little encouragement at first.
That changed one night when she was driving to her cleaning job on I-75 during a rainstorm. She got a flat tire. Not knowing what to do, she called her mother, who was at Connie’s house at the time. Gentle Lee happened to call the house soon afterward. He drove to find her, changed her tire, and bought her a pair of new ones. They married in 1992.
Lee continued to chip away at college requirements. When the historically Black Bethune-Cookman University opened a satellite campus in Gainesville, she transferred there. In May 1998, she received a degree in religion and philosophy. Raised Baptist, she was serving as a licensed minister in an independent Pentecostal church when she became convinced that God was calling her to a deeper role.
In her secretarial job at the University of Florida, she received mail from postgraduate programs that were recruiting applicants. When material came through from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur and the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, she took note.
She planned to apply to the predominantly Black ITC, but her transportation to an information weekend fell through. When she and Gentle visited Columbia, they felt that’s where she needed to be. Gentle found a job in Atlanta, and they moved their blended family into Columbia’s campus housing. Through an internship funded by the Presbyterian
Church (USA), she came to work under the late Rev. Black at First Presbyterian. The church would go on to fund a second year’s internship.
“Working with FPC-Hillside partnership changed me, I was able to see an example of God's kingdom at work on Earth."
Rev. Connie Lee
‘God’s Kingdom at Work on Earth’
By the time she graduated from Columbia, Lee—like her mentor, Black—had become a Presbyterian. She was being recruited by a church in Minneapolis, but Black and Wirth had other ideas. With Lawson of Hillside, they created the FPC-Hillside Partnership, and Lee became its leader. She was ordained in 2002.
“Working with the partnership changed me,” she said. “I was able to see an example of God’s kingdom at work on Earth. Members of the congregations came together and focused on goals, not on anyone’s background. It made for some lasting relationships built on trust.”
As Black’s successor in Community Ministries, Lee “spent a lot of time getting to know people who came in for help,” said Dellinger, who after volunteering for years became part of the church staff. “She had a real heart for ministry.”
Lee brought her own vision to the position. Understanding that the church couldn’t do everything for everyone, she focused on forming relationships with other institutions to get people what they needed. Organizations were willing to work with the church, she said, because “we have really good street cred. That’s more valuable than money.”
Lee was easygoing with people who came for help, Dellinger said, “but she didn’t mind pushing other agencies and other people to get the help people needed. She was very passionate about community ministries.”
Even when the church couldn’t help with people’s material needs, she made sure that they were still treated with dignity and respect. “That offers hope,” she said.
When Lee observes the city now, she sees many challenges. People suffering from mental illness have little access to treatment, people with menial jobs can’t afford housing, and the metro area puts inadequate resources toward addressing the myriad needs of people in poverty. But she still manages to see progress, one life at a time.
“I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to serve,” she says.
Lee retired from the church in 2019. Charles Black died in 2018. Together, they changed a church and a community. Their legacy lives on at the corner of Sixteenth and Peachtree Streets.
