By Tiffany Mishé, Special to TSDMemphis.com
Innovation Church Memphis is bringing life to the term “ A Church Without Walls.”
They recently rang in Juneteenth with “Praise in the Park” at a perfect location — the historic Robert Church Park, established in 1899 by a businessman and former slave. The church joined with Telisa Franklin, Memphis’ Juneteenth coordinator, to provide a service in the midst of the events’ musical performances, including a performance from Personal Praise, a youth brother and sister duo who belong to Innovation. Personal Praise performed their new hit single “I Don’t Need a Thing.”
Tonight, they continue to take church outside of the walls with “Movie Night on the Lawn.” The event, featuring the moving “Miracles from Heaven,” starts at 8:07 p.m. at 3925 Overton Crossing. Bring a lawn chair and your family, and experience for yourself this congregation’s Innovative approach to church.
The Movie night seeks to build on their Praise in the Park event on Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating June 19, 1865 — the date that some former slaves learned of their emancipation earlier during the Civil War. Texas didn’t get the freedom message until three years after it was announced. President Barack Obama even released a statement acknowledging the holiday:
Today we commemorate the anniversary of that delayed but welcome news. Decades of collective action would follow as equality and justice for African-Americans advanced slowly, frustratingly, gradually, on our nation’s journey toward a more perfect union. On this Juneteenth, we remember that struggle as we reflect on how far we’ve come as a country. The slaves of Galveston knew their freedom was only a first step, just as the bloodied foot soldiers who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge 100 years later knew they had to keep marching.
Here in Memphis, churches and faith-based groups were invited to worship in the park and bring with them a message of hope, faith, reconciliation, unity and praise. Innovation Church, pastored by the Rev. Marron D. Thomas Sr. headlined this year’s “Praise in the Park.”
“Music unites us as a human race and helps to cast our worries aside,” said Telisa Franklin, the event’s organizer. “We have too much in common to allow the problems we face in society to drive us apart. Praise in the Park is the conduit that pulls us together – blacks, whites and other ethnicities.”
Innovation Church, showed up in mass numbers, happy to help celebrate in an innovative way. The church is very familiar with doing things differently, find proof in their 11:07 Sunday service start time. Founded by Marron Thomas after spending years serving the Frayser community as a youth minister and football coach, the Innovation Church has grown tremendously in 3 years, expanding from their 3925 Overton Crossing location to service on Sundays at Trezvant High School.
Pastor Marron, as he likes to be called, has had a special connection with at-risk youth that not most could not achieve, which could be said to be in part to his background. Thomas was himself once a drug dealer facing serious jail time, but despite that situation, maybe even because of it, he gave his life to God, finished college, and found a wife who would help him fulfill what he and hundreds of lives he’s touched believe to be the highest calling on his life. You can now find Pastor Marron somewhere in Frayser fulfilling his church’s mission: To innovatively EVANGELIZE the lost; to EMPOWER the believer for kingdom living; and to COMMIT to building Godly families, Godly communities and change lives for the Glory of God.
