After fifty prolific years as the pastor at SF’s Third Baptist Church, the Reverend Amos Brown is stepping aside to the position of “Pastor Emeritus,” and there’s a big weekend of events to honor him, including a street renaming.

The Reverend Amos Cleophus Brown, Sr. may be now 84 years old, but he has remained a forceful advocate for the Western Addition communities where his Third Baptist Church is located. And some may remember that Brown actually sat on the SF Board of Supervisors, having been appointed by Willie Brown in 1996, and reelected in 1999.

Brown was one of the earlier supporters of LGBTQ rights, and took a lot of heat for his support of same-sex marriage in the Prop 8 era of the late 2000s. Though all the while, he remained pastor at the Third Baptist Church, SF’s oldest Black church, for the last 50 years.

Until this coming weekend. NBC Bay Area reports that Reverend Amos Brown will be retiring as head pastor this weekend, or rather, transitioning to the position of “Pastor Emeritus.”

“I know traditionally we have called one’s moving from a position of service as being retirement,” Brown said in an interview with NBC Bay Area. “But for me, I will never retire. I’m just repositioning myself.”

Brown was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the great-grandson of a slave, and the youngest of eight children. He would go on to be one of Dr. Martin Luther King’s students at Morehouse College, and moved to SF in 1976 when named Senior Pastor of Third Baptist Church. Brown actually testified against Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991, and has been the president of the SF NAACP for years. That’s because he made his name as a racial justice advocate working alongside Medgar Evers as early as the 1950s.

“I was even locked up two nights in jail down in Jackson, Mississippi, when I wouldn’t let a white intern call my 85-year-old neighbor ‘boy,'" Brown told NBC Bay Area.

The honorariums for Reverend Amos Brown begin on Saturday, when a block of Pierce Street next to Third Baptist Church will be honorarily renamed a Dr Amos Brown Way. That’s at 11:30 am Saturday, and an RSVP is required to attend.  

Then on Sunday, Brown will perform his usual 10 am Worship Service at Third Baptist Church (1399 McAllister Street), which is open to the public and will be livestreamed. His Pastor Emeritus Designation Ceremony will be Sunday afternoon at 3 pm at Third Baptist Church, which is also free, but requires an RSVP. Then at 5:30 pm Sunday, Brown will hold court at a Pastor Emeritus Cocktail Reception at The Green Room (401 Van Ness Avenue), though the affordable tickets for that one have sold out, and the only tickets remaining are at a “Trailblazer Individual Sponsor” level, with a price tag of $1,005.

Related: Rev. Amos Brown: 'The Only Thing San Francisco Is Progressive On Is Sex' [SFist]

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