EXTRAORDINARY PERSON, ORDINARY PERSONAGE

In the sanctuary, the congregation seems ready to explode into a mushroom cloud of spiritual ecstasy. The 10 a.m. service, the third of five this day, is reaching climax, and nearly everyone is on their feet, arms raised, palms extended in receptivity to the Holy Ghost. The man at the pulpit surveys the crowd, his face a blissful mask of fatherly love. They are his people and, all told, 18,000 of them belong to his church. At this service alone, about 1,300 people, mostly African Americans, are crammed into the main sanctuary. These are the ones who lined up early. An additional 800 to 900 have spilled off into the banquet room next door and over across the street at the church’s theater, where they view the service on a TV monitor.

“Is there anybody here who needs a miracle today?” cries Bishop Charles E. Blake, pastor of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ. At 58, he’s a trim 6 feet, handsome, youthful, brimming with vigor. Foot-stomping and hand-clapping break like thunder amid the spiky calls of “Hallelujah!” and “Amen!” and “Praise Jesus!” And just when his voice would seem obligated, by both the general laws of physiology and the specific affliction of chronic allergies, to dwindle to a barely audible rasp, it soars, soars as if Blake has switched on some hidden reserve fuel tank, soars to what must surely be a high E, and now he breaks into the improvisational, rafter-raising singing that’s known as “tuning.”

“Does somebody here know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes!”

“You found Jesus and he lifted you up!”

“Amen!”

Standing next to me in the alcove outside the glass-enclosed sanctuary is Toni Grayson, a pretty, sharply dressed woman with a snow-blinding smile. She shakes her head in admiration. No, not in admiration. In gratitude. * “He preaches four times every Sunday [morning],” she says, her voice tinged with awe. “Four times! Nobody has that much energy. But bishop”--to his congregants he’s not “The bishop” but “Bishop”--”is the chosen one. He’s been anointed. And I’ll tell you, that’s not human energy. That energy comes from God!”

Wherever it comes from, there is no doubt that Blake is a force. His power as a preacher, combined with a rare and widely admired gift for management, has resulted in a massive following that stands out even in this age of “mega-churches.”

It was 1969 when Blake first stood before a fractious band of four dozen congregants bent on deposing him from the pulpit he had just inherited. Now, 30 years into his stewardship, the West Angeles congregation is not only the fastest growing and possibly the largest among African American churches in Los Angeles, but it is also among the top half-dozen churches of any kind in the country. His services are also carried nationally by the Trinity Broadcast Network.

To house his burgeoning flock, the church is about to begin work on a $50-million, 5,000-seat cathedral of Karelian granite--the first in what Blake sees as a three-phase, $65-million church complex at Crenshaw and Exposition boulevards, down the street from West Angeles’ present location. It’s a daunting undertaking, but West Angeles is an unusual congregation, counting among its members such celebrities as Denzel Washington and Magic Johnson, each of whom have pledged $5 million to the building fund. Other pledges in the million-dollar range, from donors who want to remain anonymous, have helped boost the fund to $28.4 million. When open next year, Blake will mount the pulpit of Los Angeles’ second-largest church, next to the Crenshaw Christian Center’s 10,146-seat Faith Dome.

*

One morning several months ago, I sat waiting to be let in to Blake’s office for our first meeting. Next to me was a man down on his luck. Stooped forward, hands clasped together, he shifted around in his seat with an uneasy lightness that suggested there was little encumbering him but the tattered clothes on his back. When Blake appeared in the waiting area, the man jumped to his feet. “Bishop, I’ve been watching your ministry on TV for three years. I--”

“That’s wonderful,” Blake responded. “Brother, how do you FEEL?”

The man began reciting his past church involvement, until Blake’s gentle but piercing gaze seems to hasten the point. “But then a couple of years ago, I backslid.”

Blake gave a knowing nod. “How much time’d you do?”

“Six months. I just got out two days ago--”

The sound that came from Blake’s throat, something between a sigh and a moan, spoke volumes, more than any extemporaneous sermon he might have delivered to the man. It was a sound I would hear more than once in Blake’s presence. In it were a note of sympathy for the man’s predicament, a counter-tone of gentle reprimand for his personal failings and an accent of belief that, this time around, the man could pull it off--the message of suffering, death and resurrection, all contained in that one murmur.

“Talk to Peaches,” he said. “She’ll take you over to emergency services,” one of the church’s many social programs.

The man wasn’t a church member, yet he managed to speak to Blake. “Anyone who needs to see him just has to go to the office,” Grayson had told me. “I don’t know how he does it. And I’ve been to other large churches, and I’ll tell you, that’s not always the case.”

Dressed that day in an understated but expensive blue suit, Blake moved, as he always does, with a comfortable but inviolable dignity that somehow blots out any reverb of personal importance. His friend Cecil Murray, pastor of Los Angeles’ First African Methodist Episcopal Church, calls him “the paradox of an extraordinary person with an ordinary personage.”

Blake passionately believes that a church must extend its influence well beyond its walls. For South-Central, that has meant another element of hope and progress growing from the ground up. Enfolded within his organization are 80 social ministries that constitute a New Deal in microcosm. The counseling center, open to nonmembers too, offers marriage counseling, AIDS support groups and substance abuse recovery, among other things. The church has the city’s largest literacy program, a prison ministry and an aggressive school mediation program aimed at preventing violence. Its skid row ministry feeds 2,000 a week. Blake takes particular pride in West Angeles’ Community Development Corp., which has built 44 low-income housing units and has 112 more under construction.

On another occasion, I asked Blake what he thought had brought the surge in membership at his church. He was between services, sipping herbal tea to soothe his vocal chords. We were in his modestly appointed office, where he occasionally leaped up to tweak the ears of new babies who would be dedicated during the next service.

“It’s because of the failure of everything else,” he said in a near whisper. “There are some things that are necessary for emotional and social survival that only the church is providing. And we’ve tried to minister to every aspect of a person’s life, and people respond to that.”

*

In another time or place, Blake might have become an ivory tower preacher. He was, after all, the child of a minister, as is his wife, Mae. He entered the ministry when he was barely old enough to drive. And, as he says, he “never considered another direction for my life.” But at the time he attended Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Center in the mid-1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. was pumping a new vitality and social relevance into the role of the black minister, and this ignited his activism.

The South itself would mark him deeply, too. As student body president during his final year at ITC, Blake was called upon to mobilize his school for civil rights demonstrations. It was a protest in Selma, the focus of King’s historic voter registration drive, that would deliver Blake to manhood.

In summer of 1965, he led a small “decoy demonstration” of 150 to distract police attention from the larger march headed for City Hall. Nearing its destination, Blake’s group was confronted by the sheriff and his deputies and a pack of snarling police dogs--one of the most haunting images of the civil rights struggle.

The sheriff ordered the group to turn back, but Blake held his ground and prepared to be mauled. As the dogs were about to be unleashed, the sheriff caught sight of the larger demonstration moving toward City Hall and went after it instead.

Blake sighs, remembering. “I was ready to face whatever we had to face. We were that hyped-up about freedom, and once you get to a situation where you have said, ‘No matter what happens, I’m going ahead,’ once you’ve found something you’re willing to die for, you apply that to almost any other situation that you confront. So that was a life-changing experience, to be in Selma. And I think that enabled me to stand before anything else that I’ve ever faced or will face. And, of course, that has colored my whole ministry in terms of social justice.”

The incident echoed one of his earlier but no less vivid memories in his hometown of North Little Rock, Ark., on May 7, 1945--the day the war ended in Europe. The streets erupted in celebration. A child of 5, Blake was leaning out the window of his father’s car when a passing white teen snatched the little flag he was waving. “I cried out, ‘Dad, get my flag,’ but my father was afraid,” Blake says, as a rare grimace flits across his face. “He told me to be quiet. It was then and there that I learned that your flag could be snatched away from you because of the color of your skin.”

Surprisingly, however, Blake seems devoid of racial bitterness. He is, in fact, credited with playing an important role in mending a bitter historical rift between black and white Pentecostalists at a religious convention in 1994--an event now known as the Miracle in Memphis.

“It was in the session that Charles Blake spoke that the spirit fell,” says religious historian Vinson Synan, author of “The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition” and dean of biblical studies at Regent University in Virginia.

The result was a Racial Reconciliation Manifesto that pledged to “oppose racism prophetically in all its manifestations” and brought about the disbanding of the all-white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America. Before it was over, a white minister washed the feet of a black in repentance for past sins. Blake reciprocated and washed the feet of a white religious leader.

*

Blake can laugh about it now, but his welcome at West Angeles was anything but cordial. He didn’t know when he showed up that first Sunday in 1969 that its members had already voted 40-11 to reject him as their new pastor. He now stood before a congregation of sullen faces. “The bishop patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘It’s all yours, my boy,’ and walked out the door,” he recalls with a chuckle. The congregation, once 300, had dwindled to a mere 51 during the protracted illness of the pastor Blake replaced. Over time, the members had taken control of the church, then located at 5th Avenue and Adams Boulevard, and decided against the newcomer before even meeting him.

A court battle ensued as trustees tried to seize ownership of the church property. When Blake solved that problem by incorporating the church, the recalcitrant members redoubled their efforts to depose him. The dispute grew so acrimonious that Blake traveled with an armed guard, a precaution he dispensed with long ago. Through it all, something underpinned Blake’s optimism.

“The bishop himself said that God had told him to make the appointment,” says Blake, who had worked the previous three years as an assistant at his father’s church in San Diego. “He also said that he truly believed that if he did any other thing then he would be cursed by that. So there was some pretty powerful stuff that gave me strength to hang in here and stay even when there was tremendous opposition.”

A year later the battle was behind him, and Blake made another breakthrough. After a visit to the Rev. Robert Schuller’s fabled Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, Blake for the first time thought that perhaps he, too, could build a mega-church. “I said, ‘Lord, if you can do this through Robert Schuller, then can’t you at least do something through me?’ That gave me a scope of possibility that was literally limitless.”

In those early days, Blake also realized that his theological education had been short on the practical. So he turned from the Good Book to the textbook, devouring dozens of volumes on business and management.

It worked, this mix of dreams, religion and business sense. By 1987, membership had grown to 3,500, a figure that would double within five years, then double again, and more. When the church moved to its present location in 1981, the street was a scabrous collection of boarded-up buildings and abandoned auto dealerships, and the church is widely credited with revitalizing the Crenshaw Corridor. The new cathedral is expected to pump at least $100 million into the area economy and ultimately employ 2,000 to 3,000 people, many of them minority contractors.

The church long ago began splitting at the seams. Its average Sunday attendance of 8,000 is spread over five services. The new cathedral, to open by next July, will seat four times as many people as the existing church. It will be followed in later years by a 34,000-square-foot administration building that will also contain a nursery, a 500-seat chapel, an 800-seat banquet and multipurpose hall and a three-story, 40,000-square-foot adult school facility that will house a Bible college, a “Practical Christian Living” center and a Sunday school.

It’s an expensive proposition. When the Roman Catholic Church announced plans for a $163-million complex with a 3,000-seat cathedral, now under construction downtown, it drew sporadic protests from people who believed money that could be spent ministering to the poor should not be diverted to raise a glittering edifice.

Blake’s endeavor has drawn remarkably little such response. A rather lonely voice of dissent comes from author and commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson, whose latest book is “The Crisis in Black and Black.” He is not a member of the church, but his wife is, and he has attended enough services there to consider himself a close observer.

“On balance, I think the church is positive, but I’ve always felt that West Angeles--and, frankly, far too many churches, and not just black ones--are putting too much emphasis on materialism, trying to almost outdo each other in terms of who can put up the shiniest, grandest edifice,” Hutchinson says. “Are you saying the only way to get to God is having a big, grandiose building that looks better than the one down the block? Or could [that money] be better spent expanding social programs, HIV, prison, literacy programs, education programs?”

Blake does not brook such criticism gladly. In the scheme of things, the money for the new West Angeles “is not all that much money. We’re investing for the benefit of the community. We teach nonviolence. We teach values and moral principles, without which our society cannot survive, and in terms of the significance of those values for the survival of that society, any expenditure would be justified for a facility where those kinds of values are imparted. It’s just a factory for the manufacture of wholesome, productive people.”

Members of the church range from recovering addicts and struggling single mothers to influential business people and stars such as Stevie Wonder and Robert Townsend. Even ordinary folks dig deep. At one service, after lending a pen to the lady next to me, I watched her write a check for $300. Including the building fund, church revenues add up to $12 million a year, and while financing seems solid, Blake continues to stump ardently for the building fund at the end of each service. He says normal church donations alone would be sufficient to pay the expected $28-million debt, but the building fund would speed its liquidation significantly.

*

In a time of self-franchising mega-evangelists who rake in millions and accept lavish “love offerings” from followers, Charles Blake stands out. He seems genuine: in conversation, in deed and in the public arena. He also seems a man who has stayed within himself, who looks for his victories in his religious mission, wearing the robes of the clergyman, the suit of the businessman.

He has a surprisingly low public profile beyond the church, no foot in the political arena like Jesse Jackson or Pat Robertson, no mass-market identity like Robert Schuller. He appears not to aspire to them, although he says the day may come when he may speak out more forcefully and publicly on issues important to him. Perhaps Blake himself says it best: “Basically, I’m a pretty boring fellow who at 16 decided to pursue the ministry. And I’ve just done it, and I’ve never turned away from it, and I’ve arrived where I am now.”

He doesn’t shun the spotlight, but limits his exposure to the bare minimum necessary to achieve the goal, as if he fears that lingering too long in the public eye will invite some sort of moral sunburn.

He is well paid by clerical standards, drawing an annual salary of $134,000, which is set by the West Angeles board of directors. Mondays he plays golf. His son and community relations director, Charles, lives with him and Mae, and the two match wits over chess games that progress by a couple of moves a day. His daughter and personal assistant, Kim, lives down the block, allowing Blake to see his two grandchildren frequently. (Another son, Lawrence, works in the church’s construction office.)

He drives a 1984 Mercedes and lives near the church in the house he bought in 1970 for $42,500. He takes occasional vacations and apparently rarely socializes outside of his duties as pastor and regional bishop, which involve overseeing 250 Church of God in Christ churches in Southern California. Mae, herself a strong presence at the church, tells her husband “every day” that he works too much.

As a preacher, he’s in demand nationally, and he travels three or four times a month. As Blake’s congregation has grown, politicians often have seen fit to bow their heads in prayer at West Angeles--President Bill Clinton has been among them--and they are quick to describe him as a man of great clout and influence.

In truth, such generous praise seems sometimes more calculated than factual. “I don’t think anybody in the city has more influence than Charles Blake,” says L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, with whom Blake shares a respectful if once prickly rapport. “He’s an intelligent, fair-minded--but tough--leader. He has power but he doesn’t use it all that much. But when he does, people listen. The one thing unique about him that I love is that he’s never bulled me once. You always know where he stands. I don’t always like where he stands, but you always know where he stands.”

Blake’s victories are the sort brought about through mediation and appeals to better natures, not by the pulling of levers of power. He’s more a Warren Christopher than a Madeleine Albright, and he’s certainly not the electric, high-profile local force of a Danny Bakewell, his friend for many years. The bishop himself insists that his personal and political clout are misperceived, if not in degree, then certainly in quality.

“I think my greater reputation is that when I am called, I come,” says Blake, whose positions on political issues nonetheless are well known to his congregation.

“He is one of only a very, very few ministers in our community who can convene a meeting of other clergy across denominational lines and they will all respond [and] focus on the issue and achieve a cooperative type of action,” says John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League. “Not many others can do that because of rivalries and ego-tripping.”

James Thomas, who served as Blake’s community relations director from 1993 to 1995, recalls that after the Northridge earthquake, Blake persuaded the Salvation Army to distribute food and supplies to 17,000 residents of South-Central, which had suffered more damage than was commonly realized. After the riots, when Blake was trying to curtail the re-proliferation of liquor stores in the Crenshaw district, his letter to a state assemblyman resulted in the reversal of a new law that liberalized their zoning, says Thomas, now regional organizer for Bread for the World, a Christian advocacy group for the poor.

Blake’s ability to call together top African American leaders stems partly from his position as chairman of the Los Angeles Ecumenical Congress, a confederacy of about 30 predominantly African American denominations that gather sporadically to discuss social and political issues with community leaders. Blake formed the council seven years ago when he noticed that he and his fellow black clergymen were being summoned to several meetings a week to discuss similar topics; it was essentially a time-management strategy, and Blake insists that the council has no particular agenda. “I’m not the leader of it, I’m just the convener,” he says.

His most publicized foray into public affairs came with his impassioned defense of former L.A. Police Chief Willie Williams. Blake had been on the committee that selected Williams, and he felt that the besieged chief, who had become a member of his church, had not had a chance to prove himself.

Blake’s relations with Riordan were initially clouded by his support of Michael Woo, Riordan’s opponent during his first mayoral run. When I asked whom he’d supported the second time around, Blake paused as if praying for a bout of selective amnesia. “He and I have such positive relations now that I would not try to remember how I voted.”

But Blake is clearly not a believer in Realpolitik. During Riordan’s first campaign, “Most of the other people went over on the basis of ‘He’s not our cup of tea but he’s going to win,’ ” Bakewell says. “I remember us laughing over that in a troubled sort of way. You can always be assured that he is not going to switch based on what is expedient.”

*

Weird Babel of Tongues

New Sect of Fanatics is Breaking Loose

Wild Scene Last Night on Azusa Street

Gurgle of Wordless Talk by a Sister

--Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1906

*

The cradle of Charles Blake’s particular brand of Christianity can be found in Los Angeles at 214 N. Bonnie Brae St., a house now owned and under restoration by West Angeles. It was here that an itinerant black preacher named William Joseph Seymour set off a spiritual earthquake. He embraced the new “Pentecostal theology” that had begun circulating the country during the 1890s. Its chief doctrine holds that speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, is, according to the Bible, direct evidence of the “baptism in the Holy Spirit.”

Visiting Los Angeles in the spring of 1906, the impoverished Seymour accepted an invitation to stay at the Bonnie Brae house, where he began holding prayer services. Seymour himself had not yet received the gift of tongues. But on the night of April 9, 1906, he and seven others suddenly fell to the floor in a religious ecstasy and began speaking in tongues. The spontaneous revival began to attract such large crowds that Seymour moved it to an abandoned African Methodist Episcopal Church building at 312 Azusa St. (the structure was razed in the 1931).

What would become known as the Azusa Street Revival would continue unabated for 31/2 years and make national headlines. It also became the cornerstone of the Church of God in Christ, which had been founded in Memphis in 1897 but radically redefined itself after a founder returned east to spread the word.

From the beginning, the Pentecostal form of worship has been controversial among Christians and the object of scorn among skeptics. Traditional worshipers find its emotionalism unsettling while adherents are electrified by its vitality.

Indeed, a visitor to West Angeles is apt to find the experience intense. However, newcomers, be they curiosity seekers or prospective members, are exuberantly welcomed, and it requires quite a feat of stubbornness to stand apart with arms folded as a cool observer amid the hugs, hand-holding and group chants.

“Are you a Christian?” I was frequently asked, to which I would stammer something about being a devout lapsed Catholic, imagining how the pastor of the church I grew up in would likely have called the state police had the congregation actually gotten this excited about Jesus.

Whatever the case, it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to see the appeal. The music rocks--you could launch a couple of record labels from the talent pool--and the vibe is upbeat and the message uplifting, whether or not you believe in it. Blake’s sermons exhort his followers to clean living, self-reliance and strong communal ties, and his message is one of unassailable hope.

Still, Blake does not close his eyes to the dark side of life. On the not-so-distant horizon, he sees the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and he’s trying like the devil to stay them. “Our destiny is dependent on whether people who want to do good and want to do right and want to help humanity step forward and really assume responsibility for actively pursuing their convictions,” he tells me as we enter the parking garage of a West Angeles low-income housing development.

“If they do not, then I feel that there are some rocky days ahead. Because I don’t think you can neglect and deprive great segments of society and successfully carry on the life of our nation with one class of our people having all the assets and resources. This may contain the seeds of our destruction.”

A few yards away a man is pushing a broom. “Who’s that?” Blake asks an associate. “He’s a person who had been incarcerated,” comes the answer. “He’s a member of West Angeles, he’s been saved, he’s filled with the Holy Ghost, so we’re giving him a second chance.”

“That’s wonderful,” Blake says, raising his hand in salutation. “Brother, how do you FEEL?”