Church and State: Bishop Arthur Brazier has built the Apostolic Church of God into a megachurch and influenced city politics
“A large church is pretty much like a small town,” says Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, and he should know. Brazier is the pastor of the Apostolic Church of God (ACOG) in Woodlawn, whose congregation numbers around 22,000, more than any other church in Chicago. By any standard, this qualifies the ACOG as a megachurch, which Brazier says is a label he would embrace.
The ACOG’s humble beginnings lie in two different churches. The ACOG itself was founded on the third floor of a building on West 57th Street in 1931 and only moved to Woodlawn in 1952, settling at 6344 South Kimbark Avenue. In 1960, the church found itself without a pastor and decided to merge with the Universal Church of Christ, which shared the same building and was headed by the young Reverend Brazier. Seventeen years later the congregation had grown from about one hundred to about five hundred parishioners, enough to justify the move to a new building at 63rd and Kenwood. By 1992, the church had again outgrown its space and moved east again, settling at its current location at 6320 South Dorchester Avenue. The church had over 14,000 members in 1999, and it has continued to grow at a rate of close to 1000 new members per year.
The tremendous size of a modern megachurch creates both advantages and disadvantages over the traditional smaller church. “We have a fairly large membership of everyone that is saved and walking with the Lord,” says Brazier, “but also some people who haven’t committed their lives to Christ.” In addition to spiritual problems, parishioners often come to Brazier with other crises ranging from marital to financial. The church has found that some unusual solutions are made possible by its size and resources. “We have on retainer a clinical psychologist to whom we refer people whose problems are more profound and difficult” than a pastor can handle alone, explains Brazier. The psychologist’s services are paid for by the church’s ample funds.
Brazier cites these resources, both human and financial, as the main advantage of the church’s size. The large congregation provides a constant supply of volunteers and “an income substantial enough to help a lot of people in need,” which Brazier emphasizes as a constant concern of the ACOG. “You can’t think in terms of helping people just in your church.”
In its early Woodlawn days, the ACOG’s small congregation must have closely resembled the larger neighborhood: poor blacks, most of whom had moved in during the 1950s after being “urban renewed” out of their former neighborhoods. Their new neighborhood was no sanctuary from that threat, and in 1960 the University of Chicago announced a plan to turn a mile-long strip of mostly residential land between 60th and 61st Streets into a new South Campus. Many of the houses occupying the land at the time belonged to elderly homeowners unwilling to be forced out of yet another neighborhood. At the instigation of several Woodlawn pastors, The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) was founded to unite the community behind a single voice. A large part of that voice was Brazier, who served first as the organization’s spokesperson and later as its president. TWO’s mostly successful struggle to shield Woodlawn from outside attempts at urban renewal, satirically called “Negro removal,” has become a textbook example of what community organization can achieve.
Brazier has continued to be an active and influential participant in Chicago politics after his stint as head of TWO. In the mid-1990s, he was one of the most prominent Woodlawn leaders to argue for the demolition of the 63rd Street El between Cottage Grove Avenue and Jackson Park. This section of track was one of the oldest in the entire CTA system, and parts of it had been unused for over a decade due to structural defects. The CTA had just completed a multimillion-dollar project to renovate the track as far as Dorchester, where a new station was being built that would provide transfers to the nearby commuter rail. Brazier argued that rather than completing the new station, located immediately next to the ACOG, the city should tear down the track east of Cottage Grove and remove a blight preventing development on 63rd Street. In September 1997 the CTA finally settled on demolition, and ten years later Brazier defends his controversial success. “The El structure gave the community a sense of disharmony,” he says. “It only darkened the street and gave the impression that there was a lot of crime.”
It seems that Brazier’s influence has grown along with his congregation. Since his victory in the fight over the 63rd Street El, his name has appeared more and more often in the newspapers, and his endorsement has been sought and won by political figures from Mayor Daley to Barack Obama. Upon Rod Blagojevich’s first election as governor in 2002, Brazier served on his transition team, and his current posts include commissioner on the Public Building Commission of Chicago and chairman of the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corporation, which he founded. He also served as head of the 6th Episcopal District of Illinois for the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World until the ACOG left that body in November 2007 over doctrinal differences.
Brazier’s dedication to his work has not gone unnoticed by his congregation. A recent Sunday afternoon service, presided over by Evangelist Ivory Nuckolls, included tributes to Brazier and his family, several of whom also serve as church leaders. Brazier’s son Byron is also an ordained minister who serves as assistant pastor and church administrator at the ACOG. Byron and his sister Lola are also on the Board of Trustees. Meanwhile their mother Esther Isabelle Holmes Brazier has been involved with the church alongside her husband since they first met at a church picnic in 1947. At the time Brazier, who had recently returned from overseas service during World War II, was not particularly religious and had told his mother he was only going to the church picnic to find a wife. He and Isabelle married less than a year later. In celebration of the couple’s 60th wedding anniversary, the ACOG’s Drama Guild is putting on a three-weekend production of “Destiny…Designed by God,” a play about the Braziers’ life.
At 86 years old, Brazier is still going strong and displays the energy of a man half his age. In addition to preaching two morning services every Sunday, he leads more than 1000 people in a Bible study class every Wednesday. “Not too many men my age are still working every day,” he admits, but says he has “no plans to retire and go home and look out the window.”
