BUFFALO, N.Y. — The billboard at the northwest corner of Fillmore Avenue and East Ferry Street was the kind of urban gem that inspired drivers to brake for a better look or backtrack to snap a picture.

A mammoth photograph of a man in a leopard-print toga filled out the center of the sign. Eyebrows arched, he wore a fake beard and wielded what looked like a cross between a club and a giant drumstick. To his right, the billboard’s message, a marriage between the Flintstones and religion, crawled across the larger-than-life display:

TRUE BETHEL
WE MAKE THE BIBLE
SO SIMPLE
BAM BAM
COULD UNDERSTAND

True Bethel Baptist, the church that ran the advertisement, occupies a flat, beige building a few blocks away at 907 E. Ferry St.

The half-mile walk that separates the placard from the house of worship paints a portrait of the neighborhood. A number of businesses are open, but mostly, the scenery is bleak. Years of neglect have left the sidewalk to crumble, its ugly, uneven surface slithering along the street like a skin of concrete scales. Boarded-up buildings flash wooden grins.

This is a place where children play in the wreckage of Buffalo’s industrial past, where a bike ride to visit a friend cuts through a panorama of collapsing homes. The dead smokestacks of rusting factories rise in the distance, like ghosts. Across from True Bethel, a forest of Queen Anne’s Lace and other weeds grows 5 feet tall in a former brownfield.

Against this vista washed in umber and gray, the Stone Age-themed billboard, up last year, was notable for its levity. The sign was a shock of energy.

The advertisement was also typical of True Bethel, which has a reputation for being over-the-top. The padded chairs that sit in place of pews are a royal purple. Spotlights illuminate the nave, and every Sunday, videographers record the sermon—which usually inspires yelling and tears—for viewers who want to buy a DVD or watch the proceedings on the Web.

In 2002, senior pastor Darius Pridgen—the man in the caveman costume—made national news by getting his blood drawn for an HIV test during a morning service. Later, the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and CBS Evening News reported on True Bethel’s decision to open a Subway sandwich franchise inside the church to create jobs in the neighborhood.

True Bethel, with all its idiosyncrasies, owes its big personality to Pridgen, the man who led the institution through a period of explosive growth. When Pridgen joined the church in 1994, he preached to a congregation of 25 believers. The choir had to step down after singing to give him an audience.

Today, about 3,500 members participate in Sunday worship and public service. A downtown branch has opened. Drama, music and dance ministries engage youth in creative activities. A nurses ministry educates families on preventing disease. Charities provide food, clothing and transitional housing for people in need.

True Community Development Corporation, an organization True Bethel launched, is partnering with the city to replace eight vacant homes with three new ones next to the church’s East Side location. The corporation also collaborated with the state’s environmental conservation department to clean up the lead-contaminated brownfield across the street, a more than $9.5 million project.
 
The reverend, too, has benefited from the rise of True Bethel.

He lives, rent-free, in a church-owned waterfront townhouse assessed at $218,500. He leases a 2010 Cadillac. He won’t disclose his salary. He is also running for public office, hoping to win the Buffalo Common Council’s Ellicott District seat, which representative Brian Davis vacated last fall after pleading guilty to misusing campaign funds.

Some people question Pridgen’s lifestyle: How much is too much for a preacher to take from an inner city congregation? It’s a topic worth debating, to be sure. But regardless of where you stand on the issue, True Bethel’s story—and by extension Pridgen’s—is one worth hearing.

Pridgen, 45, makes no apologies for his success. He worked his way through college, and his resume includes four years in the Air Force and double that time as a bureaucrat for the U.S. Postal Service. He saved his money and invests in real estate.

At True Bethel, he delivers three Sunday sermons, each of which can draw overflow crowds. Parishioners come to him on weekdays with legal and financial questions that he tries to help answer. He says his first parsonage was a fixer-upper on Humboldt Parkway that “had mice and rats and windows that bled air.”

From the pulpit on Sundays, Pridgen preaches self-reliance: Help yourself, because if you don’t, who will?

He is a product of the East Side. His mother grew up in the Perry projects, where Pridgen spent much of his youth. His father was a steelworker. They poured what little money they had into organ and acting classes for their son, their only child.

They bought him the best education they could, sending him to private academies in Clarence and Williamsville until, as a teenager, he demanded to return to Buffalo. He wanted, he told them, to experience public school.

He took summer classes and petitioned to graduate early. When his school denied his request because he had not enrolled in a formal accelerated program, he took the bus to see Claude Clapp, a high-ranking district administrator and the first black principal of a Buffalo public.

“I played by the rules,” Pridgen told Clapp, handing over the papers school officials had signed approving his summer courses.

Clapp reviewed the documents, looked at the young man and responded, “You’re going to graduate.”

Clapp died in 2003, and Pridgen’s mother, Barbara, says she can’t verify the details of how her son came to finish his studies at Bennett High School at the age of 16. But when she hears Pridgen’s account, she says the story sounds accurate. Even as a kid, he was always testing limits, she says: “You would find out afterward and be like, ‘You did what?'”

Years later, Pridgen applied that enterprising attitude toward a new project: advancing True Bethel. The church that expanded under his watch grew in his image. The institution is bold, eccentric, entrepreneurial. The operating principle seems to be to get things done—whether that means dressing up as a caveman or rehabilitating old homes.

“I felt we had to give more than just bible lessons, but we had to take those lessons and go out into the community and improve it,” Pridgen says.

“Why a church, why a faith-based organization?” he adds. He answers his own question: “There was nobody else here, doing it.”

“907 [E. Ferry St.], this building, was sitting empty, roof burned off, drug dealers using it,” he says. “Nobody came. Kids were playing football on a lead-contaminated site with no fencing around it. Nobody came as Woodlawn, Winslow and Glenwood continued to be dilapidated. Nobody came.”

PRIDGEN TELLS a story about one Sunday he remembers in particular from his early years with True Bethel. He had encouraged parishioners to bring guests to services, but few did, and the congregation was not growing. Standing at the pulpit, he surveyed the same, small cluster of people to whom he had been preaching week after week. Then, mid-sermon, he left the church.

At the time, True Bethel was on the 400 block of Ferry Street, next door to a gas station, and Pridgen walked to the establishment and approached a young man filling up his tank.

“I will pay you $50 to come and go to church with me,” said Pridgen, still in his black robe.

“You’ll pay me $50?” the stranger asked, incredulous.

The pastor had a deal. And at the end of the sermon, Pridgen recalls, the gas station customer jumped up and said, “I just wanted to give you back your $50, because this is the best time I’ve had in a long time.”

The man was wearing boots and a T-shirt—certainly not the customary Sunday best. The encounter inspired Pridgen to change the way he ran the church. He got rid of the dress code and advertised True Bethel as a “come-as-you-are” institution. Instead of trying to poach congregants from other houses of worship, he would concentrate on marketing to people who did not yet attend religious services.

The strategy worked. One Sunday not long after the incident with the man pumping gas, parishioners confronted the reverend as he headed to the pulpit. They needed chairs. The church was full. The new philosophy Pridgen was pushing—that a person’s heart, and not his appearance, was what mattered to God—appealed in an impoverished neighborhood.

True Bethel went on to host a no-frills Easter in 1997, breaking with tradition by inviting the faithful to dress down. The Buffalo News published an article on the event, with Pridgen saying that he had seen Easter become “more of a fashion statement than a faith statement” in the African-American community—that he had counseled parents who felt guilty because they could not afford holiday clothes for their sons and daughters.

Rasheed Wyatt, a long-time True Bethel trustee, remembers how quickly the institution was evolving in those days. When the church outgrew its space next to the gas station, Pridgen recommended moving down the road to the 907 E. Ferry location. Wyatt quietly wondered whether the building, which once housed a supermarket, was too big.

But the pastor got his way, and True Bethel re-opened at the new site—its current home—in 1998. The year after, when USA Today quoted Pridgen in an article on the nation’s relaxing sartorial standards, the newspaper reported that the congregation had 1,400 members.

The policies of the fast-growing church have engendered controversy over the years. When Pridgen defied convention by inviting women to preach, many fellow clergymen objected, Wyatt recalls. Social liberals, on the other hand, criticize the reverend’s refusal to support gay marriage. (Pridgen says he believes the “intent of Genesis was that God created man and woman to be together.”)

Despite such conflicts, Pridgen has had little trouble attracting followers. One day, he and Wyatt bought plywood and paint and crafted a small stage for gospel-themed, pre-sermon puppet shows. The pastor reasoned that if children got excited about the bible, they would drag their parents to services. The performances were a hit.

Billboards, another publicity tactic, tout True Bethel’s focus on educating religious novices about Christianity. Pridgen explains that the caveman ad was part of this campaign: “It’s all about connecting with people, to be as human as possible.” He says when he test-marketed the idea on Facebook, “The feedback was, ‘It’s hilarious.'” He considered that a plus.

PRIDGEN GREW UP in two worlds. He lived on the East Side, moving from the Perry projects to Winslow Avenue and, eventually, Hamlin Park. But his education took him out to the suburbs, and his family joined a middle-class Methodist church whose congregants included many African-American professionals: doctors, lawyers, teachers.

As a teenager in public school for the first time, Pridgen found the environment shocking. Teachers hollered at unruly students from across the room. Parents appeared nonchalant, materializing only to meet with administrators about disciplinary problems.

The societal norms and disparities in opportunity that separated rich from poor during Pridgen’s youth remain strong today. Buffalo still feels distant from its wealthier suburbs.

Even within the city, lines of segregation can be stark. Main Street marks the division in many areas, with canopied avenues and manicured homes sitting west of the thoroughfare, blocks from devastated communities to the east. Residents of these opposing neighborhoods might never find reason to cross over invisible boundaries to meet one another.

That dichotomy shaped Pridgen’s convictions: Even as a child, he saw that with the right choices and attitude, social mobility was within his reach. Years later, that’s the dream he brings to the pulpit week after week.

“I think that some people don’t know their potential,” he says. “[They’ve] never been exposed to other things, other places and other opportunities, like I was in Clarence and Williamsville.”

“People pray and wait on God,” the reverend says. But he believes that faith alone cannot solve all problems, so he tells his congregants, “Pray and do something while you’re waiting.”

ON A SINGLE morning not long after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake lay waste to Haiti in January, the True Bethel congregation raised about $8,000 for relief efforts. The money went to an irrigation project in Soukri, a village by Port-au-Prince, and in June, Pridgen traveled there to demonstrate the church’s commitment to the project.

The Sunday after he returned, he chose Psalm 46 as the topic of his sermon. The passage opens with these lines: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”

The reverend’s talk began with the earthquake and segued into the broader subject of trauma in general. Pacing behind the pulpit in black slacks and a white polo shirt, he asked who among the parishioners had endured an unexpected loss, coped with sudden grief.

“One second you were doing one thing, and something occurred. It shifted your entire life…Things changed without your permission,” the pastor shouted. “And baby, when it shook, it shook good. When it shook — I need to know if I’ve got anybody who has ever gone through a shaking.”

His voice shuddered with intensity. The room felt electric.

A woman in a light-blue blazer had jumped to her feet, screaming, one hand thrust in the air. An elderly man in a charcoal suit gripped the seat in front of him. A lady in a straw hat and short-sleeved pumpkin jacket took notes. The pastor continued, yelling over the claps and calls of congregants.

“I don’t know what changed in your life,” he said. “But I came to tell you, you at the right place at the right time. I don’t know what was removed in your life, but that’s what the psalm is saying—He said, ‘Some things are going to be shaken, some things are going to be removed.’ He said, ‘Some things are going to be shaken up, some things are going to be carried into the sea.’ But He said, ‘Let the waters roar.’ He said, ‘There’s going to be some trouble and some torment in this life.’ He said, ‘Let it come.'”

Pridgen fired the words into a microphone he gripped with his right hand. As he spoke, he threw his entire body into motion, rocking, nodding, and enlisting his free arm in careening gestures. And now that he had everyone’s attention, the reverend stopped to tell a story.

On his trip to Haiti, he said, he learned that when the earthquake struck, some residents had fled their homes, surveyed the scene on the street, panicked and run back inside. The houses collapsed and turned into graves.

Pridgen related the dark vignette back to Buffalo, saying that the horror imparted a universal lesson: In times of turmoil, change may be necessary. Returning to places and people who once provided comfort could do more harm than good, the reverend told his listeners.

It was a sermon that alluded to drug use, bad relationships, any number of other ills. The connection to Haiti was, perhaps, a stretch. But congregants seemed not to care. The pastor’s philosophy was clear, and that was what mattered: Call on God but help yourself.

“I think that often times, the focus of the church in African American communities is to sympathize and pamper, rather than to propel,” Pridgen says. He believes True Bethel is different: “People are strengthened here.”

THE FACTORIES are still abandoned. Homes are still falling apart. Violence is common. It is hard to imagine anyone or anything resurrecting these urban ruins. Long before Pridgen arrived, East Side activists were trying to save their community. But the decline has persisted.

The pastor believes he is making a difference. The proof is in the people True Bethel has helped — people like the scores of parishioners who lined up to follow Pridgen’s lead the morning he got tested for HIV at church; people like Tiffany Robinson, 26, a stay-at-home mom who says the preacher’s Sunday sermons are helping her heal after years of enduring sexual abuse. True Bethel has purchased tailored suits for out-of-work men hunting for jobs, and dresses for women who said they had never owned one.

The church has also anchored development in its neighborhood. The houses that True Community Development Corporation lobbied to build are finally rising on Woodlawn Avenue. Children no longer play in the brownfield across the street on Ferry. Clean soil now fills the site, and a chain link fence surrounds the plot.

Plans call for restoring a historic firehouse nearby at Kehr Street and Winslow to accommodate True Bethel charities. The Subway sandwich shop continues to provide jobs. The busy establishment, with its tubs of cold cuts, peppers, olives, tomatoes and cheese, is a blast of color. And one recent morning, at the intersection of Ferry and Fillmore, across from True Bethel’s billboard, workers appeared to be renovating a once-abandoned gas station.

Other churches, too, have undertaken impressive development projects. But the progress represents a patchwork of change, and, as a whole, the East Side is still struggling. The Buffalo News reported in March that foreclosures and depreciating values have plagued subsidized homes.

As Pridgen might say, God alone won’t save this place. If more people don’t step up, what will happen?

“WOULD YOU LOOK up there to see if you can find some sheets?,” Barbara Pridgen, 65, hollers to her younger sister, Gail Parks. “She could use any size.”

The day is hot, the air thick. And inside the True Bethel Clothes Closet, a single ceiling fan spins as the women root through the kaleidoscope of treasures crowding the church-owned charity’s backrooms. Heaps of donated items—shirts, boots, linens, towels, dishes—define the topography of the storage space. The mess spills onto the steps of a narrow staircase that opens onto a cluttered upper floor.

From the bowels of this chaos, Barbara, her hair brushed into a tight bun, emerges carrying a cardboard box of glassware. “This woman just moved here from Tennessee, so she could use, like, everything,” Barbara explains. Out come pillows, blankets, a set of plastic cooking utensils.

Cora Long, a 54-year-old grandmother in a sleeveless black blouse, receives the goods in the Closet’s front room. She moved to Western New York from Memphis this summer after her daughter, Francisca, died suddenly, leaving behind four girls and a boy, aged 5 to 18. Of the siblings, three now live with Long in Cheektowaga. The remaining two reside with other relatives.
 
Francisca was a member of True Bethel, where her funeral took place, and without the church’s help, “I don’t know what we would have done,” Long says. She readies to leave. But before Long can go, Barbara rushes over with one last gift: a bag of stuffed toys.
 
“You’re gonna need to hold this in your lap, ’cause I gotta give the kids something,” Barbara says. She watches as Long steps out onto the hot, cracked pavement of Fillmore Avenue.
 
The slate-and-coral building that houses the Clothes Closet is nothing spectacular. The paint is peeling. From outside, the structure looks like it might be vacant. But the charity is open on Wednesdays and the third Saturday of every month. Volunteers say 60 or 70 people come to browse the racks each week.

The place resembles a thrift store, with dresses, shirts and pants cascading from plastic hangers. In one corner, visitors examine footwear—black heels, camel flats and orange Crocs. Clothing and household wares in storage are available for emergencies like Long’s.

Barbara, Darius Pridgen’s mother, and Parks, the pastor’s aunt, started the Clothes Closet with other volunteers in the 1990s in the basement of True Bethel’s 491 E. Ferry St. location.

Why do all this for strangers? Barbara shoots me a look that says the answer is obvious.

“If we don’t,” she asks, “who else will?”

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Cora Long is still looking for beds, dressers and household goods for her home and grandchildren. If you have items to donate, please contact Ms. Long at or .

Charles Proctor, law student and former reporter, and Brad Greenberg, creator of The God Blog, reviewed and offered direction on improving this story. , a crime and public safety reporter for the Contra Costa Times in the San Francisco Bay Area, also helped.