The Kings did not arrive at Ebenezer by accident. Adam Daniel Williams, the maternal grandfather of Martin Luther King Jr., took over as pastor in 1894 when the church had a mere 13 members. Under his leadership, the congregation swelled to 400 by 1903 and 750 by 1913. Williams built the church into an institution. In 1927, a young minister named Martin Luther King Sr. joined as assistant pastor, and by 1931 he had ascended to the senior role. "Daddy King," as he was known, would hold that position for more than four decades, shepherding the church through the Depression, a world war, and the seismic upheavals of the civil rights era. When his son Martin Luther King Jr. returned to Atlanta in 1960 to serve as co-pastor, three generations of the family had shaped Ebenezer into something far greater than a neighborhood church.

In 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. invited Baptist leaders from across the South to meet at Ebenezer. The gathering produced the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization that would become the strategic backbone of the civil rights movement and the campaign to end racial segregation in the United States. The church was no stranger to activism; its Auburn Avenue neighborhood was the commercial and cultural heart of Black Atlanta, a street so vibrant that Fortune magazine once called it "the richest Negro street in the world." From this address, King Jr. preached sermons that blended theology with urgent moral argument, delivered in the cadences of the Black Baptist tradition that had been refined at Ebenezer for decades. When he was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, his body came home. The funeral on April 9, 1968, filled the sanctuary and spilled out onto Auburn Avenue, watched by millions on television.

The losses came in waves. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in April 1968. His brother A. D. King, who had served as co-pastor alongside him, died in 1969. Martin Luther King Sr. continued to preach, a figure of immense dignity carrying unimaginable grief. In 1974, his wife Alberta was shot and killed by a gunman while she played the organ during a Sunday service at Ebenezer. Through it all, the church endured. Joseph L. Roberts Jr. became senior pastor in 1975 and guided the congregation for three decades, maintaining its dual role as a house of worship and a living monument to its history. In 1999, a new 1,700-seat Horizon Sanctuary was dedicated within what had become the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, expanding the church's capacity to meet a congregation that continued to grow.

In 2005, Raphael Warnock became the fifth senior pastor in Ebenezer's history. He inherited a church with 6,000 members and a legacy that placed enormous expectations on its leader. Warnock proved equal to the task, carrying the tradition of prophetic preaching into the twenty-first century. In January 2021, he made history of his own by winning a special runoff election to become the first Black senator from the state of Georgia. On December 6, 2022, he won election to a full six-year term, cementing the achievement. His dual role as pastor and senator echoes the long Ebenezer tradition: faith expressed not only in worship but in public action. The same sanctuary that hosted King's funeral also hosted the funeral of congressman John Lewis, another civil rights icon, connecting the generations of struggle that define this church.

Today, the original brick church building stands preserved as part of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, its wooden pews and stained glass frozen in time. Visitors can stand at the pulpit where three generations of Kings preached and look out at the same sanctuary where Coretta Scott King comforted five-year-old Bernice during her father's funeral, a moment captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. Across the street, King's birth home and the King Center continue the story. The Horizon Sanctuary next door hums with Sunday services, its modern architecture a deliberate contrast to the preserved original. Ebenezer remains what it has always been: a working church with a living congregation, not a museum. The stone of help still stands on Auburn Avenue, still offering what its biblical name promised.