After the hymns and quiet prayers of a Sunday morning, Rev. Rhonda Britton sat in the silence of her 192-year-old Black church in Halifax, reflecting on what it’s meant to guide her congregation for 17, often challenging, years.
An important moment for her congregation came last year, when New Horizons Baptist Church reopened after the COVID-19 pandemic and four years of construction, complete with new offices, comfortable chairs rather than wooden pews, and a non-profit wing dedicated to community and church programs.
The physical renewal of her church building complements the years she spent working to transform society, speaking truth to power, and battling for social justice.
“The welfare of people is a key part of the church’s mission, not just the gathering in a building on a Sunday morning,” said Britton, who recently announced she is retiring at the end of this year.
Britton, a 67-year-old former information technology worker from Jacksonville, Fla., was ordained at the age of 44. Her choice to join the church, she said, was a response to a calling she had resisted for decades, even as friends had longtime referred to her as “Rev.”
In 1999, Britton attended Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, where a professor, originally from Nova Scotia, suggested she consider a job at Second United Baptist Church in New Glasgow, N.S., located in a Canadian province she knew nothing about.
In 2007, after five years in New Glasgow, she shifted to Halifax’s New Horizons — then called Cornwallis Street Baptist Church — becoming the first woman senior pastor at the historic institution, on its 175th anniversary.
She says it was “a good fit” for a pastor who as a child attended churches whose leaders had marched alongside Martin Luther King and “spoken out about injustices in society.”
New Horizons has a similar tradition of long-serving, activist preachers. Located in downtown Halifax, the church was founded by Rev. Richard Preston, who planted churches around the province and formed the African Abolition Society in 1846 to combat racism. In 1937, William Pearly Oliver began a 25-year ministry in what was then a segregated city, and he would become a founding member of the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.
In her first years at the Halifax church, Britton said she focused on aiding the community, through outreach programs such as the provision of parenting classes. “People were trying to raise their children — some of them were children themselves, and so very young,” she recalled.
As street violence increased in the city over the years, she was worried that youth were being influenced by the glorification of gangs and drug culture in the United States. Working with three other pastors, her church helped form Save our Sons, Save our Sisters in 2012, a faith-based effort to address violence and exploitation through preventive programs.
“It was a rites of passage program for our young boys and girls, teaching them not only about their history, but also … empowering them to make good decisions,” she said.
In 2011, the minister supported a lengthy court battle opposing the sale of a nearby, abandoned school to a developer. She took part in a coalition pushing the city to permit their non-profit group to acquire the land and create a mix of market and low-income housing.
Faced with criticisms this was no matter for clergy, Britton says, “Sometimes you have to challenge the powers that be on the decisions that they are making that are not helpful or healthy or fair and equitable to people. ”
Progress is often slow, and disappointments inevitably have emerged, she said.
“I just see it as, ‘OK, there’s more work to do’ … Human beings keep messing things up so long as there are human beings,” she said. Healing also comes from remembering “God exists and God still has us,” she said.
This summer a 17-year-old Black girl was shot and severely injured while attending a reunion of residents of Africville — a historic Black community in the north end of Halifax that was demolished in the 1960s. Police have said the young woman was caught in crossfire as she cared for her young cousins.
In response, Britton called for a “circle of lament” to allow people to express their sadness at the violence. It was a tradition begun in January 2023 when the congregation re-entered their renovated and renamed building and needed to grieve those who had died and suffered from the years away from their beloved church.
“The service allowed attendees to express their grief however they desired. Some people simply wept. Some shared their journey and their feelings of loss,” she wrote in a recent email.
Meanwhile, the ongoing work of maintaining a small church — which like others has an aging congregation — continues.
During a recent Sunday service, the baskets were passed to collect donations as people prayed that congregants would give generously to help the church pay off a $1-million mortgage.
Britton admits she is “tired” and says she will rest and discern what comes next after she leaves on Dec. 31.
“The Lord has decreed it is fine. You can go. You’ve done what you came to do … and you can go,” she said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 2, 2024.