A lion in winter

The church is so crowded that ushers are setting up folding chairs next to the packed pews. From the pulpit of the First African Methodist Episcopal church, trustee Irma Brown Dillon instructs, “Raise your right hand if Pastor Cecil Murray married you.”

Hands fly up.

“Raise your left hand if he baptized you,” she continues.

More hands go up. Some wave both hands.

“Stand up if he said a funeral for your relative or someone you know,” she says.

Nearly everyone stands.

“We’re celebrating 27 years of the most dynamic ministry in the history of this city,” she says.

By this time everyone is standing, clapping, shouting, praising the minister who, after building this church from 1,000 members to more than 17,000, must now retire.

On Sept. 26, the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray will turn 75, the mandatory retirement age for pastors in the nation’s oldest black denomination. Soon he must leave the city’s most prestigious black pulpit, located near Western Avenue and Adams Boulevard in the old Sugar Hill neighborhood that was home to such black luminaries as Lena Horne and Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel.

In his time at First AME, Murray has become a luminary himself. He’s known in the White House, the State House and City Hall. He’s a member of a citizens committee, appointed by Mayor James Hahn, to review the investigation into the televised police beating of a car theft suspect. He’s on a first-name basis with some of the region’s biggest corporate honchos. Hollywood celebrities take his calls and come to his church.

But while those connections are useful, his heart has always belonged to black people. A fighter, he’s taken on police brutality, insurance and bank redlining, gang violence, the three-strikes law, education and homelessness. He’s a port in any storm for poor families who need a place to live, for mothers burying sons, for entrepreneurs seeking venture capital. “Chip Murray has been a giant of a leader in our community,” says John Mack, head of the Los Angeles Urban League. “He has been a tremendous bridge builder across all ethnic and racial lines .... On his watch, First AME became a church that went beyond the stained glass windows.”

The congregation doesn’t want him to go. They had hoped the church’s quadrennial AME conference in Indianapolis this June would extend the retirement age. Instead, the body reaffirmed it. And after months of saying no, the minister is finally ready to talk to a reporter about the R word.

But first he bows his head and prays aloud.

Called to preach

“Everything is in the mind. It is the mind that controls. You say to your mind and your mind says to you, ‘Move on. Get out of the way. You’ve been gifted with 75 winters and summers, so transition, turn and go in the next direction,’ ” Murray says, in his book-filled study at the church, in that same rolling baritone that he plays like an instrument from the pulpit.

Move on to what?

He believes he was born to preach.

“I remember our kerosene stove caught on fire there at 511 Division Avenue, West Palm Beach, Fla. The three of us kids were there. The stove is burning. My brother and younger sister were out in the backyard putting sand in a bucket to bring in and throw on the fire, and there I was on my knees, praying. I think I was in the third grade then. ... That sensitivity to God, that sensitivity to the effects of prayer, I think that was born in me. Each of us perhaps has a calling. That was mine.”

Murray, who was born in 1929 in Lakeland, Fla., where his father was a high school principal, lost his mother when he was 3. He and his siblings were sent to live on their grandparents’ farm in South Carolina until their father remarried and brought the children to West Palm Beach.

Fifth-generation African Methodist Episcopal, he spent much of the day in church on Sundays and often returned during the week.

“I was junior pastor from junior high school right on through senior high school,” he says. “Every Tuesday we met and we had junior church.”

After graduating from college, he joined the Air Force. He trained in jet fighters and served as a radar intercept officer and then as a navigator from 1952 through 1961.

Meanwhile, the calling to preach kept nagging, he says, and a trauma finally pushed him to respond.

Stationed in Southern California at what was then Oxnard Air Force Base, Murray recalls, “We were taking off in our two-seated fighter and did not negotiate the takeoff. The pilot was a white young man from South Carolina.... Something went wrong. The front tire exploded. The nose tank erupted. The cockpit would not open, so I was trapped in the back.”

The pilot was able to get out, Murray says, and there was a small opening between the canopy and the frame of the plane, just enough for him to squeeze through. He says he felt as if voices were directing him to safety.

“To this day, I could hear the voices clearly as if it’s happening now. Take off your helmet. Take off your parachute. Take off your life jacket, your Mae West. Unfasten your seat belt, place your head through that tiny opening, coming out backward.... Soon I was on the wing of the aircraft and looked and saw that the pilot was on fire.”

Rushed to a burn center, he sent for Murray before he died.

“As I stood by his bedside ... he told me he had not forgotten me and he was trying to help me,” Murray says. “So those two traumas, the depth of his love and the delivery of my life, made me know that I had to live beyond me.”

With the blessing of his young wife, Bernadine -- the beautiful daughter of his childhood minister and his date to the senior prom -- Murray went to Claremont School of Theology, where he earned a doctorate in religion. He pastored first at tiny Primm AME Church in Pomona, moved next to Trinity AME in Kansas City, Kan., at the height of the civil rights movement, then on to First AME in Seattle just as Boeing was laying off thousands, including members of the church.

In October 1977, First AME in Los Angeles was supposed to be a plum assignment.

It wasn’t.

“You could shoot a blunderbuss, a scattergun there, and you wouldn’t hit a soul. It was thin, very thin,” Bernadine Murray remembers.

There were about 1,000 members on the rolls -- including then-Mayor Tom Bradley -- but barely 250 showed up regularly to worship in the large, modern sanctuary designed in 1963 by renowned black architect Paul Williams. And many were conservative, older members with a Eurocentric view of Christianity. Jesus was white in every depiction. The main choir sang staid classics and anthems, while the gospel choir had a lower profile.

“I think about the first time he came to FAME,” says trustee Brown Dillon, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge who is active in the church, “he came strutting out in a black robe, a gold chain with a cross on it and a big natural. I thought, ‘What do we have here?’ ”

Shortly after his arrival, some officers of the church wanted to speak to Murray and his wife.

“They held us for three hours. Was he the right person? Was he qualified? They were an old historic church,” founded in 1872 by a former slave, Bernadine Murray recalls. “I said, ‘I’m glad that wasn’t the cross Christ had to die on because he would have died from rust poisoning. Look how this place looks. It’s not clean.’ The floor down on the plaza level was dirty.”

Murray cleaned up the church and started services on time. He preached in a black style and sometimes in the black vernacular. He pumped up the music. He expanded the youth program. New members flocked to FAME at the rate of 250 a year, then 500 a year. “Then in the ‘90s,” he says, “we averaged 1,000 new members a year.”

Business of the church

It is a big church with big business.

Murray, like any other workaholic chief executive of a multimillion-dollar enterprise, lives his job. In at 7 a.m. -- at times even earlier. Out at 7 or 8 p.m. -- or on to evening events such as a recent interfaith service at Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral, where he gave the invocation.

Monday through Saturday, he’s at the church. In a suit. Always. Shoes polished. Always. On time. Always. Sometimes with a few choice expletives for anyone who has blown an assignment.

He takes no days off. No sick days, with the exception of his recovery from prostate surgery two years ago. No vacations.

On the Sabbath, he arrives before dawn, preaches sermons at two of the three services and never repeats one. Then he visits the sick and shut-ins until evening.

On a recent Sunday, pop singer Michael Jackson, in Los Angeles the day before a court appearance on child molestation charges, visits the church. As television news cameras record every moment, worshippers maneuver to get a peek at the star. Raising the tempo, the choir -- accompanied by piano, organ, drums and guitar -- sings joyfully and loudly. In the pulpit, Murray looks skyward, raises his arms to the heavens, smiles and does a little holy dance before praying for Jackson in his slow, sonorous voice, asking for “Justice. Equity. Healing.”

Jackson isn’t the only special guest at this 10 o’clock service. State Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley), who is running for Los Angeles mayor, steps to the pulpit. He pitches his “4/15 plan,” which would allow the top 4% of public high school students who live within 15 miles of a University of California campus to attend the college. It resonates with the predominantly black congregation.

“Presidents, senators, mayors, governors, when they want to come to speak to the black community in Los Angeles, they come to First AME,” says Bernard Kinsey, a church trustee. Especially when the city burned.

On April 29,1992, after the acquittals were announced in the trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating Rodney King, the world, it seemed, gathered at FAME. “The place was packed. The parking lot was full. We had rooftop speakers so everyone could know what was going on. Then we got word that there was fire everywhere on the horizon,” says Murray, who wept that night. “Going outside, we could see. It really looked like Dante’s Inferno.”

Days after the riots, Bill Clinton came as a presidential candidate. He visited FAME again after his election and even mentioned Murray in his memoir, “My Life.” On the 10th anniversary of the riots, President Bush visited FAME Renaissance, the church’s economic development center.

The fires put the minister on a first-name basis with business and Hollywood elite.

“Disney started the corporate world’s major investment in us with a million dollars set aside for business loans,” Murray says. Former Arco chairman Lodwrick M. Cook gave $500,000 while Barbra Streisand donated $100,000. Others quickly followed. “We began to have inroads and resources,” Murray says.

In the years since the riots, the church transformed crack houses and shabby apartment buildings into 2,000 units of clean, modern, affordable housing. It helped thousands find jobs; increased the feeding program to 5,000 families; housed hundreds of homeless people; opened a private elementary school, the Cecil L. Murray Education Center; provided thousands of college scholarships; helped 100 families get home loans; made business development loans for minority start-ups; and created an incubator to create and nurture small businesses.

“One of the things that Rev. Murray is going to be most noted for -- not just the baptisms, the funerals he preached [like that of Ray Charles] and the great sermons -- but the lasting institutions,” says Kinsey, who was a co-chair of Rebuild LA, which directed deals and connections to First AME after the riots. “They’re doing everything. It’s a real diversified business of $60 million, and that just didn’t happen overnight.”

Secrecy surrounds successor

All of this awaits the new pastor.

He (or she) will be appointed in October or November by the Right Rev. John. R. Bryant, the AME bishop in charge of states west of the Mississippi.

“First AME is one of the most progressive churches in the country,” the bishop says. His vision for FAME is a senior minister who continues the “ministry that speaks to the whole person” and also communicates the church’s message “to all people regardless of race and gender.”

There are two white women and a Latina among the dozen or so ministers and ministers-in-training at FAME. None expects to succeed Murray. No names under consideration have been made public, and the process is as secretive as the selection of a new pope.

After the new minister arrives, what role Rev. Murray will play at FAME, if any, has not been determined.

What’s next?

Murray has no money. Unlike some ministers, he chose not to profit personally from any of the church’s deals. “He’ll give away his last dollar,” his wife says, “and he’ll give away your last dollar too.”

He has no plans to leave Los Angeles. He’s not about to get into his aqua-blue Thunderbird -- a bargain bought from a member of his congregation -- and drive off into the sunset. No moving van will pull up to the parsonage, because his family left it years ago for a home in Windsor Hills that the church helped him purchase.

A loner, he counts his wife, his minister son, Drew, and his sister, Louise, as his best friends.

He doesn’t golf or play tennis. He watches his “beloved, precious” Lakers on television, but last attended a game seven years ago. He roots for the Dodgers, but hasn’t been to the ballpark since former manager Tommy Lasorda invited him.

He plays chess against his computer, reads, works and listens to music constantly in his office and car. Blessed with perfect pitch, he often sings or hums. If he has a weakness, Murray won’t talk about it. He will admit that when he gets depressed he drives along Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. “The ocean will wash you, if you just sit there or get out and walk to the water. It will wash you, or cleanse you. I think [by] its very vastness. And then the flow is like a waterfall that is taking the old away and bringing in the new.

“I haven’t had to do it within the last couple of years,” he says, “because wisdom comes in the 70s -- if it’s ever going to come -- and you begin to realize the ocean is within, the healing is within.”

He doesn’t want a big fuss made over his retirement, but the fanfare has already started. The City Council has named a street after him and the County Board of Supervisors has proclaimed next week Cecil Murray week. Some business friends feted him at a reception in Bel-Air and other celebrations are planned.

His congregation is holding a gala tonight, with the proceeds to go to the church’s assistance programs and elementary school. His brother, Edward, a retired Air Force colonel, has already contributed to the gala’s memory book. He offered his younger brother’s yearbook prophecy, Industrial High School, Class of 1947: “He will be a Methodist minister in California.”

Not for much longer.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

From the pulpit

Rev. Cecil L. Murray preaches two sermons every Sunday. He gives his messages without notes, mopping his face several times with a white handkerchief, pacing the pulpit, his booming baritone rising and falling.

Murray connects with intellectuals and illiterates, the emotional members of his congregation and the publicly stoic, the centenarians with their walkers and the children who are afraid to squirm in the pews.

The following is an excerpt from a sermon Murray gave the Sunday before the 1992 riots, while L.A. waited for the verdicts in the trial of four police officers:

“Be cool! Even in anger be cool. And if you’re gonna burn something down, don’t burn down the house of the victims, brother! Burn down the Legislature! Burn down the courtroom!

“Burn it down by voting, brother! Burn it down by standing with us at Parker Center, brother! Burn it down by saying to Daryl Gates: ‘This far, and no farther!’ ”

-- Gayle Pollard-Terry

*

Possible successors

The new pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church will be appointed by the Right Rev. John. R. Bryant, the AME bishop in charge of states west of the Mississippi.

No names under consideration have been made public, but the local grapevine suggests several candidates:

* Frank Madison Reid, from Bethel AME, a mega-church in Baltimore. It would be a return to Los Angeles for Reid, who previously pastored at Ward AME, near the USC campus.

* Benjamin N. Thomas, who pastors Tanner Chapel AME, a mega-church in Phoenix. He also served as youth minister at FAME, and pastored in Los Angeles at Price Chapel on Slauson Avenue.

* John Hunter, from First AME in Seattle, the pulpit that Murray left when he moved to FAME.

* C. Dennis Williams, from Bethel Memorial AME in San Diego.

-- Gayle Pollard-Terry