Saturday, April 12, 1997

Renowned pastor C.B.T. Smith retiring after 45 years

By CHRISTINE WICKER

The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS - Sixty-one years ago, after a day of hard work, the son of a sharecropper flung himself on his bed for a nap. Instead, he said, the Lord sent him a vision so powerful that he begged to be let go.

In the vision, 20-year-old Clarence Booker Taliaferro Smith was plucked from among his friends and pulled toward heaven by iron hands that grasped him by the shoulders.

"Come out from among them," a voice commanded. "I want to use you."

Smith awoke, perspiring so heavily that his clothes were wet.

That young man is now the Rev. C.B.T. Smith, 81 years old and about to retire after 45 years as pastor of Golden Gate Missionary Baptist Church in Dallas' Oak Cliff section.

A weekend of retirement festivities include a Friday night dinner at the Fairmont Hotel attended by Dallas City Council member Barbara Mallory Caraway, state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, and U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas. Dr. E. Edward Jones, president of Smith's 4.5 million-member denomination, the National Baptist Convention of America Inc., will give an address.

Smith is known all over the country as a "preacher's preacher," a strong example of the kind of old-fashioned black preaching that has kept African-Americans strong in the faith through hundreds of years of hardship and persecution.

He never forgot the power from heaven that came to him in his afternoon vision.

In fact, a trademark gesture of Smith's preaching is the moment when he stomps three times, raises his arms toward the ceiling and brings them down as though pulling the majesty of God himself into the room.

"It's almost as if you can see the power descending from heaven," said the Rev. Lelious A. Johnson, pastor of St. Paul Baptist Church and one of the many young ministers Smith mentored through the years.

"The worship experience at Golden Gate fed the entire man, the soul and the body. When you went to Golden Gate and heard C.B.T. Smith, you really got soul food ... You were fresh to go back into the world for another week," said Johnson, whose own preaching style is much like Smith's.

Smith never used Sunday morning to fuss at his congregation, said Willie Range, a lifelong member of Golden Gate until he left to take the position of youth minister at Oak Cliff's Red Sea Baptist. And that was good.

"You get fussed at when you go to school or work. You don't want to go to church and feel that somebody is dominating you," Range said.

The Rev. Vincent Parker, who has run Golden Gate's drug treatment program for five years and will now become the church's senior minister, said Smith knows his church members' weaknesses, but encouraged their strengths.

When Smith has a reprimand to deliver, he does it privately, said preachers who have worked with him.

"He's got such a soft touch. He'd cut you up and you'd never even know you'd been cut," said Parker.

Smith said his gentle methods are another way of helping people learn to follow - not him - but Jesus.

"If you do what I want because you felt like I was going to raise sand about it ... you would never develop to stand on your own feet," said Smith. "I wanted to keep them from becoming old people who were still babies in Christ."

Every year, when preachers from the National Baptist Convention gather, Smith is the early morning speaker and the room is full. "Everyone who hears him wants to hear him again," said deacon and church trustee Lester Price, a Golden Gate member since 1954.

Age has not dampened Smith's Sunday morning pyrotechnics.

"He still jumps around in the pulpit. People worry about him," Range said.

Smith always brings an extra shirt when he preaches. "The kind of preaching he does, you have to," Johnson said.

Golden Gate's pastor has so loved helping young preachers that he once sent a church bus to the former Bishop College every Sunday to pick up student ministers.

"He'd let you preach in his pulpit, which is something not every preacher will do," Range said.

"Don't copy me," the old minister told young preachers. "Stir up the gifts God has given you."

"He's told me that the effectiveness of his ministry has not been based on the effectiveness of his preaching. It's been based on the effectiveness of his lifestyle," Parker said.

Even as the church grew to a membership of 3,000 and an annual budget of $1 million, Smith has continued to be available to his flock. "Nine times out of 10, he'll answer his own phone," says Range. "A lot of preachers will duck you."

"He's at the hospital door when they roll you into the room. Before and after the operation, he's there," Parker said.

Calvin Verrett Carter, a columnist for "The Dallas Weekly," went to Golden Gate as a foster child. The pastor indiscriminately spread a "blanket of love and compassion," Carter wrote in a recent tribute to the man who is still his pastor.

"I owe a great deal of who I am today to a man who would say he did nothing special," Carter wrote.

Betty Davis, a Golden Gate member since 1978, has watched Smith's life, compared it with what the Bible calls for in a Christian and come away convinced that he truly embodies the faith he preaches.

"He's very, very caring of his wife," she said, referring to Rosie Lee Hartsfield Smith. "He shows us how we should treat our families."

Golden Gate sponsors a drug treatment program, a jail ministry, the Sunday School on Wheels and a senior citizens' ministry. The church is on Sabine Street in a neighborhood commonly known as "The Bottoms," long one of the poorest neighborhoods in Dallas.

Smith had been at Golden Gate about 10 years when richer churches began courting him. "They offered me a better financial setup, far better than what I could get here," he said. "But the love and obedience and the fellowship that I had with my people weighed greater with me than the money they offered."

Golden Gate is still a relatively humble church, said Rable Johnson, chairman of the church's deacons. "There are no rich folk down here. A few schoolteachers, one lawyer, one doctor, but the rest of us are just ordinary working folk," said Johnson, a member for 61 years.

Smith's leadership has meant that anyone who comes is welcome, the deacon said. Homeless people are just as welcome as someone who drives up in a Cadillac, Johnson said.

"The church is the community. In the community, you've got everything from lawyers and doctors to scrubs and nubs. He felt like we should be able to reach and teach what we call the lowest of the low and the highest of the high," he said.

Unlike some other preachers, Smith has never used his pulpit as as a political tool, his congregation says.

He notes that he sponsored community forums and took great interest in politics, "but I never said (to the politicians), 'You come and I can deliver you 200 votes.' " Instead, he encouraged his congregation to make their own choices.

"I wanted to keep my pulpit free so I could say what the Lord wanted me to say," he said.

Smith, who will give his farewell sermon Sunday morning, is in great demand as a guest preacher and may very well be even busier once he retires. He was honored last year by the Dallas Black History Chronicles as one of five "Legends in the Clergy."

Despite his high profile, people often mention his humility.

The attitude comes partly from a focus he developed long ago. "You have to take the role that you're going to be more or less a servant," he said, "not that the people minister to you, but that you minister to them."

Distributed by The Associated Press