SAN FRANCISCO — When the Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown stepped down in 2025 after 49 years in the pulpit at Third Baptist Church, the question across the Fillmore was not whether the church would survive the transition. It has survived 174 years, a Gold Rush, two earthquakes and redevelopment. The question was whether it would still matter the way it had — as the place where San Francisco’s Black community gathers when something needs to be said.

A year into the tenure of the Rev. Devon Jerome Crawford, the 18th senior pastor in the church’s history, the answer on McAllister Street is a steady yes.

Crawford, a Birmingham, Alabama native and Morehouse College honors graduate, arrived in February 2025 to learn the city before taking the pulpit that July. He was formally installed as senior pastor over the weekend of Sept. 20–21, 2025. Attendance was already climbing by the time of his installation, as the Sun-Reporter reported at the time, and the calendar since has looked less like a church settling in than one stepping out.

Civic life, under the church roof

In February, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi named Crawford as her guest for the State of the Union address, calling him a national faith leader who “represents the very best of faith in action.” Crawford used the moment to speak about declining trust in institutions and the toll of state violence on ordinary people, and to insist that love and justice must prevail over fear and division — language that would have been at home in any Third Baptist sermon of the last half-century.

This month, as the race to succeed Pelosi in Congress tightened, Third Baptist did what it has always done: it opened the doors. On Oct. 11 the church hosted a congressional candidates town hall with Supervisor Connie Chan and state Sen. Scott Wiener, taking written questions from the congregation and the neighborhood. For a community that has often felt talked about rather than talked to in San Francisco politics, the symbolism of candidates coming to Fillmore and McAllister — rather than the other way around — was not lost on anyone in the pews.

In September, the church hosted the Sun-Reporter’s annual Black Men: Celebrating Change Makers gathering, followed by its Homecoming Weekend. And on Oct. 2, Third Baptist launched Friday Night Live, a weekly Friday-evening program for young people ages 5 to 18 in Nelson Fellowship Hall, with dinner and transportation provided — the kind of practical, unglamorous ministry that keeps a historic congregation from becoming a museum.

‘Standing on the foundation’

Crawford came to San Francisco with a résumé built for exactly this. He served as the inaugural staff director of the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at Harvard Kennedy School, where he worked with Professor Cornell William Brooks on voting rights, public-safety reform and reparations, and advised cities in the U.S. and U.K. on public-safety redesign after the murder of George Floyd. He was campus minister at Morehouse’s Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel, and most recently the first national executive director of the Multifaith Initiative to End Mass Incarceration, the effort founded by U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock and based at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School and is pursuing doctoral studies at Boston University.

“I am standing on the foundation of his legacy,” Crawford told the Sun-Reporter of Brown last year. “Third Baptist has always been a prophetic ministry.” Brown, for his part, offered the kind of endorsement that carries weight in a Baptist church: “He can sing and preach. He is a thinker, an administrator, and an educator.”

The pastor who marched with Medgar Evers and the pastor who mobilized voters with Chance the Rapper come, as Brown put it, “out of the same soil.” That continuity is the quiet achievement of Crawford’s first year. The music is still good. The Monday-through-Saturday 7 a.m. prayer call still happens. The church that has been called the “church of the movement” is still, on any given Sunday, the place where the movement meets.

Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, 1399 McAllister St. Information on worship, Friday Night Live and the daily prayer call at thirdbaptist.org.