BY MARK AUGUST
E IS STANDING BOLT UPRIGHT, HIS LEAN FRAME A
CORDED mass of sinewy tension as he commands the attention of an appreciative
and teary-eyed President Bill Clinton.
The occasion is the National Prayer Breakfast
and part of William Jefferson Clinton's second presidential inauguration in
the nation's capital. At the podium of the ornate Metropolitan AME Church, the
man pumped his fist into the air with his eyes shut tight. The crease on his
furrowed forehead framed an intense facial expression, as his mouth released
melodious sounds. The voice, a richly entombed baritone, was as urgent as it
was reassuring.
As he sang, so breathlessly uninterrupted by a
pause, the dignitaries who packed the pews of the storied sanctuary would have
been excused for believing the singer was born with three lungs. This is Wintley
Augustus Phipps gloriously in song. Phipps is more than just a two-time Grammy
Award-nominated gospel and inspirational singer. He is also a spirit-filled
preacher, songwriter, and a veritable mover and shaker.
Phipps has sung for and befriended every sitting
American president since Ronald Reagan. He counts among his closest political
friends senators Trent Lott (R-Mississippi), Orrin Hatch (R- Utah), Bill Nelson
(D-Florida), Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Max Cleland (D-Georgia), and John Ensign
(D-Nevada). In the House, Phipps is especially close to representatives Zach
Wamp (R-Tennessee), Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Illinois), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas),
and J. C. Watts (R-Oklahoma).
Phipps has been a frequent guest on Robert Schuller's
Hour of Power television program. He has sung at Billy Graham's crusades
in Moscow, San José, New York, and Philadelphia. In 1981 he sang at the Vatican
for Pope John Paul II.
A decade later Phipps was part of the welcoming
crowd as Nelson Mandela took his first steps out of Victor Verster Prison, located
on the outskirts of Cape Town, after nearly 30 years in prison for opposing
White domination.
In a singing career spanning nearly 30 years,
Phipps, an ordained minister of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, has seen his
influence grow exponentially. Like a rainbow whose arc can link disparate territories,
Phipps found common cause with both Democrats and Republicans at the highest
levels of the political food chain.
He has done this without violating the fundamental
beliefs of his faith. In the early 1980s Phipps turned down an invitation to
audition for the Temptations. He also turned down an invitation to tour with
Diana Ross because he had promised God, at the age of 16, that he would sing
only to His glory.
"I'd met such musical heroes as Tom Jones,
Stevie Wonder, and Sly Stone," Phipps said. "Even though they had
the world at their feet, they were not happy, and I wanted to be happy."
Phipps is also driven by strongly held moral values and is jealously protective
of his family. "Neither I, nor my wife, had good examples of happy and
successful marriages in our respective families," said Phipps, who dotes
on Linda, a registered nurse and Phipps's most ardent supporter and confidante.
The Phippses will renew their marriage vows on their silver wedding anniversary
in August on Florida's scenic Atlantic coast.
Phipps is quick to laud Oakwood College, in Hunts-ville,
Alabama, where he not only earned a bachelor's degree in theology, but had his
first encounter with Black gospel music. He continued his education at the Seventh-day
Adventist Theological Seminary, where he earned a Master of Divinity degree.
Armed with his powerful voice and a disarming
personality, Phipps has sung his way to every continent in the world except
Antarctica. He gratefully acknowledges the flowering of his musical talents
under Alma Blackmon, the venerable and much-revered former director of the Oakwood
College Aeolians Choir.
It was Blackmon who pushed Phipps to strive for
musical excellence and did much to promote his singing career. Phipps also had
the good fortune to be taken under the wings of Calvin C. Rock, then president
of Oakwood College and currently general vice president of the General Conference
of Seventh-day Adventists, as well as board chair at Loma Linda University and
Oakwood College.
Then there was Jesse Jackson, who in 1986 took
Phipps to Nigeria, Angola, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique, and Tanzania to observe
firsthand the impact of apartheid on those front line states.
Another significant influence on Phipps was Charles
"Chuck" Colson, the former "hatchet man" in the Nixon administration.
Colson, who was imprisoned for his role in the Watergate scandal, introduced
Phipps to the Prison Fellowship Ministry, taking Phipps to sing at prisons across
America.
Phipps initially had no idea of the jarring lessons
he was about to learn. Nor was he aware that he had come face-to-face with the
reality of his own extended family's life: "I had just sung at a women's
prison in Marion, Florida, when a very pregnant young woman asked me if my wife's
name is Linda," he said, still visibly moved by the recollection of that
encounter. "When I confirmed it, she said, with tears rolling down her
face, 'That's my aunt.'"
The young woman went on to give birth to her baby
in prison and, thanks to Linda's intervention, is working on turning her life
around. For Phipps, changing lives and giving hope to his own is a work in progress.
All of Linda's seven brothers and sisters have been incarcerated. All but one
of her eldest sister's six children have been incarcerated. Of the five sons,
two have died from hard living, and two of the others are in prison, Phipps
said. The only daughter of his wife's eldest sister had six children by the
time she was 28 years old, he said.
"I learned that more than 60 percent of those
in prisons come from homes where a parent had been in the penal system too,"
he said. "Several members of Congress asked me to put together a commission
to study how to break the cycle of crime in the lives of children of convicts."
In 1998 Phipps founded the U.S. Dream Academy,
a nonprofit group that provides children of prisoners and those failing in schools
with values-centered mentoring, academic and computer tutoring. The academy
opened its first site in March 2000 at the Ferebee Hope Community Center in
Washington, D.C. A second site has since been opened, also in Washington, for
the academy that now caters to more than 200 children.
Three months after the academy opened its first
site, President Clinton visited the center and praised Phipps's effort to give
the attending children a toehold in the New Economy.
Phipps is passionate about wanting to remain close
to his wife and three sons. Whenever his packed travel schedule requires him
to be away from his Maryland home for more than five days, he takes his family
along with him. As a result, Linda and the three boys, Wintley II, Winston Adriel,
and Wade Alexander, have already visited more countries than many people will
ever see.
"I did not have a strong nuclear family in
my own life," Phipps said. "It became clear to me that I had to take
my family along with me if I'm to carry out effectively the ministry I've been
called to do. I just did not want to miss out on any aspect of my family's life."
Phipps, who has 15 albums to his credit, recently
recorded "Out of the Night," a duet with Jennifer Holiday. It is a
civil rights lament written by Hatch. The Republican senator is an accomplished
songwriter who has penned more than 300 songs, and is completing a project of
civil rights songs, which Phipps will record in an album to be released soon.
Along the way Phipps has met many entertainment
stars. He appeared on Saturday Night Live, performed on Lou Rawls'
Parade of Stars Telethon, and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Oprah
Winfrey, Sean Connery, and the late Natalie Wood. He has enduring friendships
with several captains of major American corporations. Senator Dan Coats, the
Indiana Republican, put Phipps's name up for consideration as chaplain for the
U.S. Senate.
It has been a remarkable 45-year odyssey for the
native of Trinidad and Tobago, who started in humble beginnings and is today,
without question, the most politically influential Seventh-day Adventist minister.
The good favor Phipps has had with highly placed national leaders, and the relatively
easy access he was granted to the corridors of power, was not lost on church
leaders.
At its General Conference session six years ago
Phipps was elected associate director of religious liberty of the governing
world body of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Phipps, who is now a pastor
at the Seabrook Seventh-day Adventist Church in Maryland, continues to make
his talents and contacts available to the church leadership to advance causes
the church deems critical to its mission.
Phipps, who sang for President George W. Bush's
first National Prayer Breakfast in February, enjoys direct-member relationships
with many of the Republican leaders in Congress. Because he has close friendships
with senior Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the White House, some
have wondered about Phipps's true political affiliation.
When pressed, Phipps first demurs. He would rather stay focused on "the
politics of Jesus," he said, as he flashes his famous mile-wide smile:
"The essence of the politics of Jesus was to feed the hungry, clothe the
naked, and visit those in prison," he said.
Knowing what Adventists believe about how the
earth's final events will unfold, Phipps thinks it is important for the church
to develop broader relationships with political leaders of competing shades.
To press the point, Phipps invited a quartet, The Singing Senators, to a packed
concert at the General Conference on September 14, 1998.
The quartet, which specializes in Southern gospel
and patriotic songs included, Larry Craig, a Republican senator from Idaho;
James Jeffords, Independent senator from Vermont; Trent Lott, the Mississippi
Republican; and John Ashcroft, then the Republican senator from Missouri and
now the nation's attorney general.
Phipps said he learned long ago that it is difficult
to make friends when you need them. That is why he works hard to build relationships
before the church needs them. Phipps's story, from Trinidad and Tobago through
the Canadian province of Quebec, is one that brings vividly to mind the gripping
narrative of the biblical Joseph. To hear him tell it, the events in his life
"have gone by as fast as trees on a highway."
A gifted speaker who cherishes precise and profound
thoughts, Phipps has had a successful pastoral ministry in the Washington, D.C.,
area. The three churches he led were struggling when he arrived, but later experienced
remarkable growth and financial security under his pastoral care.
Phipps is, by his own admission, a man who often
bites off more than he can chew. He said he has always had to spread his best
around just to survive. He manages to maintain order in his life in part because
of Linda's steadying hand, and by always striving to do his "balanced best"
in a frenetic life. Phipps is working even harder at it now, as his ever-growing
list of business and community-based interests jostle for his limited time and
attention.
_________________________
MARK O. AUGUST, a novelist and commentator on national and international
affairs, is a former war correspondent based in Tampa, Florida. Reprinted with permission of Message Magazine.
