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Shaun King in the fall of 2008, making a YouTube pitch for Courageous Church.
ATLANTA —Inside the shell of a vacant building, in the fall of 2008, the activist Shaun King, then 29, filmed a video telling his supporters about one of his life’s many dreams: to plant a church in the “The Bluff,” a neighborhood in the English Avenue section of Northwest Atlanta. Known as Atlanta’s forgotten community, nearly half of the homes there are vacant. But it’s where King said his vision to be a church planter began.
“This neighborhood is spiritually empty, not just physically empty,” King says in the grainy video. “Our heart and our passion and our love is for the people that are here.”
“Maybe,” he says, “just maybe one day years from now we’ll be able to buy this corner, and this corner can be a beacon of hope and beacon of light for this area called ‘The Bluff.’ Will you believe God with me for that?”
Although his vision for a church was still forming in 2008, the video was classic King: He often filmed himself making appeals to his vast network of monetary support for various projects. By late 2008 — still weeks away from Courageous Church’s first service — King had helped corral thousands of dollars for a Christmastime toy drive and donated uniforms to a local school.
By 2009, the Association of Related Churches, an organization that works with pastors and their wives to plant churches, assessed and approved King. To ARC, which was averaging close to 50 new churches a year, King had unlimited potential. He was celebrated for his ability to rally people around causes using technology, and he used that leverage to tell the ARC’s leadership it was too white. King was something of a golden boy, so they listened — and King delivered with something no church planter can deny: numbers.
With King, the organization had its largest church grand opening ever. On average, ARC’s churches host about 250 people. More than 600 people showed up to hear King speak at Courageous Church’s first service on Jan. 11, 2009 at Center Stage in Downtown Atlanta. The church took up an offering.
King never planted a church in The Bluff, but he led Courageous Church for nearly two years. It’s not clear how many members the church had at its peak, but in 2011, after a shift to make the church less focused on traditional Sunday services and more mission-oriented proved unpopular, King stepped down. An assistant, Broderick Santiago, assumed pastoring duties, but the church closed its doors within a few weeks’ time.
Interviews with King, as well as dozens of his friends and former members of his church — as well as King’s numerous blog posts and video pleas for donations to the church — reveal many of the typical struggles of a young pastor and a new church: problems finding meeting places and inconsistent tithes. (Many members were under-employed or not working at all. The breakfast drew dozens of homeless people every Sunday.)
Yet, in its narrative arc, King’s eventual exit from Courageous Church also mirrors the wildly ambitious goals, impressive successes, sudden collapses, and nagging questions that have defined King’s public profile since he became one of the most well-known activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. Courageous Church was one of the first of many organizations, nonprofits, and start-ups that King built from scratch. Again and again, the unfulfilled promises of the projects left people searching for answers — about King, his intentions, and whether his peculiar magic as an online fundraiser was fraudulent.
Late last year, King announced the suspension of his latest endeavor, Justice Together. In King’s words, Justice Together was a “noble idea to bring together tens of thousands of people from all over the world, virtually, who are disgusted by police brutality but don’t really know what to do about it.” Members say they understood the project as a way to streamline communications in the decentralized Black Lives Matter movement. Board members pressed King on why he was raising money for an organization that would do much of its work online.
One former board member of Justice Together stopped short of accusing King of wrongdoing in an interview with BuzzFeed News, but observed: “How much does Slack cost?”
King took down a page on Justice Together’s website that listed the names of the board members. It included the journalist Glenn Greenwald, Inclusv’s Alida Garcia, and Campaign Zero organizer DeRay Mckesson.
“I am proud of what we’ve done to help so many families in need and refuse to be demonized for my role as a promoter of fundraisers,” King wrote recently. “It is because I have been effective at this that these attacks started from racists in the first place. I raised funds for white folk for years and nobody said a single thing about it. It wasn’t until I started raising funds for victims of police brutality that I began being attacked for it.”
But activists tell BuzzFeed News the allegations of financial impropriety swirling around King come at a time when the movement can nary afford it. “It’s just messy,” as one activist said. And though King is not known as an organizer, his notoriety, public squabbles and online campaigns to protect his reputation all reflect on the movement.
The fallout incensed King. He publicly and personally attacked other members of Campaign Zero, a criminal justice policy group connected to Black Lives Matter. Mckesson announced publicly that he had stepped down from the board, but still had questions about the organization, presumably about why King had raised $25,000 for Justice Together in the first place. Johnetta Elzie, a prominent activist, spoke up, too. King responded by telling Elzie not to “come for” him — and said that Mckesson told him “months” ago he was tired of working with her. At the end of it all, King apologized and deleted his entire Twitter timeline.
What’s left is mostly an assortment of blog posts by pastors and church planters dated at the time of King’s departure ... The young stud they viewed as a master of influence was suddenly a victim of burnout.
King responded to the accusations, but the bitter end of Justice Together only raised more questions about his fundraising methods, including what actually happened with the half-million dollars he said he raised on behalf of the families of victims, to a fever pitch.
Said Elzie, “Explain where all this money has gone, why my homie in Atlanta told me last year you start churches — raise money — then disappear.”
But as Elzie hinted, King’s time as a pastor at Courageous Church is mostly unknown, outside of the members, staff and close friends of King, nearly all of whom declined to speak with BuzzFeed News on the record about King’s management and departure.
Nearly two dozen of King’s former church-planting colleagues either declined to speak with BuzzFeed News or did not return a message requesting an interview.
What's left is mostly an assortment of blog posts by pastors and church planters dated at the time of King’s departure from Courageous Church. The young stud they viewed as a master of influence was suddenly a victim of burnout. Even then, it caused some to wonder if King was a false teacher — or if he ever really wanted to be a pastor at all. Others said King left his missional project prematurely. Experts say missional churches that make such shifts need time. For his part, King gave the new church six months and then he was gone.
King has come under fire for the uncertainty over what happened to the hundreds of thousands of dollars he raised for earthquake relief in Haiti. (The Daily Beast reported A Home In Haiti was never incorporated or registered as an independent nonprofit.) Online fundraising ventures like HopeMob and TwitChange flamed out and eventually fizzled, only to give birth to yet another fundraising scheme, for which King’s most fervent supporters had an insatiable appetite.
But for all the doubters, there is also an unwavering group of King supporters. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, a prominent graduate of Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, alluded to a code that he and many Morehouse men would never speak ill of King in a public forum.
“I think you look at stuff like that, with all these projects that flopped and you go, ‘What’s going on here?’” the graduate said. “I don’t really think that it means that Shaun is a bad person. Do I worry that he’s done damage to his reputation? Yes. But is he a bad person? Absolutely not. That's the question people to need to ask.”
“What he ventured to do is imagine a different way to do church and activism,” said Rashad Moore, a Morehouse graduate who is now an assistant pastor to Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. “Being the person who starts a new path means you run the risk of being unpopular or failing. You will always run the risk of failing. But I know his model of doing church inspired others to do something different, too.”
That King started Courageous Church with a service-minded mission statement (“Love God, love people and prove it,” he exhorted members in his Kentucky drawl) means his plan to deemphasize worship to focus on issues like child trafficking and education, perhaps can't be considered a complete betrayal of his intentions. Jesus did it that way, King would argue, but did so hardly in the temple. So should Courageous Church.
“I'm deeply uncomfortable and bothered by every failure I've ever had,” King said.
The first year of Courageous Church was focused on growing a membership that craved traditional, weekly engagement. The church itself was under financial duress, a common circumstance for churches starting out. The model used by ARC, the church-planting organization that helped King plant the church, would have required King to invest back into ARC with 10% of Courageous Church’s tithes and offerings until ARC could plant another church. After that, Courageous Church would have continued to invest 2% of its budget back into ARC. King gave a plea for financial help; the type of church he was trying to plant are notoriously expensive to maintain.
“I'm deeply uncomfortable and bothered by every failure I've ever had,” King said in an hourlong interview with BuzzFeed News. “I hate [failure]. When I seek out to start something I aim to succeed. But I'm always willing to try stuff that I know may very well fail. Our goal with Courageous Church was to do something we hadn't seen done before.”
“Part of what I've always tried to do is do something in a way that has a high probability of failure with the hope that if it works it might really work,” he said. “But if it fails it might be a royal failure.”
Courageous Church was the first of King’s failures as a public leader and activist. Midtown Atlanta didn't have a lot of churches; it attempted to reach people other churches ignored or saw as “unchurched” in a different, refreshing way. But King demanded a shift. The move proved unpopular; church planters quietly questioned King’s commitment to preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ as King and his family left Courageous Church with little explanation.
King began to build out the framework for Courageous Church amid a boom in alternative ministry-building and church-planting in Atlanta that looked nothing the stained glass houses of worship of the generation before. Based on nearly 1 million interviews, Gallup reported that church attendance had increased significantly each year in the U.S. from Feb. 2008 to May 2010. King and others believed the best way to seize this momentum was to capitalize on the currency of genuine relationships.
He immediately turned to Morehouse College, his alma mater. King was a student there in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, and a chapel assistant at the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel Assistants Program, which had produced the theologian Howard Thurman, among others.
Observers and friends say King cultivated a quiet but authoritative profile at Morehouse. While other young preachers were trying to emulate the rhetorical fireworks and cadence of the chapel’s namesake, Shaun King’s preaching leaned on the substance of his ideas. “Speaking at Morehouse, in some ways is like performing at the Apollo,” King said. Dr. Anthony Neal, a classmate of King’s at Morehouse said that in one address King offered a critical analysis on the dearth of black leadership and the methodology of Pavlov’s Dog. He spoke frequently about his personal story, about what he had overcome after a brutal assault in his hometown, mixing it in with illustrations from the biblical text. King won an oratorical contest there in 1999 as president of student government; to the college community, he was well on his way.
“At Morehouse I would try to come at problems from academic or abstract angles,” King said in an interview. “A lot of times I was thinking through them on my own. But it was always a safe place to do that.”
“It wasn’t really about him like a lot of preachers,” Neal said. “People who wanted to be pastors or were doing that to make sure that they were well known, they were making sure they joined the right fraternity, going to all of the right events and meetings and building relationships with the right people. There were just a lot of things that he should have done, that he didn’t do.”
King made his pitch for Courageous Church to meet in the chapel in 2007 or 2008. A decade their senior, King wanted to mentor the students running the chapel as he had done as a student. The students told BuzzFeed News there was no feasible way to allow it; the program is, first and foremost, for the preaching and church activity of the assistants. It wouldn’t have made sense, people who listened to King’s pitch said.
But King maintained a close relationship with the chapel, whose young charges, like King, embraced a different approach to church.
King eventually held a service at the chapel with the assistant’s blessing. At the one-off service, King’s staff provided breakfast, staffed a welcoming and hospitality committee. At the preaching engagement, during the altar call, which allows churchgoers wanting forgiveness or renewal from their sins to come to the front of the church, Beyoncé’s “Flaws and All” played as he spoke. “I don’t know why I remember that but it all but changed my life,” Moore said.
“We come out of traditional church life, with all of these values on having the right choir and the right preaching, the one thing important now is building intentional and meaningful relationships. Shaun understood that right out of the gate and was my first church experience doing something outside of the box.”
