Two envelopes circulate among the pews where, three rows from the back and more than 50 years earlier, a young Acen Phillips dedicated his life to the Lord.
One holds the general offering, the other a “love” gift – cash intended solely for the pastor at New Birth Temple of Praise Community Baptist Church.
In a green robe embroidered with gold, Phillips gazes out from the well-worn lectern upon a congregation of about two dozen – roughly half of them children – who make up the fledgling church, housed in a blond brick building at Ogden Street and 22nd Avenue that was once New Hope Baptist Church.
“Tell me about your love,” he says, urging congregants to include notes with the $40 to $50 he normally finds in the envelopes. “Remember, Bishop don’t get no salary.”
The 71-year-old Phillips has raised the roof with his oratory, launched Mount Gilead Baptist Church into prominence, given voice to civil-rights concerns and stood by a variety of controversial figures.
Yet his vision of the preacher’s role transcends church on Sunday. Since the late 1950s, when he served up soul food and soul-saving grace in his Five Points diner, Phillips has woven Scripture and business into a gospel of economic empowerment.
“You can’t preach the ‘hallelujah book’ on Sunday if you don’t care how they eat on Monday,” Phillips says. “To me, that’s not being a preacher.”
But while his message and methods have earned him praise among many of the faithful, his dealings also have been clouded by lawsuits, liens, civil judgments, an indictment that didn’t stick and assorted allegations of impropriety.
Now, Phillips is under scrutiny again as the Colorado attorney general’s office investigates life-insurance policies sold through the preacher’s latest big idea, a group called American Church United.
Critics’ persistent, underlying question: Has Phillips prospered from the litany of outside financial gambits?
Both supporters and skeptics have surfaced amid legal scrutiny of ACU. The organization offers its members – roughly 120 pay a $70 monthly fee, by Phillips’ count – discounts on goods and services, including life-insurance policies that name ACU among the beneficiaries.
The attorney general’s office has confirmed it is investigating the program and expects an outcome within a month. Phillips has declined to comment about the matter but has denied any wrongdoing through his attorney, Gary Lozow.
On a broad scale, Phillips holds to a biblical foundation for his mixture of pastoral care and commerce, figuring that almost all parables talk about investment and return, and that risk and failure come with the territory.
“You got to get out on a limb,” Phillips says. “I made a lot of mistakes. Tripped up. Limb broke. Fell down. But on my way down, I was thinking, ‘What can I do when I get up again?’ Taking a risk on people, and taking a risk on what God’s depending on you to do is what makes you who you are.”
Education degree at DU
Phillips, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper, migrated to Denver to pursue his education degree at the University of Denver and, later, earn degrees at two Baptist seminaries and the Iliff School of Theology. But only two city schools would hire black teachers – and those had waiting lists.
So Phillips bought an old truck and some shovels and started driving through alleys, knocking on back doors and asking for work cleaning ash pits. Meanwhile, he cultivated his spiritual life at New Hope Baptist Church.
On his honeymoon in Omaha in 1958, Phillips met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and later, when King visited Denver, became “the young preacher who carried his bags around when he was in town, and had an excuse to be wherever he was.”
Later, borrowing $1,500 from pioneering black businessman Thomas W. Bean, Phillips opened Ace’s Diner on Welton Street in Five Points, where he pastored pimps, prostitutes and other street people.
About the same time, he got the call to pastor Mount Gilead, which consisted, by Phillips’ recollection, of 11 congregants – about half on welfare – and whomever he could persuade to hop into his car as he cruised the city streets.
“It was that kind of relationship with the community that built Mount Gilead to become one of the strongest churches in the city,” he says. “It came up out of what you might call the rawness of what people were, facing life at its worst.”
Two years ago, Phillips prayed with the five congregants at a tiny mission church in northeast Denver, hoping to persuade them not to close. He heard the voice of the Lord: “If you don’t want it to close, why don’t you take it?”
He did, and recently moved his following into the cavernous building that once held New Hope Baptist.
“I told them, I’m an old preacher and don’t have a lot of time, so we’ve got to grow fast,” Phillips says.
He has similar hopes for American Church United.
Some local preachers have praised the program and its insurance provision, which was dropped in the wake of the investigation.
But others remain dubious.
“God called us into the ministry to preach to and win the lost and to tell them about him,” says the Rev. M.N. Thomas, who runs a metro Denver social-services ministry. “Sometimes when we cross over into doing some of the things (Phillips) has done, it doesn’t come out right. If God wanted you to be an insurance man, you’d be one.”
The cloud over the insurance program has slowed other ACU projects in the works, says Steve Conley, a former boxing promoter from St. Louis whose company redesigned the ACU website. Other plans include setting up an ACU Internet radio broadcast, training members in developing websites for businesses and raising money through commissions on cellphone contract renewals.
Former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb has known Phillips for about 50 years, since both were involved in the youth ministry at New Hope.
Webb considers the pastor “absolutely” well intentioned, and says parishioners regard him highly and pastoral peers respect his preaching skills.
“Then there’s the Acen Phillips of economic empowerment,” Webb adds. “On that issue, there will be some that will say he should only be concerned with ministry. And some will say he’s been engaged in some activities that he should have thought out more.”
“If they call, I will respond”
Phillips has always soldiered on in the face of controversy – preaching with rhetorical verve, dabbling in politics, hatching new and sometimes questionable business deals, and finding the public spotlight as a broker on race relations and an advocate for those with nowhere else to turn.
“They know that if they call, I will respond,” Phillips says. “That’s almost a given.”
Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates, who calls Phillips “a friend and adviser,” describes the pastor with the terms “professional” and “supportive.”
Phillips prayed with the department when Detective Mike Thomas was shot to death last year. But he also spoke out against Aurora police, and in support of Shelley Lowe and Aaron Thompson, the focus of a criminal investigation after Thompson’s daughter, Aaroné, 6, was reported missing in 2005.
“I understand that he is the spiritual counselor for folks we were interested in, and I understand that he has a certain role to play there,” Oates says.
But Phillips simply seeks the spotlight when he inserts himself into public controversies, claims Teresa McCaskill, a member of Aurora’s Human Relations Commission and former Phillips parishioner who stresses that she speaks only for herself.
“If you ask any black person, he doesn’t speak for them,” she says. “People do something and before he knows what they have done or what happened, he is out there beating up the city about it.”
Phillips’ negotiating abilities converged with his concept of financial empowerment for the black community in a major way after the 1968 King assassination.
As militant factions in Denver threatened violence, Phillips brokered a deal that sought to channel community energy into a landmark economic development at the Dahlia Shopping Center in North Park Hill.
“Rev. Phillips was one of the few pastors who had the ability to talk when things were tenuous, to talk to the Black Panthers and left-wing activist groups,” recalls Webb. “He had the ability to have a conversation when others couldn’t because they were perceived to be too sanctimonious.”
But after a strong start, the project heralded as the largest black-owned shopping center in the region ultimately withered.
That experience didn’t discourage Phillips from engaging in other business ventures, including an auto-sales business that became embroiled in a 1977 indictment for loan fraud.
Phillips says his company found cars at auction and sold them to needy families for $50 to $100 over cost. He and three others indicted were acquitted.
These days, Phillips says, he receives a church pension from Mount Gilead, but that it’s “on hold” while the church resolves other fiscal matters.
“It’s tough getting by,” he says. “You do preaching here and there, get a little Social Security check, retirement – ain’t that much.”
But even at his age, launching a new congregation and American Church United, he seems unfazed.
“Sometimes you see yourself taking on things nobody else will do, and you ask yourself why,” Phillips says. “And the Lord says, ‘Because nobody else will do it – don’t be asking why.”‘
At times, Phillips’ conversations with the Lord have centered on more earthly matters.
Once, he says, the Lord directed him to the newspaper classifieds, where he found a deal on a used Rolls-Royce – which also brought him criticism.
“If you go out and pay $30,000 for a Chevrolet, nobody complains about that,” Phillips said. “I paid $15,000 for a Rolls-Royce and somebody’s upset about that. That doesn’t make sense to me.
“But if you’re Acen Phillips, then people might complain about anything.”
Staff writer Kevin Simpson can be reached at 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com.
Preacher as businessman
The Rev. Acen Phillips’ many business dealings have landed him in court and under scrutiny for decades:
Coming off a problem-plagued attempt to redevelop the Dahlia Shopping Center in northeast Denver, Phillips launched an auto sales business. He was indicted in 1977 on suspicion of loan fraud. Phillips says his company, Phillips Auto Sales, found cars at auction and sold them to needy families for $50 to $100 over cost. He and three others indicted all were acquitted.
In 1985, Dorothy W. Williams of Denver sued Phillips over a consumer loan. A district court judge ruled that the loan from Phillips and one of his organizations, DTP Ministries, exceeded the 21 percent annual interest rate allowable under state law.
Williams lost her home to foreclosure and filed bankruptcy, while Phillips pocketed loan proceeds for his own use, the judge found. Phillips admitted to making 24 similar loans through DTP Ministries.
The judge ruled Phillips and his co-defendants liable for more than $28,000, as well as $30,000 in attorney’s fees.
In 1992, Phillips’ Mount Gilead Baptist Church found its “Homes for the Homeless” program discontinued by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which cited mismanagement and failure to pay liability insurance.
More recently, Denver District Court records show Phillips and his wife lost two properties to foreclosure in two consecutive years – 2003 and 2004.
