It’s that time of year again. It’s your annual reminder to do your beloved community service.
Observed the third Monday of each year, the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service honors the pastor and civil rights leader’s achievements and highlights opportunities for us to be of service to each other—if only for one day. A federal holiday, it is the only one Congress distinguishes as a “day on, not a day off.”
Whether participating in a community clean-up day, volunteering at a food bank, delivering meals to senior citizens or contributing to a panel discussion on mutual responsibility in the cause for social justice and equality, participation in service activities and meeting tangible needs that bridge barriers are offered in service to King’s vision of beloved community.
“The greatest birthday gift my husband could receive is if people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds celebrated the holiday by performing individual acts of kindness through service to others,” the late Coretta Scott King once said.
Coined by 20th-century philosopher and founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Josiah Royce, the term “beloved community” was popularized by King.
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” King famously said. His words speak to the power of service to, and mutual responsibility for one another.
There will be no Civil Rights Movement quiz and persons will not be asked to submit proof that their parents marched with Dr. King in order to serve. King explained, “Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
The federal holiday is a call to action around the work and witness of a prophet who stood for unity and a more just, peaceful and equitable society. An opportunity to create meaningful and lasting change, this kind of service empowers others and ultimately strengthens our communities. More so, it increases our personal and communal sense of belovedness.
Beloved community is not an ideal but the aim. A segregated community is not fully alive, and we will not thrive as a society as long as we are cut off from one another.
Beloved community does not occur instantaneously. There is no boxed, premeasured way of producing authentic fellowship. It’s not a quick fix or an easy answer.
Instead, it involves courageous conversations that are compassionate, grounded in truth- telling and the ongoing practice of reconciling our differences. It requires committed relationships across the sandbox lines of race, class and gender as an expressed practice of discipleship.
Beloved community is inspired. The call to community is hard, holy work. Because it is easier to point a finger than to lift one in service to someone else.
Choose to engage in this day of beloved community service in the name of a martyr for social change. Turn exclusive circles into communities of equal partnership and invite persons of different political persuasions to see beyond election cycles. Walk a day in the shoes of a member of a marginalized community and pledge to live in ways that honor the earth and indigenous people groups.
This is your reasonable beloved community service and I hope it changes you—not from the inside out. Instead, let the “outsiders” in—not as an evangelism exercise or a misguided reconciliation attempt, but to expand your awareness of belovedness. Because it’s all around you.
To read about King’s philosophy on beloved community, click