To honor the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and continue to promote his teachings, members of the Fox Valley Christian Ministerial Alliance held their annual Martin Luther King Day Prayer Breakfast in Aurora on Monday morning.
The two-hour event at Gayles Memorial Baptist Church at 730 Gillette Ave. in Aurora featured an hour’s worth of dedicated prayers, music and remarks followed by a complimentary breakfast.
Officials said the event has been held for 15 years and has drawn as many as 150 to 200 participants on a regular basis.
“The Alliance is a group of about 12 churches,” said the Rev. J.E. Burch, president of the Fox Valley Christian Ministerial Alliance. “We have gotten anywhere from 150 to 200 people in the past, but with the extreme weather we’ve having this year, we anticipated it would hold some of our seniors back.”
Burch said that the theme for this year’s event was “Where do we go from here?,” adding that “there is a quandary right now in the Christian community.”
“The quandary altogether is about what can we do to really enact the cause of Christ. As you know, our society is in an upheaval at this point,” he said.
Burch said “we look back to what Dr. King taught that we are supposed to work together as one body in Christ and this is our way of bringing us together – cross-culturally and racially,” he said.
Burch said each year there are also those who come and pray “for specific issues that we see as concerns within the community of Aurora as well as nationwide.”
Former Alliance president Peggy Hicks also weighed in on the significance of Monday’s event and said that despite the cold conditions, “We still need to have this. We need to come together because Dr. King was all about unity.”
“Unity and peacefully working toward progress, that’s the focus,” Hicks said. “As always, we’re praying about things that affect our city – crime, about families, about jobs – those are some of the prayer topics as well as those that are addicted. It’s all about the community as we want safety and we want to prosper.”
Hicks said years ago, she took the idea of the breakfast to “our late Bishop Charles Phillips because it’s something were we all can come together under a common goal from all different diverse groups and share and lift our community up.”
“That is what we believe in, it is service,” she said. “Our motto is ‘Clergy in Action’ so we are in the community and it’s a great time to get together to not only to talk about the legacy that Dr. King left but also about the legacy for our community and how we move forward.”
Ivory Burch of Aurora said she has come to the prayer ceremony nearly every year and that being there “is important because so many people sacrificed their lives so we can have the freedom that we have.”
“Coming out here in the cold is not going to hurt me. I’m here to honor a man who I believe was a man of God,” Burch said. “He fought for our freedoms and our rights and I thank God for him.”
Jason Owens of North Aurora likewise said he “had come to this event before and I’ve been lucky enough to have volunteered with the Alliance.”
“I’ve volunteered the last 14 years and this is an important event because we are commemorating obviously a very important person in United States history but also to get a sense of community and to share a meal with everybody and come together in a common cause,” Owens said.
“It’s super-important whether it’s a 50-degree day or a 0-degree day,” he said of the event. “It’s a small sacrifice to get out in the cold.”
Owens said it is important for people to come together to work for the community.
“The folks that are here today are builders in the community. Whereas on a national level politics tends to be divisive, here at the local level – what you see here is people coming together as a community to do good works together, rather than find a reason not to work together,” he said. “Here we find a reason to come together.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
