A Church Divided

On the seventh day of the last full week of September, Almighty God in Heaven was said to be working overtime on a labor dispute at New Evergreen Missionary Baptist Church.

It was difficult to tell which way He was leaning. Some said that He said the pastor was going to get It. Others said it was those who would not follow the pastor who were in Deep Trouble. Everyone quoted God directly, but the only thing anyone could agree on was that God was definitely involved.

The church they fought over was a long way from heaven. In north Houston, among the bars and humble homes on Collingsworth, it stands beside a dirt parking lot — a small clapboard structure with peeling white paint that resembles nothing more than a one-room schoolhouse. New Evergreen never held more than 125 Christians, and that Sunday, after so many had been banished, only about two dozen were scattered among the pews. But they pushed the walls out with their songs. Waving their hands, they rejoiced that “Jesus is mine!” and “I love Jesus!” A woman cried out, “Oh, sing it! Sing it!” and they sang that God loved them, and God was smiling on them. And then they emptied their pockets into the offering plate.

Rousing spirits and collecting money, the associate ministers were immaculate in their dark suits. They paid no attention to the man in the center of the podium, sitting quietly with his hands folded, wearing a red blazer that nicely matched the carpet. When the offering was done, this man disappeared with the money. The sanctuary fell silent, and then one of the ministers commanded, “All rise!” And behold, the black man in the red blazer returned, Pastor Milton Leavern Jackson, with his hard-fought wavy hair and clenching jaw muscles. He strode boldly to the pulpit and said unto his people:

“You may remain standing.”
Thus began a long and powerful sermon, deeply relevant to the times. Pastor Jackson read loudly Matthew 5:4348. He stared at his Bible incredulously. He glared at the people. He pointed his finger and shouted, “Even you with your saved self — even you! — would have a time with this verse.”

For certainly, it gave the pastor fits. Jesus was asking him to love his enemies, even to pray for them. “Prayer,” said Pastor Jackson, “ain’t what you want to do.”

According to his detractors, Milton Jackson’s time in the service of the Lord has been marked by cunning plots and secret alliances, by the crushing of the old and of the weak, and by a general indifference to the welfare of his subjects. In December 1996, after six years of his pastorship, the people revolted. New Evergreen rang with shouted accusations and flying Bible verses. There were two church elections, three court hearings and finally a victory for God. Or at least for Pastor Jackson.

After that came the purges.
The people of New Evergreen are now the meekest and most humble of believers. After his sermon on the difficulties of loving enemies, the pastor stood beside the pulpit, not so much greeting his followers as acknowledging them with a nod. He would not tell a visitor what he had done to his enemies. He said simply that it was over, and he had won, and “God bless you.”

His silence leaves open to speculation exactly why Milton Jackson was so driven to be king of New Evergreen. He grew up in the church, and such as it was, the building and the people within it were all he knew. Jackson seems to have conceived of no greater glory than becoming the authority here, under God alone. He would lead his friends and family where he thought they should go. He would achieve their respect, or demand it. They would follow, or Pastor Jackson would cast them out.

Accounts of his leadership make him appear less like a saint than like a dictator — like Stalin, say, on the most minuscule of scales. But the exiles from New Evergreen see a different influence. They say it was the devil who stole their church.

In her living room with bars on the windows and brass angels on the walls, Sarah Mims sat quoting Jeremiah 23:1: “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture.”

Miles away, in her own living room, Cwiller Spells said, “He ain’t got away with nothing. God don’t sleep, and He gonna whip his — ” And she stopped before she said a bad word.

You can’t understand what it means to believe, Sister Mims explained, unless things have happened to you. It was Jesus who made her headaches go away, she believes. Jesus made her car lock up when she tried to turn into a nightclub, and Jesus turned on the microwave when no one else could.

Sister Mims knows the power of faith, and 47 years ago, it was faith like hers that built a church. You could see the ground through the floor and feel the rain through the ceiling, and the church seemed to exist as much in heaven as on earth. Several windblown years went by, and then James Lockwood was appointed pastor, and a new building was purchased, and the church began to grow and take shape.

Lockwood was the kind of pastor who would come in the middle of the night to the hospital or the jail or a deathbed. He seemed utterly a man of God. He would keep your secrets and call you when you were going astray. He would pay the church’s bills before paying himself. People became comfortable with Pastor Lockwood, and they grew devoted. Sunday services lasted for hours. There were missions to the sick and elderly on Monday nights, Bible study on Wednesday nights and choir practice on Thursdays. The church became a center of life, but officially, it would not exist for many years. Pastor Lockwood refused to draft bylaws and incorporate. He said the Bible was the only contract the church needed.

Former deacon Murphy Smith remembered Jackson as “a devilish boy” who was always getting into fights. He fought with one of Smith’s sons and befriended another. That son, Ben Smith, recalled Jackson’s charisma and how he would never leave the basketball court without winning. Jackson himself, in preaching on his enemies, said he learned his determination from his mother: “If someone tries to pick on you,” she told him, “you better not run. We stand our ground and fight.”

The boy grew up, in any case, with strong ties to his church. Pastor Lockwood always worked full-time for the post office, and after high school, in 1972, Jackson, too, took a job as a letter carrier (which he still holds). Later, Pastor Lockwood appointed him secretary to the trustees and watched over him through the years as Jackson became church treasurer, then deacon, trustee and finally, associate minister.

In 1981, Ben Smith also became an associate minister, and sometime after that, their rivalry overcame their friendship. Of the five associate ministers, Brother Smith and Brother Jackson were considered Pastor Lockwood’s favored “sons.” In 1989, when Lockwood went into the hospital for an operation, the sons came to his bedside, and Brother Smith was told to take over. A month later, Pastor Lockwood returned. A month after that, he was back in the hospital with pneumonia. Again, the sons gathered around, and from his bed, the old man said, “Smitty, I want you to let Jackson be in charge this time.” Shortly afterward, Pastor Lockwood died.

New Evergreen trembled with grief for a long time. (“He was a god,” Creola Scott explained, “I’m telling you like it was.”) The people sobbed in the sanctuary. They prayed to the Lord for the strength to accept what the Lord had taken away. Milton Jackson did what he could. From the pulpit, he proposed a monthly pension for Pastor Lockwood’s widow. From the chairman’s seat on the board of trustees, Jackson presided over the decision to choose a successor from within the church. (Appointing a “son,” it was believed, would avoid a difficult transition.) Brother Jackson campaigned hard for himself. He told the congregation he was Pastor Lockwood’s chosen one. He promised that the church would grow under his leadership. Brother Smith’s domestic life had been “scarred,” and Brother Jackson preached hard on the sanctity of marriage. Brother Smith says now, “I just got plumb sick of it, you know?”

By this time, one of Jackson’s friends, Michael Nelson, had become chairman of the deacons, and it was only natural that he assist the chairman of the trustees in supervising the election. As Murphy Smith remembers, Pastor Jackson was elected by a single vote. He was inexperienced, said Deacon Smith, “but we thought we could make what we wanted out of him.” And he seems to have been thinking the same about them.

Jackson was installed in the winter of 1990. Remembering all the little things they had failed to do for Pastor Lockwood, the people were determined to oblige Jackson. No one shrieked when the new pastor adjourned indefinitely the board of trustees, saying he needed to reconsider its role. Few protested when he suggested incorporating. It was marketed as part of the growth plan: If the church could just be incorporated as a nonprofit organization, it would be eligible to receive government surplus. By giving away surplus cheeses and such, church leaders believed they could attract new members, said Deacon Smith, and the empire of New Evergreen could perhaps be stretched across the nation.

It seemed at the time a wise idea. Deacon Smith took the pastor to see a lawyer friend, and the lawyer friend said the church would first need some bylaws. As he had done with the board of trustees, Pastor Jackson took this under consideration. He studied and cogitated and thought it over, and for the many years that he seemed to be doing this, no bylaws or cheeses were ever produced, but there were some not-so-subtle changes in the church climate.

What the pastor had quietly done was to locate a good lawyer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Together, where only belief had existed before, the two of them established the order of Milton Jackson.

The bylaws began by addressing the usual tenets of the faith — Article Two, Section 10 on “Total Prosperity” for the believer; Article Two, Section 12 on “The Lake of Fire” for the sinner. And then it was on to matters of business.

The membership would be divided into two classes: the nonvoting congregation and the trustees. All trustees, deacons, elders and advisers would serve “at the pleasure and in the complete discretion of the Pastor-President.” He would be the presiding and only perpetual member of the board of trustees, which would handle all affairs of the church. The trustees would have the power to suspend or expel anyone, except the pastor. All members “shall work in harmony,” decreed Article Three, Section 10, part B, or “necessary adjustments shall be made.”

The pastor and his lawyer described it as a “corporate, democratic, congregational form of government.” Not to mention tyrannical. The little church was incorporated August 1, 1991. The application was signed “Rev. Milton Jackson, President/Pastor/CEO.”

A good leader always has followers, and from the start, the pastor had two. He was joined on his new board of trustees by Michael Nelson and Willie Tom Alexander. Both men work in cemeteries. They’re a couple of the nicest fellows you could ever hope to meet.

“A church has two main ships — leadership and followship,” said Brother Alexander. And then he referred all questions to the pastor.

Brother Nelson said, “When you have given your life to Christ, you can ask me questions, and I will answer.” Then he answered a few anyway.

In becoming a new trustee, Nelson had overthrown his mother on the old board. The pastor appointed him “to get the church going in the right direction,” he said. Brother Nelson told the pastor he would follow as long as the pastor follows God. Since Jackson quotes scripture for everything he does, Brother Nelson believes God is directing the church.

“I’m being led by him and he’s being led by God,” said Brother Nelson, “so if I’m going to be obedient to God, I got to obey him.”

There was little more to talk about, except a few hellish rumors. When Brother Nelson heard them, he guessed this story wasn’t going to glorify God. He had tried to endure the conversation, he said, “hoping the spirit would touch you, but the Bible says when you can’t touch a person, you shake the dust from your feet and go on. So that’s the end of this conversation, sir.”

And he hung up.

The people of New Evergreen prayed to the Lord to help them follow this pastor. When Jackson visited the sick, they observed that he seemed at a loss for words. When he was preaching, they were bored that he “read a paper.” They confronted him when he misquoted the Bible. When he denied it, Wesley Scott produced a miniature cassette recorder and proved the point.

Certainly, a few of them were not easy to please, but then the pastor wasn’t very accommodating either. As he strengthened his hold on New Evergreen, financial reports all but disappeared. Terra Smith, who was the church recording secretary (and no relation to Murphy Smith), grew uncomfortable with what she saw and began whispering reports of her own. It became known that Michael Nelson’s wife had been hired in the finance room; that Pastor Jackson had raised his own salary to the unprecedented $15,600 a year; and that $30,000 had been raised for a church van, which then had been purchased on credit. The members were keenly aware of this and of their lack of input on church matters, but what they felt most was the absence of their pastor. In addition to working full-time for the post office, Jackson was spending precisely 51 hours a week tending his flock, according to the charter application. But his detractors complained that they rarely saw him except on Sundays. Evening services, Bible study, youth missions, fellowship with other churches — all of these became rare or extinct under Pastor Jackson. His people would leave messages on his answering machine, and he wouldn’t return the calls. In church, he explained one day that he really couldn’t be expected to visit all the sick and dying in the congregation. At a funeral, he urged the speakers to keep it short, because the day had been long, and he was tired.

It was like a bad marriage: The people stuck with it and prayed it would improve. They didn’t consider their prayers answered when the pastor began attending full-gospel revivals at church expense. New Evergreen was decidedly not a full-gospel church. The congregation didn’t generally mind the full-gospel emphasis on faith healing and speaking in tongues. But when Pastor Jackson began asking them to stand up or sit down all at once, like an army, there were many who blamed full gospel. As they saw it, you’re supposed to be moved by the spirit; the pastor wasn’t supposed to move the spirit, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to move them.

Pastor Jackson had begun tinkering with their faith. In the summer of 1996, when he established a pension for himself and announced that the Lord had told him to revoke the pension to Lockwood’s widow, many members reached a conclusion about Pastor Jackson.

“He just a devil from hell,” said Cwiller Spells.
And they revolted. The pastor quickly decided to revoke only half the widow’s pension, but this only raised the pitch of the crowd, since everyone knew that if the Lord had really spoken, the Lord would not have changed His mind.

What people had only whispered in their prayers, they began to speak aloud. Murphy Smith can’t forget what he finally told Jackson, after a deacons meeting: “You are one of the no-goodest black bastards I ever seen pastoring a church!”

“What did you say?” asked the pastor, and Deacon Smith repeated himself. Things got worse after that for Pastor Jackson. Deacon Smith swears he was just looking for candy when he opened the pastor’s desk and — “Bless God!” — found the charter and bylaws.

He made copies and passed them out. On the Sunday after Christmas last year, Wesley Scott stood up in church and announced an election on whether to retain the pastor. Scott recalls that Pastor Jackson jumped up then and went “stone crazy.”

“Brother Scott, you don’t have the authority to do that!” Jackson is remembered as saying. “Brother Scott, you are the devil! Look at the devil! This is the devil himself!”

But the announcement had been made. As the election took place, Jackson stalked around the parking lot, taking note of which cars were present. Afterward, to prevent any more meetings, he changed the church locks. A mentally retarded girl who attended the meeting was fired as church janitor. For “causing division among the flock,” Wesley Scott and Murphy Smith received letters ousting them from the board of deacons. For being “very combative and argumentative,” Terra Smith was “terminated” from her volunteer position as recording secretary.

Jackson, too, was sent a letter informing him that he had been fired, but he declined to accept it. With nowhere else on earth to go, Wesley Scott et al. turned to the courts. The judge appointed a monitor, and a new election was ordered for February 9.

In the weeks beforehand, Pastor Jackson offered no apologies. “God bless you,” he said, but he wasn’t going to answer questions about his leadership. “I’m not going to be a pastor who has to follow what others think I ought to do,” he is heard to say on one of Wesley Scott’s recordings. “Whatever God tells me to do, that’s the way I have to go.”

The election was held after the Sunday service. Jackson stood over the ballot box and greeted friends and family members who had not been seen in church for some time. Other parishioners were informed they really didn’t have to vote if they didn’t want to. Finally, when the monitor tabulated the results, Pastor Jackson won the election by two votes. Wesley Scott et al. protested the influx of strangers, but there was a fatal hitch: Criteria for church membership had never been clearly defined, except in Pastor Jackson’s bylaws. No one mentioned Jackson’s bylaws, so the court upheld his election.

Claiming the authority of God and man, the pastor then embarked on a cleansing campaign. “Obey them that have the rule over you,” read the letter to Priscilla Morrison, the church pianist. She was fired for absences, lateness and “negative attitude toward Church leadership.” She had made the mistake of sitting on the wrong side of the courtroom. As for her attendance, Pastor Jackson was aware her father had recently suffered both a stroke and a heart attack and was in a coma.

The heads of all auxiliary groups — choir, usher board, missions and youth department — were fired for appearing in court. Citing I Corinthians 6:18 (“If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints?”) the pastor wrote letters to Terra Smith, Wesley Scott, and Murphy and Ben Smith, throwing them out of the church. When Brother Scott refused to leave, Jackson called the police.

“People kind of stopped singing” after the pianist was fired, said Cwiller Spells. The choir fell apart. The church remained divided between those who had voted for Jackson and those who had not. There was no kissing or hugging between them. People stood when they should have sat, and sat when they should have stood. If they opened their mouths at all, it was to heckle the pastor, or to defend him.

So the day of judgment came none too soon. Pastor Jackson stood before the congregation last June and formally announced that the church would henceforth embrace the full-gospel doctrine. All members must sign up for the New Members’ Orientation Class, he said, or be dropped from the rolls.

They left en masse, out into the cold and Godless world. Wives turned away from husbands. Mothers left their sons. Ruby Moore, who had been a founder nearly 50 years earlier, wouldn’t agree to become a New Member, nor would Lockwood’s widow. One by one, they were sent into exile, until at last all dissent was erased, and Pastor Jackson took his predecessor’s portrait down from its place above the pulpit, and he turned to face his true believers.

The lost lambs have their theory now about their shepherd. In the Bible, Wesley Scott points to Matthew 4:8, in which the devil offered Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” if Jesus would only worship Satan. Jesus politely declined, but at New Evergreen, said Brother Scott, “the devil was able to show Jackson a pretty picture, and Jackson fell for it.”

In her home behind the bars, with angels on the walls, Sarah Mims said you’ve got to have bylaws these days because you just can’t trust preachers. After more than 40 years at New Evergreen, she’s waiting for the Lord to lead her to a new church. She predicts a painful end for Pastor Jackson (“Have you ever seen people not fit to die?”) but Sister Mims tries not to think about him, tries not to let Satan get to her, too.

“The weeping is over for me,” she said. “Satan has attacked, and the church is gone, but I’m going to have joy — that’s right — because God is going to be there, and He is going to judge right from wrong. And I won’t have to worry about it.”

People treat you unkindly, Pastor Jackson said, because they don’t know “the hand that anoints you.” That Sunday in September, facing empty pews and two dozen believers, he shouted for some time about the impossibility of loving people who had made him lose weight and sleep, and take medication for stress. In the end, he found the way: Pastor Jackson has God. And since God is love, God will love the pastor’s enemies.

This was the message for the day.
“We are a peculiar people,” said Pastor Jackson in his benediction. “We are the particular people. God has lifted us up to be saved.”

Amen, they said together, and they joined hands and sang of unity.