Sep 15, 2024

Robert Lawson

Robert C. Lawson (1883-1961) was orphaned at a young age and raised by an aunt and left home as a teenager to become a nightclub singer. He abandoned his Christian roots and adopted a pleasure-seeking lifestyle. At age thirty, he contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to an Indianapolis hospital, sharing a room with a prize fighter whose mother insisted on praying for Robert’s recovery. Doctors conceded Robert’s diagnosis was dire, given that he had tuberculosis in both lungs, but this “Holy Ghost woman” kept vigil for Robert.

After his dramatic improvement and release from the hospital, Robert was baptized and joined a Pentecostal church. One night, God’s presence came to him one night in audible form, “Go, preach my Word. I mean you. I mean you. I mean YOU. Go, preach my Word.” Robert became an itinerant preacher and found his way to Harlem in 1919. The Holy Spirit prompted him to board the subway and follow the first man he saw, who led him to a prayer meeting. Long story short, Robert founded a church that became known as The Refuge Church of Christ, which he served until his death in 1961.

Robert possessed a curious blend of Pentecostal theology and passion for social change, a rarity in those days. He opened a funeral home that charged modest fees, a grocery store in his church to assist low-income people, and schools for inner-city youth. He ministered during the era of Jim Crow and the “one drop rule,” by which anyone with a trace of Black ancestry was considered Black and was therefore disqualified from the privileges accorded to whites. Robert wrote in The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman that according to the one-drop rule, Jesus would be considered black since the blood of all nations flowed in his veins. Robert believed the color line was something Christ obliterated, as expressed in Paul’s assertion in Romans that “Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ” (Rom. 8.37-39).

It’s instructive that the four Gospel writers never provide a description of what Jesus looked like. The omission is striking when you consider the tendency of first-century Greco-Roman biographers to include elaborate descriptions of people’s physical characteristics. Jesus unites all people in his own ancestral bloodline. Robert leads us to pray:

O God, who has made man in thine own likeness, and who doth love all whom Thou hast made, suffer us not because of difference of race, color, or condition to separate ourselves from others and thereby from Thee; but teach us the unity of Thy family and universality of Thy love. As Thou Savior, as a Son, was born of a Hebrew mother, who had the blood of many nations in her veins; and ministered first to Thy brethren of the Israelites, but rejoiced in the faith of a Syro-Phoenician woman and a Roman soldier, and suffered your cross to be carried by an Ethiopian; teach us, also, while loving and serving our own, to enter into the communion of the whole family, and forbid that from pride of birth, color, achievement and hardness of heart, we should despise any for whom Christ died, or injure or grieve any in whom He lives. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.

Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans, edited by James Washington, p.143.
Robert C. Lawson, The Anthropology of Jesus Christ our Kinsman, 1925, p.42.

Rev. Dr. Peter James served 42 years as the senior of Vienna Presbyterian Church in Vienna, VA — 21 years in the 20th century and 21 years in the 21st century. He retired in 2021 and now serves as Pastor-in-Residence at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Even as a pastor, prayer came slowly to Pete. Read Pete’s story.