‘God is wanting me to stay here.’ Why West Columbia pastor invests in church for 50 years
Pastor Charles Jackson Sr. delivered a message to the congregation of Brookland Baptist Church nearly every Sunday in the 1970s.
“The true measure of the church is not determined by what it does for itself but by what it does for others.”
Five decades later, he still reminds worshipers at the West Columbia sanctuary of that message inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
On Feb. 1, Jackson reached his 50th year as the pastor of Brookland Baptist. In that half century, he’s helped build the church’s congregation into one of the Midlands’ largest. The church has a sprawling campus that stretches thousands of square feet. Its mountainous sanctuary rises near Sunset Boulevard, a prominent West Columbia thoroughfare. The church, which employs more than 160 people, has another location in northeast Columbia.
The church’s influence is so great that when most presidential candidates come through the area, they stop at Brookland Baptist.
But the church’s growth and prominence didn’t get Jackson’s weathered voice rolling when he talked to The State.
Rather, his words come flying out when he talks about all the ways the church serves the community beyond the people who filled the pews before the pandemic and who today watch online.
For 50 years, he’s helped steer Brookland Baptist toward impacting the lives people other than on Sunday morning, Jackson said.
Living up to that mission hasn’t been without challenges, particularly as the church grew in the 1980s. Even now, the coronavirus has brought a new set of obstacles for Brookland Baptist.
Jackson has another message that he’s had posted on Brookland Baptist’s bulletin many times over the decades.
“The church that glorifies God and edifies humanity.”
“When I came from seminary I didn’t see any kind of statements like that in churches anywhere,” Jackson said.
For 50 years, he’s built a church with that message.
The teenage preacher
When he was 2 years old, Jackson knew what he wanted to become, even though he couldn’t quite say it. When grown folks asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, the young Jackson would say, “I want to be a peacher,” he said, a story that his older sister likes to recall.
Born in 1952, Jackson grew up in a devout family that attended Brookland Baptist. The church was on what Jackson described as the shortest street in Lexington County. Monticello Street in West Columbia was only two blocks long, dotted with a few houses and the old brick church.
He gave his first sermon as a grade-school-aged kid. He preached about two Bible stories. One was the story of a boy who gave his meal of two fish and five loaves of bread to Jesus, who used the food to feed a crowd of 5,000 people.
By age 10, he was licensed by a religious organization to preach. At 12 he was ordained. That year, he preached for five consecutive nights at a Summerville church, he remembered.
Jackson looks back at those developmental years and laughs. He was passionate about preaching, but he was a child. What spiritual wisdom could he pass along as a 12-year-old?
His parents asked the same question when it became more obvious that their son’s talk of being a “peacher” was turning into his calling. They were a loyal, church going family, but not even a distant cousin had been a preacher. His parents looked for guidance from Jackson’s principal at Lakeview School, who was also a pastor at Trinity Baptist in Columbia.
“He reminded my parents how God called Samuel when he was but a boy,” Jackson said, referring to the Old Testament figure who was said to have heard the voice of God at 11 or 12 years old.
In February 1971, at 18 years old, Jackson became the pastor at Brookland Baptist. He may have stepped up to be a spiritual leader, but he still needed guidance. Some said he was too young to lead the church.
“I didn’t know much about what I was doing but I relied on the wisdom of the older deacons who knew me as a boy when growing up in Sunday school,” he said.
When he made mistakes, the deacons corrected Jackson and he listened.
He went to Morehouse College’s School of Religion in Atlanta in the early 1970s. The day after his Sunday sermons, he drove to the Georgia capital, stayed until Friday and drove back to West Columbia so he could preach at Brookland Baptist.
After his graduation, he had opportunities to be the pastor of churches across the United States, where he could have earned a full-time income. But he stayed with the small West Columbia church and made ends meet by working as a hospital clinical pastor.
Today, he’s still amazed that he’s the pastor of what he calls his “home church.”
“The older I get and I start thinking back on it,” Jackson said, “I never understood myself why I wanted to stay at Brookland Baptist Church ... I really think God kept me.”
Old Brookland Baptist, new church
The 1980s were the most challenging time for him, Jackson said. A rift had slowly grown in the church as its membership grew.
By 1984, Brookland Baptist had grown to the point that it needed Jackson to be a pastor full time. He had no hesitation about taking the position but it wasn’t without sacrifice. He took a hefty pay cut when he left his career as a clinical pastor at a state mental hospital to dedicate himself to Brookland Baptist.
Fewer than 184 people could fit into the church that year. An expansion over the next couple of years allowed the church to seat 260. With more people came a divide among members, Jackson said.
After Jackson graduated from Morehouse in the 1970s, only two members of Brookland Baptist had graduated college, he said. As the church grew in the 1980s, the new members were more educated and had higher paying jobs. The church was gaining a reputation that a parishioner had to be educated to attend, Jackson said.
Older members of the church and its leadership began to feel alienated in their sanctuary. The church they’d helped sustain was forgetting them, some thought. Newer leaders felt their elders held them back from modernizing the church .
Members who had lived through Jim Crow and segregation were at odds with a growing membership who had shed some of the burdens of the past and benefited from opportunities previous generations never had.
Dispelling the notion of an education requirement and making sure older and newer members and leaders respected each other was his hardest challenge as a pastor, Jackson said.
But the church stayed together, and by the early 1990s, the congregation was trying to expand the sanctuary on the secluded road in Lexington County. The members hoped to build a house of worship that could hold more than 600 people.
They faced a problem, though. A person who owned property next to the church wouldn’t sell the land. In talk after talk, she politely turned Jackson down when he’d ask about the church buying her lot.
Carroll McGee, a white reverend and acquaintance who also worked in real estate, had an idea for Brookland Baptist after visiting a service, Jackson said.
“He saw at that time what we did not see,” Jackson said. “He said ‘Brookland needs to be accessible and visible.’”
McGee arranged a deal for Brookland Baptist to lease-to-own a former Piggly Wiggly on Sunset Boulevard, which the church couldn’t previously afford.
In 1992, Brookland moved off “the shortest street in Lexington County” into the old grocery store, which had room to sit over 700 worshipers, setting up the church to become one of the largest and most prominent in West Columbia.
The way it happened has compelled Jackson to stay with Brookland Baptist all these years.
Anything he ever needed for the church, he received, Jackson said. With that, “I couldn’t leave,” he said. “God is wanting me to stay here.”
Evangelism, education and economic empowerment
Brookland Baptist celebrated the completion of its current, stunning sanctuary in 1999. But Jackson felt unsettled when he looked around the massive church. They hadn’t built any community services, he believed.
The construction of Brookland Baptist’s campus was supposed to happen in three phases: building the church, then administrative officers, then community services.
Jackson wanted community services built before administrative functions.
In the decades since Brookland Baptist’s home was built, the church has created an expansive campus of resources that anyone can utilize.
The first community services the church built were its banquet and conference room, a health and wellness center and child development center, which is essentially a Christian school. It also established a credit union where church members can get loans and other banking services. Brookland Baptist employs 166 people, according to Jackson. Before cut backs caused pandemic, it employed 193. The church even offers a lunch buffet.
These community services, or ministries, help sustain the church and embody the mission of Brookland Baptist, which is to “proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ through evangelism, education and economic empowerment,” Jackson said.
Robert Wells has attended Brookland Baptist since he was born in 1985. Now, he’s a trustee on the church’s board and the Brookland-Cayce High School boys basketball coach.
Wells said he’s seen firsthand how Jackson is “a Godly man with a caring heart.”
“He naturally cares about everyone who he crosses,” Wells said.
As the church’s leader, Jackson is busy but “he’s always been one phone call away” when the basketball team or community needs help, Wells said.
“His help with our community may not be seen but there’s a lot he does behind doors to help,” he said.
Columbia City Council member Tameika Isaac Devine also said that Jackson’s contributions to West Columbia and beyond aren’t done for personal recognition.
“He’s truly a servant leader and he serves from such a genuine place,” she said.
Devine and her husband sought a church to regularly attend when they were engaged. With their first visit to Brookland Baptist in 2003, they knew it would be their home church, she said.
Jackson’s humble leadership and focus on actions speaking louder than accolades has inspired Devine’s public service, she said.
He’s also inspired her to care for herself so that she can care for others, she said. As a councilwoman, she carves out time to spend with her family. This gives her time to recharge, allowing her to be a better elected official, she said. Jackson taught her that as a public servant, “you can’t give from a place of emptiness.”
One way Jackson sought to give back to the community was by saving a building where he was taught some of his earliest lessons.
The thunder that can burst from Jackson’s voice came out when he talked about preserving the school where the principal supported the young pastor-in-the-making in the 1960s.
In the 2000s, Lakeview School, only about a mile from Brookland Baptist, faced the possibility of demolition. Lakeview was a school for children before integration and, though built within a racist system that oppressed Blacks, the school was seen by West Columbia’s Black community as a place of opportunity, University of South Carolina history professor Bobby Donaldson told The State in December. The school closed because of desegregation in 1968.
Jackson didn’t want to see the school’s history erased by bulldozers, and so he and the church rallied to purchase and revitalize Lakeview in 2007.
The campus of the former school now houses a food bank, school tutoring programs, mentorship and athletic programs and a senior citizens resource center.
Jackson’s voice rose again when he said that 85 percent of the seniors who use the center aren’t members of Brookland Baptist and that the church’s sports teams had won four state championships in one year. The church also awards scholarships to high school seniors every year, he said.
“I believe that the call of God upon my life is to build bridges,” Jackson said. “I asked God for the venue that would bring people together” regardless of race, church membership, education, class and even political party.
Brookland Baptist completed its administrative buildings in the last year, Jackson said. For the first time in 50 years, he has his own personal office. He loves it, he said. But not as much as the rooms and corridors that serve the community.
Marching on
On a Sunday in late January, Jackson stepped onto the pulpit with a burden heavy on his mind. He saw pews with only about 20 church members.
Since the start of the pandemic, Brookland Baptist hadn’t held in-person services. Only musicians and operations members attended so that the services could be live streamed.
He was worried about the church, Jackson said.
“All I have known for all of my life has been church on Sunday morning,” he said. “I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss the congregation.”
He worried that members were losing their connection to the church in their absence from Sunday gatherings. He worried that people would forget the sense of community that came when they worshiped together. He worried about deeper problems beyond Brookland Baptist’s walls.
He was concerned with what appears to be a church “that’s operating in the sundown of their years rather than the youthfulness of their lives.”
“In some churches there are more funerals than baptisms,” Jackson told the small crowd and the people watching online.
“There’s more and more of the world coming into the church and less and less of the church being experienced in the world,” Jackson said.
He delved into to the book that had been with him since he was the boy who wanted to be a “peacher.” He read from the Gospel of Matthew.
“Upon this rock I will build my church.” His voice rose with the grit of 50 years of preaching as he recalled the words of Jesus. “And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”
“When I read, ‘The gates of Hell shall not prevail,’ honest to goodness my spirits were lifted,” Jackson preached.
“My church is going to be alright ... My church is going to be a church that’s upright in an upside down world. My church is going to be a church with helping hands, embracing arms, compassionate hearts and loving spirits.”
“Twenty years from now, 30 years from now, 40 years from now, the church is going to march on,” he said toward the end of his sermon.
Belief has kept him marching for 50 years as the pastor of Brookland Baptist. But another element of the church has kept Pastor Jackson marching.
“God blessed the Brookland church and me with some of the best people of the Christian faith that you will find anywhere on the planet,” he said.