When U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff wanted to speak out about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s raid on Fulton County’s elections hub earlier this year, he did not call a news conference or go to the floor of the Senate.
Instead, he went to the 8:30 a.m. service at Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta and the 10 a.m. service at Big Bethel AME Church across the street from the famous mural of his mentor, the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis.
At both historic Black churches, Ossoff spoke about kings and false prophets, civil rights and justice, and a “spiritually broken president who digs the moral pit deeper and deeper.”
“How foolish to launch an attack on voting rights here at the political and spiritual center of the Black history they seek to erase,” Ossoff said of President Donald Trump and his administration.
It wasn’t Ossoff’s first time at Cascade or Big Bethel and it won’t be his last. Because over the course of his first term in the Senate, and even before that, he has made it a point to cultivate relationships in the same Black churches where Lewis spent decades advancing civil rights.
Those relationships were on display last week when Black turnout in Georgia soared and Ossoff was reelected by an 18-point margin over Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins. As they have for decades, Black churches worked for months and years ahead of time to register and turnout their communities, including for Ossoff and the Democratic ticket.
The win was massive. But in interviews with Black pastors around the state, they described Ossoff as more than a candidate. The senator, they said, had been in routine contact with them and their churches throughout his time in office, and even before that, not just as his 2026 election neared.
They said he reaches out often (“all the time” in the words of one), helps with church members’ casework issues, has a staff attentive to the church’s needs and seems to genuinely share the values of the Black church.
The Rev. Dr. Jonathan C. Augustine, the senior pastor at Big Bethel where Ossoff spoke in February, first met the senator in 2022 when he was pastoring in North Carolina. Ossoff had come to campaign for a Senate candidate there and gave the pastor his cellphone number, telling him to call anytime.
“I thought that was the oddest thing in the world and the nicest thing in the world,” Augustine said. “I couldn’t believe this level of accessibility for somebody who’s not even a constituent.”
Augustine later called Ossoff to say he would be both his constituent and the senior pastor at Big Bethel in Atlanta.
“Sen. Ossoff is well received (at Big Bethel) because his message and his morals directly align with ours,” Augustine said. “He’s at home with us.”
The Rev. Dr. Kevin Murriel, the senior pastor at Cascade UMC, met Ossoff more than a decade ago and said they bonded immediately over their shared mentor, John Lewis.
“I truly believe that Sen. Ossoff believes that the Black church is central to the movement for equal justice and rights and equity and that it has been foundational for years in America,” Murriel said. “And I think that’s why he takes the relationship with the Black churches so seriously.”
Murriel described Ossoff as “a man of deep faith and character” but also as a frequent texter.
“He’s the kind of man who will send you a random text message, ‘Hey, Kevin, how things going? Anything your congregation needs?’”
The Rev. Dr. William Flippin, senior pastor at Greater Piney Grove Baptist Church in Atlanta, met Ossoff at the beginning of his term and was struck when a member of his congregation told him that day, “We believe he is the next John F. Kennedy.”
Atlanta has a long tradition of cooperation between the Jewish and Black communities on civil rights and other issues. So it seemed fitting to their supporters that Ossoff was elected in the same year as fellow Democrat U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, the longtime senior pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Together they became Georgia’s first Black senator and first Jewish senator.
Warnock continues to lead Ebenezer. But Flippin said he felt Ossoff being Jewish gives him a shared perspective, too.
“He knows what it’s like to be in the minority,” Flippin said. “I don’t think when he comes to Black churches it’s placating them or coming around only when it’s election time. You feel genuine concern.”
While Ossoff has worked to build his own relationships with Black churches, he has also met pastors through introductions from Warnock.
The Rev. Dr. Jamal-Harrison Bryant, senior pastor at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, met Ossoff during the 2020 campaign through Warnock, a classmate at Morehouse College. Bryant said Warnock told him he should meet Ossoff because the young Democrat would soon “make a difference and an impact.” Bryant said Warnock was right.
Bryant said Ossoff is one of the few elected leaders he allows to speak from his church’s pulpit, largely because he feels Ossoff shares his church’s values. He said hears from Ossoff about once a quarter, often with text messages the pastor calls “smoke signals” alerting him to something important happening in Washington or asking the pastor to pray for him.
There’s no way to know what’s next for Ossoff. But several of the pastors described him as a generational leader, whether he eventually runs for president or not.
For Black voters, especially young ones, Bryant called Ossoff, “a beam of what is possible.”
“I think that he is a once-in-a-lifetime, consequential servant leader that we see hewn out of our own soil,” he said.
With reactions like that, it seems like the only limits ahead for Ossoff may be the ones he sets for himself.