When Samuel Pettagrue looks out from the pulpit of Sardis Baptist Church, Birmingham, the three or four white families he sees each week in the predominantly black church represent a testament to how he would like to be remembered.
But Pettagrue, Sardis’ pastor for 30 years, said there is still much work to be done.
The 57-year-old Atlanta native hopes he sees the day when black churches and white churches are gone forever — replaced by integrated houses of worship where all of God’s people come together as a family. And Pettagrue said he thinks love is the bond that will eventually compel Christians from both the black and white communities to begin worshiping together.
“That’s the greatest force on earth and my position has been that if love cannot bring us together, then we need to go our separate ways,” Pettagrue said.
Despite the white families at his church and black worshipers that can be found at predominantly white churches, Pettagrue believes Sunday morning worship is still the most segregated hour of the week in America. Yet he adds there is no reason churches should not be integrated.
“There is nothing keeping us from doing that, especially here in the South,” he said. “There is nothing that keeps us from worshiping together. We have no laws to keep us from worshiping together — they are not putting black people out of white churches, they are not putting white people out of black churches.
“What’s keeping us apart right now is simply our own desire to be with the kind of cultural worship that we are involved in,” he said.
The pastor said church leaders must work toward bringing the races together in such a way that dilutes cultural differences in worship.
“Which is better than anything that could be totally black or anything that could be totally white,” Pettagrue said. “Satan can’t keep us apart now by law, so he’s just merely keeping us apart by our cultural differences — but we’re going to overcome that.”
That vision will take time, but Pettagrue is confident it will happen. “The fact is, we can come together if we want to.”
Like Pettagrue, his father was also a preacher. Call it a premonition, but Pettagrue said his father hoped from day one his son would follow in his footsteps.
“He predicted from the pulpit that his first child would be a son and that he would be a minister also,” Pettagrue said, noting his father made the claim even before his parents were married.
The younger Pettagrue was active in the church as a youth. Still, he did his best to make sure his father’s vision never became reality.
“For many, many years, I tried to make sure that didn’t happen,” he said. “I ran from the ministry, I guess from the age of 11.”
But Pettagrue also admits he had a love of God at an early age, which was not as apparent yet in the lives of some of his younger peers.
The pastor remembers staying behind for worship service following Sunday School, when his friends had already called it a day. “No matter how long church held, I just stayed there.”
A preacher’s kid staying behind for worship seems logical, but Pettagrue remembers really wanting to be there.
Pettagrue said he also had “a tremendous prayer life” as a young boy. “I never went to bed without praying and it wasn’t just a little ‘Lord, lay me down to sleep,’ ” he said. “It was a very long prayer that I prayed every night.”
His prayer life and love for the Word of God were definitely growing. Pettagrue, however, said he still avoided becoming a minister.
“Growing up, I still didn’t want to be a preacher,” he recalled, “I wanted to be a businessman.”
Pettagrue went to Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he started off in pre-med, before changing his major to sociology — “because I was more of a people person.”
Eventually settling on a major in philosophy, he became the first Morehouse student to graduate with a degree in that discipline.
Following college, he went into real estate. Pettagrue said in his heart he knew the ministry was where he belonged.
“Eventually, though, after about a year or so, the Lord caught up with me and so I just gave my life totally to Him,” Pettagrue said.
The surrender to the ministry at the age of 26 would also lead to Pettagrue’s involvement with the civil rights movement, when civil rights activist Ralph David Abernathy hired him to be his assistant in 1969.
“I had the opportunity to become very much involved in the civil rights movement,” Pettagrue said. “As the movement prevailed, Morehouse was right at the center.
No history of the 1960s would be complete without an analysis of the civil rights movement’s historical and political consequences. Pettagrue believes the struggle also had biblical implications.
“We took the motives for the civil rights movement from Christ and the Old Testament when you see Moses saying ‘Let my people go’ and the Israelites were enslaved, ” Pettagrue said.
But Pettagrue said nonviolence was more than just a strategy employed by the movement.
“The whole love motive came out of the Bible, and we meant it,” Pettagrue said.
“Love is a real live, strong, powerful principle to the black community, especially in the civil rights movement,” he added.
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