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Ministry
How did you first get involved in the ministry?
You know, folks in those days we were even kind of anti-religion or at best benign when it came to religion. And we even had people who were killed or died in the movement and there were about three cases that I know of that I buried them, I served as the eulogist. I would read out of the red book and probably I think out of The Prophet, by Khalil Girban, not the bible. But I did do that role.
Now when you talk about ministry, in our tradition, a Christian, protestant, a Baptist tradition—they said about my family we were Baptist bred, Baptist led, and Baptist dead. We believe that the ministry is a call on your life. That the only thing that you have to do with it is at some point in your life you accept the call on your life. Because in the bible it talks about Jeremiah being called to the ministry by God before he was in his mother's womb. So it's destined. And it's not only a calling. In other words, we believe that we were designed for this. And just so—you'll find this interesting—I read in either Time or Newsweek many years ago, when I first started preaching, I'll have been preaching nineteen years this year in August—that there was a study done of Kohanim men, those are Jewish men most commonly known by the name Cohen and Levites. They were the rabbis and temple keepers and found out that they have a genetic—those men in those tribes—have a genetic disorder in the brain that no other Jewish man had. That's something I read. Maybe it is a calling. Maybe we were destined for this. But in other words, there is something different about them and they're the preachers.
So anyway, my grandmother told me when I got baptized at about 8 years old that I was going to be a preacher. I didn't really understand it back then. There is a man who passed away named G.L. Bedford, Reverend G.L. Bedford; he was the driving force behind building Bannicker homes which is one of the subsidized housing projects built through the redevelopment agency. It's the housing across the street from where you all came. That's Bannicker. Reverend Bedford asked me, when I was the executive director of WAPAC, which I'll tell you about. When I was executive director of WAPAC, Western Addition Project Area Committee, Reverend Bedford called me and asked me to come to his church; he wanted to talk to me about something. Well his church was two blocks from me now, on Sutter Street, my office was on Sutter, and his church was on Sutter. So I walked down. I walked to him and he was reading the paper and he looked at me: "Now Townsend...", and like you know all senior men do, then he went to ignore me, he just ignored me. So finally I said "Rev, didn't you need to talk to me. I'm a busy man. I've got things to do." And he looked at me and said, "Boy, why don't you cut your chatter, shave that beard off, put on a suit and tie, clean yourself up. Now I'm like, "Is that your problem that you wanted to talk to me about?" I said some other things that I won't say on tape. I wasn't a preacher then.
And he looked at me and said, "Boy, you know you're going to preach before it's over, so I don't know what you're waiting on." And believe it or not, I got so angry, I didn't know what to do. He finally told me what he had invited me down there for and I walked out and I got back to the office and they said, "What did Rev want?" and I just went off: "that so and so, so and so." And he just said, "What did he do?" "Come telling me I'm gonna preach." And everybody laughed, like, "Oh, is that all? Everybody knows that but you!" It was like everybody laughed. So it's like a call and because of this work, because I wasn't part of the church then, I started to be around preachers, and that helped, because I started to see what they were like and kind of what their life was like and it made me start to consider and then start to remember all these things that I had been told over the years about. The late Dr. Hannibal Williams told me I was going to preach before I was preaching, and it happened on more occasions. Once I went to a church, even when I first started going to church, I went to a church, and an old lady who was an usher tried to take me to the pulpit. She turned around and said, "He's not a preacher?" And they said no. She said, "Well, he ought to be a preacher. You look like a preacher. "
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