Daily News | Path to Zion: A Q&A with the Rev. Dr. Chauncey P. Harrison
While people were busy preparing for the celebration of the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan last month, the Rev. Dr. Chauncey Pierre Harrison talked about his life and his hopes for Zion with The Inquirer.Baptist Church as your mentor. How did your friendship with him bring you to Philadelphia?
Deacon Frank Richardson, here at Zion, saw one of my sermons [online] and contacted Pastor Waller, to ask about inviting me to be a guest preacher at Zion. From those guest sermons, during a time Zion was looking for a new pastor, I was hired.I think people forget that Pastor Sullivan was 28 when he came here. The people God used were young: Jesus started his ministry at 12 and fulfilled his purpose at 33.
I’ve studied churches throughout the country, and if it’s a growing church — whether they have 200, 2,000, or 20,000 members — those six areas, they heavily, heavily, heavily invested in. I think this area is poised for some new development along the Germantown Avenue corridor. Zion’s Called to Serve Community Development Corp. [CDC] led by our Associate Pastor Michael Major, is working on redeveloping the oldacross [Broad] Street. The CDC just got a $1 million grant from the William Penn Foundation to renovate the Annex building [once Trinity Reformed Church, which Zion bought in 1969] and convert it into the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan Community Impact Center.
[He has noted that some of the neighbors also clean their blocks now and have thanked him for cleaning the neighborhood.] My parents weren’t together. But I grew up in the church. My grandfather was a preacher and my grandmother was a musician. During the three years I returned to Chicago after Yale, I worked as a youth pastor for a year, and also for a community organization called, that dealt with public safety. We had a “Shots Fired” technology employed where devices were installed in neighborhoods that could detect when guns were fired before the residents had time to call 911.
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