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Ira V. Hilliard, boy preacher turned man, saw clearly the life that lay before him. And it carried a promise of success that many who had grown up poor and wanting in Houston’s historically black northeast side would have jumped at if they’d had his talents.

His part of the bargain was a weekly offering of thunder and lightning, fire and brimstone, gospel music mixed with baritone exhortations that would echo among the organ pipes and steeple of some luminous cathedral. Emotionalism, he called it. A performance for the believers. The expected role of the Baptist minister – African-American style – that accompanied a church and a flock and centuries of deprivation so profound that only the lure of a world beyond this one could provide comfort and redemption.

But then came the day in 1984 when Hilliard told parishioners of a new road he was preparing to travel. This was God’s doing, he said, a move that would veer away from any particular denomination and their rote weekly rituals. And for him it was a welcome move away from the internal politics so common in churches big and small. God had spoken to him and told him to change.

“I was to become a teacher instead of a high- emotional preacher,” said Hilliard, whose life and works are being honored by his congregation this weekend. “I had been on a personal search for more – for a more relevant relationship with God, for the Bible to become more relevant to people’s lives.”

The New Light Missionary Baptist Church was no more, he announced one Sunday. The 300 or so members were shocked. Worship outside the context of the familiar – all the rituals that made church, well, church – did not have great appeal.

“Only 23 stayed with me,” Hilliard said. “I suddenly had a ministry, not a church. Independent churches were not popular then.”

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article courtesy of Chron.com

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