On Sunday, August 16 at 10 a.m., the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, senior pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., will preach at the First Congregational Church of West Tisbury. Reverend Warnock and the current pastor of the First Congregational Church, the Rev. Cathlin Baker, were classmates at Union Theological Seminary in New York city.

Reverend Warnock is a native of Savannah, Ga., and the son of two Pentecostal-Holiness ministers. He preached his first sermon entitled, It’s Time I Be About My Father’s Business at age 11. Licensed and ordained at the historic Sixth Avenue Baptist Church of Birmingham, Ala., he served for six years as the youth pastor and four years as the assistant pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York city. Before coming to Ebenezer, he was the senior pastor of the Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore, Md.

Ebenezer Baptist Church is best known as the spiritual home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.