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By K.D. Norris
ken@wktv.org

W. Frederick Wooden, who has been Senior Minister at Fountain Street Church since 2005 but will be leaving the calling in 2020, is two things without a doubt: he is a very knowledgable historian of the Grand Rapids church and he is passionate about all aspects of social justice.

And, maybe one more thing, he is rarely at a loss for words.

So he had plenty to say when asked to name a few “pivotal” moments or personalties in the history of Fountain Street Church — which was founded in 1869 as Fountain Street Baptist Church but transformed to embrace more liberal ideals first in 1886 and then again in 1962, when “Baptist” was dropped from its name.

Along the way, the church which holds dear its “Liberal Legacy” — the name of the two-volume history of the church — took up its current downtown location in 1877, which nearly burned to the ground in 1917, and has been the center of the local religious and social debate throughout the 150 years it is currently celebrating.

And there have been many pivotal personalities, arguably the most well know and revered being Dr. Duncan E. Littlefair (1912-2004), who led Fountain Street Church from 1945 to 1979. But Wooden, with all due respect, chose others to highlight.

“The temptation is to pick out all the heroic things, which are great. But there are other things,” Wooden said to WKTV. “Something I did not know until recently is that Samuel T. Graves, who was minister here for five or six years, back in the late 1800s. He went from here to serve at Atlanta Baptist Seminary. You know what that place is called now? Moorehouse College.

“There is a hall, a dormitory, named after him, Graves Hall, where Spike Lee and Martin Luther King (Jr.) and other young men lived as students. So the legacy of Fountain Street, as a Baptist Church, is one we should be more eager to claim because even before we became notable as liberal religionists, there was strain in this church that was trying to— quote, unquote — live your faith in a way that impacted the world for the better. I think that is something that we (at Fountain Street) have not acknowledged as consistently over the years.”

While Fountain Street has its roots in the Baptist faith and Baptist activism in Grand Rapids, its path to become its current “non-creedal, non-denominational, liberal church,” as its website states, started with a succession of clergy coming to the church from 1896 to 1944, including John Herman Randall, Alfred Wesley Wishart and Milton McGorrill before Littlefair.

During those years, all of its leaders were Baptist in name and training but “moved the church toward the conclusion that no profession of denominational faith was needed to be a person of faith. One could worship here as a Christian, an agnostic, or an atheist, because the task of organized religion is not to secure unity of belief, but to demand integrity of mind and spirit,” again, according to its website.

One of those leaders, John Herman Randle, was the next “pivotal” person Wooden wanted to talk about. But the story starts a little before Randle.

“John L. Jackson (who led the church in the 1890s) was the first guy who said ‘You know, maybe Darwin wasn’t evil.’ It was like opening the door, a little crack,” Wooden said. “And when he left, John Erin Randle came. A young buck out of Chicago. He didn’t know nothing, but he had that cocky quality only a 26-year-old can have. And he was really great.

“If I had to pick someone who really changed the church into what it is, it would be him. Because he is the one that made it possible for us to think that we could be Christian and modern. That we did not have to choose one or the other. And it is that path that we have been on ever since.”

Randle left Fountain Street around 1906 to lead Mount Morris Baptist Church of New York City. But there continued a streak of liberal leaning leaders through the five decades of the 20th Century, climaxed by the beginning of Littlefair’s tenure.

Under Littlefair’s four decades leadership, the church dropped the name “Baptist” and, according to its website, for a time considered affiliating with the Unitarian Universalists because of similar liberal views — Littlefair had Unitarian Universalist ties. But the church opted, instead, to maintain its independence. Littlefair is credited, among other accomplishments, with cementing Fountain Street Church’s reputation as being the most liberal Christian institution in the the city, advocacy for women’s rights including reproductive rights, free-thinking religiousness, and community and social activism.

Letter to Littlefair

In Wooden’s opinion, however, Littlefair’s tenure might never have happened had it not been for a woman, Dorothy Stansbury Leonard Judd, a member of the church at the time, and letter she wrote to Littlefair soon after he gained his Doctorate from University of Chicago.

“There was a woman, Dorothy Judd, who finagled Duncan Littlefair to come here,” Wooden said. “He did not want to come. He thought this was a backwater church with nothing to offer. But she said ‘Consider the possibilities.’ I’m paraphrasing obviously. But she said “Man, you have room here to do something no other church would give you.’

“In the history of the church, and it is recorded, he came here and said the worst day of his life was the day he started here. He was in a backwater town that was completely enthralled with Evangelicalism but, as he put it, ‘I’m just going to do whatever I wanted.’ … He just showed up and messed with everybody’s head at exactly the right moment.

“And it was Dorothy Judd, a woman of privilege by the way … her family was Leonard, as in Leonard Street, she was at the top of the Grand Rapids social ladder. But this guy (Littlefair) came along because she wrote him a letter.”

The final of Wooden’s “pivotal” persons was not a religious leader but a woman who had as much a passion for social justice as any pastor who ever took the pulpit at Fountain Street.

An angel in time of strife

“Another person that needs to be lifted up is Viva Flaherty. She was the staffer that worked with the guy in the painting during the furniture strike,” Wooden said, waving his hand in the direction of painting of Alfred Wesley Wishart, who succeeded Randle as leader of Fountain Street and was present during the 1911 Furniture Workers Strike which divided the city and the church. “Flaherty was what we called the social secretary, basically the (church’s) social worker, she sided with the unions. The reality was that the two key staffers at this church were on opposite sides of the furniture strike.”

Wishart and many of the church leaders sided with the business leaders — “the people who wrote the checks to the church,” Wooden said. “But Flaherty spent her time with the emigrants and she saw their point of view. We have a portrait of him, but we don’t even have a picture of her. I want to say, Viva Flaherty was on the side of the angels. … She was a woman who dared to stand up to the powerful, to stand with the workers.”

Wooden clearly has an affinity for social activism, as shown by Flaherty in the early 1900s and by Littlefair in the 1960s through the 1980s. And the soon-to-depart leader of Fountain Street may well be known in the future for his own social activism.

Just don’t expect him to say the job is complete with the work he has done.

Despite his fervent support of women’s and reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ recognition and support, as well as outreach to and support of minority and homeless populations who do not even attend Fountain Street, Wooden says he leaves the job unfinished.

“The great agenda for us, for every church, for every house of worship, is that we haven’t yet stepped up to the question of racial justice,” Wooden said about his tenure. “That doesn’t mean we don’t care. It doesn’t mean we are not involved. It means that organizationally we have not seen that as key function of our community. It has been a key part of my ministry but that is my choice.”

Wooden currently works with groups such as the Urban League, the NAACP, with the Grand Rapids Pastors Association (sometimes inexactly referred to as the “Black Pastors Association) “because that is important to me. And I am hoping the church will see, as part of its future, to advocate for genuine racial and social justice.”

He also hopes the church, as it moves into its second 150 years, will continue his advocacy for the poor in our community.

“We have to have a relationship with the people who are struggling in our community,” he said. “Our name, as an institution, should be present in a wider range in this community. … We are a community institution, for the community as well as for ourselves.”