Ebenezer Baptist Church's history runs through five senior pastors since its founding in 1886 by John Andrew Parker and a congregation of just thirteen members, and the fifth of them extended the church's political voice further than any predecessor, including the King family, ever formally held. Raphael Warnock became Ebenezer's senior pastor in 2005 at age thirty five, the youngest person ever called to that position, continuing a tradition of activist preaching Martin Luther King Sr. and Martin Luther King Jr. had built the church's identity around decades earlier, focusing his own ministry on criminal justice reform, voting rights and organizing nonviolent protest against policies he argued harmed poor communities.
In 2020, while remaining Ebenezer's senior pastor, Warnock ran for the United States Senate from Georgia in a special election runoff, and won it in January 2021, becoming the first Black senator ever elected from Georgia and only the second Black senator from any former Confederate state since Reconstruction. He was reelected to a full term in 2022, holding both positions simultaneously, preaching at Ebenezer on Sundays while serving in Washington during the week, an arrangement without close precedent among sitting United States senators.
Warnock has described his pulpit and his Senate seat as expressions of the same calling rather than as separate roles, a framing that places him inside a continuous line running from Ebenezer's earliest pastors through the King family's ministry to his own, a church whose senior pastors have moved, one generation at a time, from local Black Atlanta congregation to national civil rights pulpit to the floor of the United States Senate.