A New Voice Speaks in an Old Pulpit

The Rev. John J. Hunter ascended the pulpit of First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles last Sunday and threw open a sanctuary transformed. The church, housing the city’s oldest black congregation, is gleaming with new pews and paint, fresh carpet and a gold-edged inscription of its motto, “First to Serve.”

Behind the sparkling new look, however, lies an intense drama of transition, personal challenge and small triumphs since Hunter stepped in last November to replace the congregation’s legendary and longtime pastor, the Rev. Cecil L. “Chip” Murray.

In the last 10 months, Hunter has had to fend off furious criticism for some of his early decisions and balance a high-wire act of forward steps with reverence for his predecessor’s larger-than-life legacy even as he grapples with learning the ropes of a mega-church that dwarfs his last post, in Seattle.

“I knew it would be some difficult waters,” said Hunter, 48. “But the Lord’s strength has carried me weekend by weekend. It’s the busiest and most exhilarating time of my life.”

So far, many congregants who grieved the loss of Murray seem pleased with their new pastor.

“I wouldn’t want to be him,” said Kerman Maddox, a Los Angeles public relations consultant and church board member. “Replacing a legend like Chip Murray is impossible. But this new pastor in a fairly short period of time has done yeoman’s work. I think this man will be a huge leader.”

During 27 years at the helm, Murray led his flock to become the AME denomination’s largest congregation west of the Mississippi, with 17,000 registered members. He transformed what had been a staid and insular congregation into one of the region’s most prominent churches, a $75-million civic powerhouse with 14 corporations that house the poor, aid the jobless and nurture entrepreneurial businesses in concert with Southern California’s corporate and political chieftains.

But a denomination rule requiring pastors to retire at age 75 forced Murray to step down last year. Congregational leaders, reluctant to imagine First AME without Murray, sought a waiver of the rules, to no avail.

That brought them Hunter and a controversy that exploded onto the front pages of many of the newspapers serving the region’s black communities.

After Hunter removed two of Murray’s top lieutenants and presided over the closure of the school founded by the former pastor, a small group of opponents launched a bitter campaign to discredit him with allegations of financial mismanagement, tax problems and excessive spending in Los Angeles and at his previous post in Seattle.

Critics in both cities circulated his personal tax documents and details about his credit card spending and compensation package. They blasted e-mails around the nation to AME bishops, congregants and the media, publicizing the address and purchase price -- $2 million -- of the new Encino parsonage that church officials bought for its new minister’s use.

One of the dismissed employees, former chief operating officer Diane Young, is threatening to file a complaint against Hunter alleging age and gender discrimination. She said the pastor replaced her with younger men.

She also said Hunter did not offer her another job, as he did another top Murray aide. That aide, Steve Johnson, later left the church after being replaced by Hunter’s wife, Denise, as head of the church’s economic development arm, known as FAME Renaissance. The pastor called Young’s allegations “ludicrous.”

Hunter has retaliated with a $2-million libel and defamation lawsuit against Errol Briggs, a Young ally and Los Angeles publicist, and others who teamed up with Seattle critics to lead the attacks. Briggs ultimately apologized for and retracted some of his allegations, but he continues to accuse Hunter of financial mismanagement and of “trying to destroy the legacy of Pastor Murray.”

Murray has avoided commenting on the controversy, reflecting a determined effort to stay out of the spotlight since retirement. (“I’m dead,” he said.) Superior Court Judge Irma Brown Dillon, a church board member, said many congregants have taken Murray’s decision to continue worshiping at First AME as a signal of support for Hunter.

Others have backed Hunter more overtly, including Bishop John R. Bryant, who appointed Hunter, and most congregational leaders in both Seattle and Los Angeles.

“He has exceeded my expectations,” Bryant said of Hunter, citing more than 600 members who have joined the church since he arrived. “Pastor Chip did a good job of passing the baton, and Pastor John has taken it and run.”

Bryant, who oversees 250 churches in 14 central and western states, dismissed the allegations of financial impropriety as untrue “foolishness.”

“The church is a human organization,” he said. “When it’s moved by egos rather than spirituality, these things surface.”

Within First AME, the Rev. Brenda Lamothe and others say Hunter and his wife have brought a youthful dynamism and transparency to the organization. Lamothe, executive secretary to both Murray and Hunter, said contributions have increased, along with a slew of initiatives to boost spiritual growth and serve community needs in the church’s West Adams neighborhood.

On Sept. 10, for instance, the church launched its first back-to-school day, offering 1,300 neighborhood children free backpacks, shoes, school supplies and other goodies, a brainchild of Denise Hunter. At Sunday services the next day, Hunter welcomed a Louisiana family into the congregation. The church plans to feed, clothe and house the Hurricane Katrina victims for the next year.

For his part, Hunter categorically denied any wrongdoing and said the backlash is the price of leadership. In Seattle, for instance, he wanted to sell the historic downtown church and follow black migration into the suburbs as a way to ensure growth. After running into furious opposition, he opted to open a satellite congregation instead.

“There’s nobody who’s a leader who doesn’t have enemies,” Hunter said. “You have to make decisions. You can take the easy road, or you can take the right road.”

Hunter is short and rotund, with an affable manner and powerful preaching style that draws congregants to their feet, especially when he breaks out in song, as he did in crooning a Delfonics tune during his first Los Angeles sermon last year.

He freely dispenses jokes, hugs, details about his personal life and straight talk about inner church workings, in contrast to the more reserved Murray.

“Let’s get real,” he often says.

Armed with degrees in theology, law and business administration, Hunter speaks of congregants as a “customer base” and spins out visions of how to expand it. He melds the sacred and the secular, embracing Jesus Christ’s “great commission” to evangelize around the world with tactics gleaned from such favorite books as “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” by business guru Stephen R. Covey.

“For a motor company, at the end of the day it’s ‘How many cars did you sell?’ ” Hunter said. “For a church, it’s ‘How many souls did you save?’ That’s the No. 1 thing.”

During several conversations over more than a month, Hunter showed his many sides. The Boston University Law School graduate dismissed rumors of financial impropriety with documentary evidence and character witnesses, including church officers in Seattle and Los Angeles and the public accounting firm that scrutinizes AME operations in both cities.

The holder of a business degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he displayed his annual reports and the strategic plan crafted during his six-year term in Seattle to demonstrate his work as pastor there.

And the Princeton Theological Seminary graduate turned to Scripture to explain how he has weathered the attacks against him while juggling the daily demands of the job: preaching three sermons every Sunday, teaching religious classes, meeting corporate and civic leaders.

“The whole point is, don’t focus on the problem but on the Lord, who can solve the problem,” Hunter said, paraphrasing a lesson from Numbers 11 in the Bible.

The Indiana native boasts an esteemed family lineage, with AME bishops on both sides, including his father, John Hunter. His maternal great-grandfather was an Alabama slave. Taught to read and write by his Oxford-educated master, he became an AME minister and editor who set a model of educational achievement. Hunter’s mother, who earned a master’s degree in library science, was a librarian and constantly took new books home for Hunter to read.

But Hunter was also a product of inner-city Detroit and Gary, Ind., where he fought for his lunch money, witnessed schoolyard stabbings and considered joining a gang for protection. More interested in drums than in school as a youth, he described himself as a mediocre student until he hit his stride in high school, became class president and went to Morehouse College in Atlanta. (His 1979 graduating class photo shows Martin Luther King III and filmmaker-to-be Spike Lee, the only one in sneakers and jeans.)

His first interest was law, which he viewed as a more dynamic path to social change than the ministry. But Boston, he said, “was cold in every way to a black person.” The transition from the camaraderie of his black college campus to the cutthroat competition at the largely white law school was jarring. His first-year class of 350 included 12 African Americans. By year’s end, several of them had flunked out, he said. Hunter managed to finish the year but said he was “real scared.”

He told his father the Lord was calling him to preach. His father told him to finish law school. “If you don’t, people will believe you couldn’t and you ran to ministry,” Hunter said he was told.

After graduation, Hunter worked at a Detroit law firm and in a Michigan prosecutor’s office but did not pass the bar exam, a failure he said he attributes in part to grief over his father’s death in 1984. (He practiced law under a court waiver and with supervision of senior prosecutors, according to an official who supervised him in Michigan.) By then, he had also started pastoring his first church, New St. James AME Church in Detroit.

“I put ‘em in jail during the week and prayed for them on Sundays,” Hunter said.

Ultimately, the ministry won out. In 1989, he earned his master’s of divinity degree at Princeton, and he served as pastor at AME churches in Wichita, Kan.; Kansas City, Mo.; and Seattle before landing the highly coveted Los Angeles post. All assignments are one-year terms that must be annually renewed by the presiding bishop, but Hunter said he hopes to retire in Los Angeles, as Murray did.

“This is the top,” Hunter said of the congregation founded in 1872. “There’s no place to go from here.”

Filling the shoes of an icon is not easy. For one thing, First AME leaders did not want to let Murray leave. In the AME denomination, the presiding bishop wields sole authority to make appointments; local congregations have no say.

Bryant said he selected Hunter because his “unusual cluster of qualifications” in business, law and religion equipped him to manage First AME’s enormous church and corporate operations. Bryant also lauded the dynamic team ministry he practices with his wife, a rousing speaker and former business executive. The Hunters have three daughters.

Not everyone, it seems, was pleased with the choice. Hunter said he heard reports of criticism in Los Angeles even before he arrived, including talk that he couldn’t preach.

“I expected the worst,” Hunter said. “So I came with much trepidation and in great prayer. To our surprise, people have received us quite warmly and been very kind.”

Shortly after he arrived, Hunter began his series of fateful personnel decisions. He called Young’s removal as chief operating officer part of a restructuring move. He said he asked Johnson to step down as chief financial officer and president of FAME Renaissance because California corporate law bars one person from serving in both posts. Instead, Hunter installed his wife, who worked at the Urban League in Seattle, as head of Renaissance, saying he needed someone he could completely trust in that position.

The publicist Briggs launched his cyber-attack, hooking up with a small group of Hunter’s Seattle opponents, many of whom were furious that he tried to sell the historic downtown First AME church.

At a recent gathering in Seattle of more than a dozen of Hunter’s critics, it was clear that the pastor also had offended their traditional sensibilities with his administrative style. He did not live in the nearby church parsonage as the previous pastor had done but chose to live farther away; he replaced some older church officials with younger blood; he asked for more money and spent more on church functions than they believed prudent.

“We’re not out to get John Hunter,” said T. Marie Floyd, a church member for 49 years. “We were trying to save the AME church.”

The Seattle group began relentlessly investigating him. Critics hired a tax attorney and eventually reported Hunter to the Internal Revenue Service, accusing him of having failed to declare as income direct contributions to the pastor. According to IRS documents circulated by the Seattle group, the tax agency placed a lien in 2003 against the minister’s Seattle-area home for $134,000 in taxes and penalties owed on the offerings. Hunter said the tax issue “has long since been resolved with the IRS.”

But Hunter had many fans in Seattle. Geoffrey Evans, a church financial official and an executive at the Boeing Co. in Seattle, was among those who supported the plan to move the church, calling it far-sighted. He said Hunter’s social vision and brisk business style caused him to join the Seattle congregation.

Seattle leaders in charge of the church budget say Hunter was an honest steward who properly accounted for all the congregation’s money. “There’s no question about it,” said Charles Johnson, a retired judge and finance committee member.

According to Horace Francis, the accountant who handles Seattle’s bookkeeping, it was Hunter who brought a professional accounting system to the church for the first time. The pastor also ordered the church’s first audit, which revealed a $500,000 embezzlement by one employee under the previous regime, and set up unprecedented procedures to count and safeguard the Sunday collections.

“The irony is that [Seattle] didn’t have anything closely resembling accurate financial records prior to my coming,” Hunter said in frustration one day. “So to spend time getting it together there, and then spend time proving I got it together there, is just incredible.”

Hunter said the criticism is part of the challenges of being a pastor. “Ministry will eat you alive,” he said. “You live in a glass bowl. If you don’t know the Lord has anointed you and called you to do it, you will either quit or become so discouraged.... But I believe I’m doing what the Lord wants.”

However consuming the controversy has been for Hunter and church leaders in Los Angeles, it seems to have had relatively little effect on his rank and file. A move to collect signatures calling for Hunter’s ouster in July fizzled when only a few people responded. Many congregants say they had not heard about problems.

Some of those who have, among them Los Angeles resident Lloyd Ridgeway, said he researched the allegations on the Internet and in queries to church officials. His conclusion: “It was all a lie by disgruntled people from somewhere else.”

But Ridgeway, who regards Murray as his “shepherd” through life crises he has revealed to no one else, said it is too soon to evaluate Hunter. “You can’t expect someone to walk in and hold the esteem of someone who has been here 28 years,” he said.

Longtime church members Willie White and Rebecca Williams say that closure of the school was a “sore spot” for them initially. But they say Hunter has since won them over by showing congregants how much the church was subsidizing the foundering school.

They praised Hunter’s energetic outreach to youth with a popular new service for them and his following through on such projects as the $350,000 renovation of the church. The two-story building of yellow stucco, atop a hill amid the mansions and modest bungalows of the West Adams district, features an airy sanctuary with stained-glass windows and a commanding mural portraying African American religious and political history.

“He is taking us to a new level,” said White, a 42-year church member, adding that there was more resistance to Murray when he arrived at First AME than to Hunter. “He has a vision beyond our comprehension.”

So far, one of the biggest grumbles about Hunter has been his relatively loose management style compared to the notoriously organized Murray, a former military man. At least one employee has resigned over it, saying it was too difficult to run a tight video ministry without Murray’s practice of scripting and rehearsing every detail of Sunday services in advance. At times, Hunter turns up for services shortly before they begin and runs them well beyond the allotted time.

Following Murray, Hunter acknowledges, is a constant balancing act of looking forward and honoring the past. In promoting the church’s renovation at one Sunday service, for instance, he took pains to point out that it would be “built on the foundation of Rev. Murray.” In justifying the closure of the educational center to transform it into a charter school, he and his officers produced church bulletins showing that Murray had started plans to do the same thing.

“What was accomplished here was legendary, astronomical, major and worthy of all the accolades [Murray] got,” Hunter said.

On some issues, however, Hunter has broken with Murray’s past practices. He has declined to continue annual pulpit exchanges with Temple Isaiah in West Los Angeles, a decision Rabbi Robert Gan said he understood but which saddened him. Hunter said he is eager to continue such activities as joint Passover Seders to commemorate the two communities’ shared struggle from slavery. But Sunday sermons, he said, are reserved for “preaching Jesus.”

Hunter also alienated some gay men and lesbians with remarks against same-sex marriage in his first sermon. One of them is Keith Weaver, an attorney who said he found a welcoming church home under Murray but has since quit attending services and dropped his pro bono legal work for the church’s entrepreneurial enterprises.

“He slammed the doors of the church in the face of all those who need healing,” Weaver said.

Hunter said the AME denomination prohibits blessing same-sex unions, although he personally believes gays have legal rights to civil unions. “Everybody is welcome at First AME,” Hunter said, “and while they are welcome, we will not water down the word of God.” (Unlike some black preachers, however, Hunter said he has no intention of joining the Republican bandwagon against same-sex marriage. He is a staunch Democrat.)

Despite the challenges, church records show that tithings and attendance have increased under Hunter’s leadership. For instance, the church raised a record $240,000 at its annual Family Day fundraiser in June. Bernard Kinsey, a board trustee and wealthy donor who finances the church’s $20,000 Sunday radio ministry, lauds Hunter’s active fundraising, saying Murray’s reluctance to ask people for money left some church needs unfilled, including repairs to the run-down campus.

Hunter has refocused on spiritual growth, an area several congregants say Murray underemphasized in favor of social outreach.

Hunter said he will continue the church’s social and political activism. In Seattle, he protested police treatment of blacks, and he recently lent the Los Angeles pulpit to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who blasted the Bush administration’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

But he said the church’s major need of the moment is spiritual, and to meet that need, he restarted the church’s summer Bible school, personally teaches the new members’ religion classes and aims to launch an organized evangelization effort, including a Latino ministry. One goal: to brush up his high school Spanish and deliver a sermon in that language within a few years.

Hunter said he intends to carry the church’s motto, First to Serve, to new heights. So far, most congregants seem eager to give him that chance.

“We’re experiencing a renaissance,” said Lamothe, the pastor’s secretary. “I think God intends for us to renew and rejuvenate.”