Jeff Street Baptist Community at Liberty
Sunday Worship 11:00am - 12:15 (ish) pm
Jeff Street is home for us. Community. Sanctuary.
Jeff Street is a safe place where we know we will be loved, welcomed and encouraged.
At the same time, Jeff Street is a risky place, where we are challenged to work on building up and living in God's realm. Jesus did that and they killed him, so we try to keep our eyes open and our minds clear.
Still, we are a happy community of love-sowers, peacemakers and troublemakers. We are singers and songwriters, artists and poets, teachers and social workers and students and toddlers and growing-old folks. Most of all, we are family for one another. And that is no small thing.
We welcome you to our page and hope you find a bit of family here.
Jeff. St. Baptist Community at Liberty
a poem by Mackenzie Berry
Joe sings the Blues like he’s calling
his children home / a rich oak deep velvet swoon
with enough cry to bend your knees and not collapse.
He said a sermon in his overalls and the church said
Amen. He took his coffee black until he met
Goatwalker cream and then he took two spoons.
We here, who make pews of folding chairs
and make the bread stretch around the block,
have called this meeting begun
by a reformed riverboat gambler
back when we called alcoholics drunkards
and later called in all the sleeping in the stockyards hay.
If I say too much, I might call the congregation awake,
all these rebel Southern Baptists who made it gay & misfit
and still call themselves, all these rich folks with empty pockets
and a leaky roof. What do you know of rising but what rose
down on Liberty St. the day God said let there be light and it poured.
I tell you, the Phoenix burned smiling for all we can make of ash.
The city comes for us flaming and eats itself to the marrow,
finds men sleeping in Sunday school rooms and rages,
spread Clarksdale out across the city and left an empty lot,
where half of us still sits waiting for the grand return.
When the Association expelled us from Jeff St.
for holding a woman pastor behind the pulpit
we took an old factory building and made it God
by the hand of an angel mechanic called Elmer,
and kept the name, too, but longer. Ate with the whole line
on 10 for 10 biscuits and eggs right next to Norma’s House
after the steel fist in a velvet glove woman called Mary
came and asked us what were we here for anyway.
I tell you, you haven’t seen a party til Easter at Jeff. St.
when we dance on confetti just to see the mess splayed
and Di sneaks us the best piece. Gather us in,
where the prayer drums an open forum
of children too wild-eyed to call God Mister.
