A preacher for empowerment
Tim Coates
Issue date: 11/8/06 Section: Features
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I met Aaron Graham (MPP2) last year during those innocent first days as an MPP1, sitting in the forum waiting for yet another orientation event. We somehow got talking about religion and it quickly became clear I was in over my head: Graham is a Baptist minister at a church in Dorchester, one of Boston's most crime ridden neighborhoods. Jim Wallis, the progressive evangelical author and advisor to Democratic candidates, is a friend of his. I started wondering how I was ever accepted to KSG.
Growing up in a missionary family, Graham was well traveled by age 12. He had lived in Memphis, Liberia, Kuwait, Nashville and Richmond. At age 10 he was held hostage for days by Saddam Hussein's forces in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. His release was arranged by former US Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine, who was a senior fellow at the Belfer Center last year. During his high school years, it became clear that religion would be a driving force in Grahams's life.
"I had a calling to work in ministry," he told me last week over coffee. "A lot of it had to do with my Mom and Dad taking us on short term missionary trips overseas in developing countries. They were the most significant weeks of my life and it would be so frustrating coming back here. I would ask, 'why am I not doing this all the time?'"
Meanwhile, Graham saw the disconnect between the Baptist ministry of the American South and the poor.
"I really felt a desire to connect my faith to the ground level. I grew up in a southern Baptist theology that didn't have a theology of the poor. They had a personal transformation theology that focused on individualistic aspects of the gospel. But there wasn't really a theology that describes how individual transformation leads to social transformation," Graham said.
Graham spent the summer before graduating from the University of Richmond in Boston, helping a former youth minister open a church for college students and young adults.
Growing up in a missionary family, Graham was well traveled by age 12. He had lived in Memphis, Liberia, Kuwait, Nashville and Richmond. At age 10 he was held hostage for days by Saddam Hussein's forces in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. His release was arranged by former US Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine, who was a senior fellow at the Belfer Center last year. During his high school years, it became clear that religion would be a driving force in Grahams's life.
"I had a calling to work in ministry," he told me last week over coffee. "A lot of it had to do with my Mom and Dad taking us on short term missionary trips overseas in developing countries. They were the most significant weeks of my life and it would be so frustrating coming back here. I would ask, 'why am I not doing this all the time?'"
Meanwhile, Graham saw the disconnect between the Baptist ministry of the American South and the poor.
"I really felt a desire to connect my faith to the ground level. I grew up in a southern Baptist theology that didn't have a theology of the poor. They had a personal transformation theology that focused on individualistic aspects of the gospel. But there wasn't really a theology that describes how individual transformation leads to social transformation," Graham said.
Graham spent the summer before graduating from the University of Richmond in Boston, helping a former youth minister open a church for college students and young adults.
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