Rev. LeRoy Attles: Heavenly grace and community service, The

New Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2000 by Crowe, Steve

Some churches are so heavenly minded they're of no earthly good. Others are so focused on this world they've lost sight of heaven. But the Rev. Dr. LeRoy Attles has St. Paul's AME in Cambridge, Mass., planted in both worlds: heaven and earth.

"Faith without works is dead. Be doers of the word, and not hearers only," Rev. Attles says matter-of-factly He's quoting from the Epistle of St. James, but the words resonate throughout his life's work-- from the civil rights marches in Mississippi and Alabama to the New Jersey classroom where he taught children who were mentally retarded, to the homeless and drug-addicted neighbors of St. Paul's Church. The faithworks theme still plays a role as he campaigns for a positon in the church he heard God call him to 12 years ago: the office of bishop, the highest position in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Rev. Attles, a 60-something former college basketball player who stands about 6-foot-4, speaks in a soft voice that suggests he'd like to talk less about himself than what the Lord is doing. His red tie and light gray double-breasted suit coat might give the impression that he sits atop a multi-million dollar enterprise, watching over a network of professional managers. His desk proves otherwise. At two o'clock in the afternoon, paperwork covers the desk and a half-eaten sandwich is within arm's reach. It's clear that the man who occupies this office is up to his elbows in the day-to-day operation.

And what an operation it is; 30 ministries and services run out of three separate organizations. There's a church, a school, and a social-service center offering help in housing, counseling and community education.

It's a far cry from the kind of life Rev. Attles imagined when he was a student at Wilberforce University in Ohio in the I960s, where he heard the call to ministry, or even when he began pastoring his first church in New Jersey. He joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, organized by black college students to support the civil rights movement. He marched with hundreds of thousands in Washington in 1963, a moving demonstration of unity. Two years later he and a friend flew to Jackson, Miss., to take money to support the movement's leadership there. At the airport, they were greeted by two black men, one of whom was Charles Evers, brother of Medgar Evers, the Mississippi NAACP leader murdered in 1963.

"He just came over to us and asked if we had a place to stay," Attles recalls. "We said no. and he said, 'Let's get you to a hotel."' While riding in the car, Evers suggested the name of a hotel and said, "We haven't broken down that hotel yet." Attles wasn't too keen on breaking down a wall of segregation on his first night in town. He smiles as he remembers the moment. "I told them, 'Fellows. don't do that tonight on my account."'

It turned out the hotel had been integrated already, but that didn't make Attles any less anxious. While eating dinner at a nearby restaurant, he was startled by a loud noise. "I was sure I'd been shot," he says, touching the sides of his suit coat as if searching for blood. He hadn't been shot, and he never learned what the sound was, but news he heard the next morning only confirmed his fear. It was March 26, 1965.

"We called Charles and he asked, `Did you hear what happened? They killed Liuzzo."' They were the Ku Klux Klan; Liuzzo was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a 39-year-old white mother of five from Michigan, who had spent several days driving marchers between Montgomery and Selma, Ala. Klansmen in a car had pulled up alongside hers and fired bullets into her head as she was driving. Att(es flew to Alabama and took part in the voting-rights marches on Montgomery and Selma, walking arm in arm, while people on the sidelines were "spitting on us and calling us all kinds of names." Attles was one of the thousands of unsung heroes whose courage swelled the ranks of the civil rights movement, and it made a deep impression on him, confirming his call to seek justice for the silent oppressed: the poor, the weak, the downtrodden. It is the same mission to which Jesus called him.

"I hear the Lord say, 'I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink . . . As you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.' That's really our theme here." Rev Attles says.

After graduating from college he taught mentally retarded children and coordinated social programs for emotionally disturbed and socially maladjusted children in the Newark, NJ., school system. He earned a master's degree from Kane College in Union, NJ., and taught graduate courses in special education at Long Island University. He later completed a doctorate in sociology and education at Rutgers University, preparing for what he thought would be a career as a college president.

But, he's learned that "as I pursued goals, God kept changing them." He pastored four churches in New Jersey over a 15-year period before the bishop appointed him to St. Paul's AME Church in Central Square, a subway stop between Harvard University and MIT. When he arrived in Cambridge 22 years ago, members were talking about building a new church, but Attles wanted the church to look beyond its doors to the needs of the community When he first proposed building a Christian Life Center, the members voted against him.