Bishop Louis Henry Ford; Head of Church of God in Christ

Bishop Louis Henry Ford, 81, leader of the 8.5-million-member Church of God in Christ. Ford began preaching in the countryside around Lexington, Miss., while attending college there in the early 1930s. He moved to Chicago in 1933 and preached on the street until founding St. Paul’s in Chicago in 1935. Ford became bishop of Illinois in 1954 and in 1990 he was elected presiding bishop and chief executive of his Protestant denomination, headquartered in Memphis, Tenn. He was also active in the civil rights movement. “We stay in the grass roots and do not run from ourselves,” he once said to explain the rapid growth of his parish. In Chicago on Friday.