The Rev. Dr. William Barber II, the pastor of a small church in Goldsboro who rose to national prominence as the president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, gave his final sermon to his congregation on Sunday, retiring after more than three decades of service. “I have no reason to be standing here but by the grace of God,” he said, according to CNN. The 59-year-old, who joined Goldsboro’s Greenleaf Christian Church in 1993, has long suffered from ankylosing spondylitis, a painful form of arthritis that can cause the vertebrae of the spine to fuse. Barber is best known as the leader of Moral Mondays, a series of weekly protests that began at the North Carolina General Assembly in 2013. He plans to continue “to build a moral movement that can redeem the heart and soul of this nation, usher in a third reconstruction, and, through his role as founding director of the recently established Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, train a new generation of moral leaders to be active participants in creating a just society,” his church said in a statement.