By Noah Washington |The Atlanta Voice
This post was originally published on Atlanta Voice
(WIB) – In a week stocked with division in the wake of President Donald Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address, the campus of Morehouse College offered a different message Thursday evening: In trying times, faith endures.
Morehouse College, in partnership with the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA and the MOSAIC Storytelling Initiative, hosted the world premiere screening of “Faith on the Frontline,” a short film chronicling the NCC’s 75 years of shared ecumenical witness for justice, peace, and moral leadership.
The screening, held in the Bank of America Auditorium inside the Shirley E. Massey Leadership Building, drew a crowd consisting of Men of Morehouse, the spiritually inclined, and religious leaders, all gathered at the invitation of Bishop Vashti Murphy McKenzie, President and General Secretary of the NCC and the first Black woman to hold the organization’s top position, and Dr. Jann Adam, Ph.D., Director of the Institute for International and Experiential Education at the Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership, who hosted the evening.
Dr. Sushama Austin-Connor, Program Director of the MOSAIC Storytelling Initiative, welcomed attendees on behalf of the MOSAIC team.
“This documentary chronicles the enduring influence of Black leadership in shaping national movements for justice,” Austin-Connor said before the film began.
The documentary chronicles the influence of Black faith leadership in shaping national movements for justice and features former Atlanta Mayor and United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, who served as NCC president from 2000 to 2001, reflecting on the church’s central role in accelerating the civil rights movement. The film opens on a simple but urgent premise, that God has always called his people to unite, and the stories that follow make the case that the NCC spent 75 years answering that call.
“The churches were coming together to pass legislation,” Young said in the film. “We had the closest to a global ministry.”
Young, who began his career with the church in 1955 as a pastor in rural Alabama, later joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1960 and became its executive director in 1964. He worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., playing a role that was critical in the negotiations and strategies that advanced the civil rights movement. Young went on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 1977 to 1979, as a Georgia congressman, and as the second Black mayor of Atlanta.
During the post-screening panel discussion, Young recalled the pivotal role the National Council of Churches played in connecting him to Dr. King. After King was stabbed by Izola Ware Curr and relocated to Atlanta to recover, NCC staff reached out to Young, then working as Associate Director of the Department of Youth Work in New York, to help King establish himself in the city. Young credited his years at the NCC with preparing him for that work.
“This is my story too,” Young remarked in reflection during the subsequent panel discussion following the screening.
“We felt it appropriate to close Black History Month with this remarkable collection of stories that can be found in no other repository,” McKenzie said.
McKenzie, who previously served as the 117th bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the first woman elected to that post, now leads NCC’s executive operations, overseeing 37 denominations, more than 100,000 congregations, and 30.5 million people.
Thursday’s screening marked the launch of “Faith on the Frontline” as the first documentary of NCC’s MOSAIC Storytelling Initiative, a five-year project funded by the Lilly Endowment aimed at building a national repository of up to 500 stories of faith, justice, and unity across the United States.
“Our stories matter,” McKenzie said, “not just for bragging rights, but to inspire action from one generation to the next.”
The post Faith on the Frontline doc screens at Morehouse College appeared first on The Atlanta Voice.