A door closed. Another one opened.
Pastor Jomo K. Johnson didn't set out to plant a church in Rochester — he set out to serve one. A graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary, Jomo applied for a youth pastor position at an established Presbyterian congregation in Pittsford. He was a fit on paper: seminary-trained, Reformed in his theology, called to youth ministry. He was turned down anyway, over his past involvement with Black Lives Matter.
He didn't leave that conversation angry so much as awake. If a seminary-trained pastor could be filtered out of a pulpit over his record of standing with his own community, how many ordinary people were being filtered out of a pew — for their accent, their immigration paperwork, their politics, their zip code, their past? The American church has a way of drawing its circle a little too small.
North Star Church started as an answer to that question. We're planting in a city that already knows something about being a waystation for people headed toward freedom — Frederick Douglass ran his abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, out of Rochester, two miles from where we now gather. We didn't choose the name lightly. A church, like a star, should be useful to people trying to find their way somewhere better.
We do not have a back door for the people other churches quietly route around.
— North Star Church, founding conviction