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Paper: Greensboro News & Record (NC)
Title: DESTINED FOR DIVINITY A MAINSTAY OF BOTH HIS CHURCH AND HIS COMMUNITY, HOWARD CHUBBS MARKS HIS 35TH ANNIVERSARY AT PROVIDENCE BAPTIST CHURCH TODAY.
Date: June 17, 2001
Howard Allen Chubbs was 10 years old, washing breakfast dishes, the day he heard the voice.

Then he heard it again.

"`Howard, I want you to preach my word.''

The boy looked around, but no one was there. Still, he knew the voice wasn't just in his head. It was in the room.

He dropped the dishes.

``My mother still swears I dropped the dishes and then got called to preach,'' jokes Chubbs, whose own voice - a smooth baritone - has drawn some of the most powerful and prominent black people in Greensboro to the sanctuary of Providence Baptist Church for more than three decades.

Chubbs, a preacher virtually all his life, is minister to Henry Frye, former chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, and Bill Martin, a senior member of the state Senate. His congregation includes former N.C. A&T Chancellor Edward Fort, and Eunice and Joe Dudley, whose multimillion-dollar hair-care empire is a mainstay on Black Enterprise magazine's list of the top 100 black-owned businesses in the nation.

He marks his 35th year at Providence today - a tenure that is a rarity among pastors. During that time, Chubbs has been a quiet tower of strength in his own congregation, and a steady and constant presence on numerous boards and organizations across the city. Much of his work remains outside the public eye. But those who know him well say he has a sweet soul, a generous heart and a mischievous sense of humor.

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The morning air is thick with humidity, the rain momentarily at bay. Prayers are working. But the swing of the preacher on his won't-miss weekly golf date is not.

``This is a lesson in how Christians make it through adversity,'' deadpans Chubbs as he nails a tree at Bryan Park with a golf ball meant for the lush green skirt of the 8th hole.

He is on a course he knows better than his own back yard, and his early-morning musings to golfing partner Pat Patterson, a retired Wachovia executive, also suggest a certain familiarity with putts that are too short and balls that don't land where they're supposed to.

But the 5-foot-7-inch Chubbs, who at 65 looks at least a decade younger, is clearly enjoying himself. He putts, he yells at the ball, he laughs at himself and then he hops back into the golf cart to get to the next hole, where it starts all over again. It's the art of having fun, practiced by a man who had to grow up before he could be a child.

``By the time I was 12 years old, I had preached in 23 states,'' he says.

Before he was called to the ministry, Chubbs was a straight-A student who talked too much in class and was ushered by his mother to every church event. He grew up in low-income housing on the wrong side of the tracks in Chattanooga, Tenn. His father was a railroad porter who also worked odd jobs, while his mother cared for Chubbs and his sisters.

Eight-year-old Mae Nan Chubbs was in an upstairs bedroom that Monday morning in 1946 when the sound of her brother crying drew her to the top of the stairs.

``He said 'Mother, I'm going to save my money, and I'm going to buy myself a Bible,' '' says his sister, now Mae Nan Brown. ``My mother said, 'Howard, are you sure what you heard?' And he said 'Mother, the voice said, Howard, I want you to preach my word.' ''

Annie Laura Chubbs dropped what she was doing and took her boy to the pastor.

``She told him, 'I don't know what to do with the boy,' '' Howard Chubbs recalls. After Chubbs recounted his experience, the minister said, ``Well, he's supposed to preach.''

The pastor, also his godfather, put him in a minister's training program at his Chattanooga church, where he prepared to preach a trial sermon. Chubbs came up with a sermon two months later, entitled ``God Conquers through Gideon,'' which he preached from atop a table set up behind the podium. He officially became a preacher at 10 and started getting invitations to preach elsewhere.

In a visit to Paducah, Ky., he was promoted as the ``12-year-old Son of Thunder.'' In Columbus, Ohio, his first revival drew an overflow crowd.

``People came expecting a performance and were surprised when they had a spiritual experience,'' says Chubbs.

Despite all the attention, he was just Howard at home, and his mother still expected him to do his share of the chores.

``She never decided what to do with me, except treat me like her son,'' Chubbs said.

But outside pressures were building. One of his teachers sarcastically called him ``Mr. Chubbs'' when he played along with the other children. Some people didn't even think he should be out playing baseball.

``I often tell my son, 'I'm glad you had the chance to be a child,' '' Chubbs says.

Chubbs had been preaching for five years when the pastor of his church left.

``I preached 35 out of 52 services that year, and that was more than any 15-year-old should do,'' he says with a heavy sigh, removing his glasses to wipe away tears.

He wanted to be in the pulpit those Sundays, but the mental and emotional strain began taking its toll. He began to get jittery and nervous. A dermatologist diagnosed the rashes that began to appear on his skin as stress.

``Here you are 15, you haven't experienced a great deal of life, but you are supposed to utter truths. Here you are trying to figure out your place in life, but leading others spiritually to places you haven't gone yourself,'' says the Rev. George Brooks, a longtime friend and the pastor of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Greensboro. ``Envision having to stand up, your every word scrutinized, your body motion analyzed and yourself opened to be criticized.''

It was also at that time that his parents divorced. To help out at home, Chubbs shined shoes on the weekend and after school.

A frequent customer at the shoeshine stand would change his life. James Finley, chief legal counsel at a large insurance company in Chattanooga, helped Chubbs, then 16, get a higher-paying job as a hotel bellhop and told him he would help with his college application. At the end of that summer, Finley wrote Chubbs a tuition check and told him to use his savings to buy clothes. He would do the same for the next two years.

``I said, 'Mr. Finley, how can I ever repay you?' '' Chubbs recounts, his deep voice barely above a whisper.

``He said, 'Howard, promise me that whenever you get into a position to help people, you do the same.' And when he died I felt like a part of my life was gone. His wife offered to continue what he had done, which is why I could never join the 'I hate all white people' crowd because it was a white man's shoes I shined that made it possible for me to be here.''

Chubbs would become the first in his family to graduate from college, earning a bachelor's degree in sociology, a master's and a doctorate of divinity.

He met his wife, Louise, after he was hired as pastor of Mosby Baptist Church in her hometown of Richmond, Va. His future wife had arrived late for one of his services, and the ushers put her on the front row, in the only available seat. Chubbs thought the tears that rolled down her cheeks meant she was touched by his message.

He walked her home that day.

``He said, 'I never get distracted by people in the audience,' and I said I had no intentions of being in church that night. I was crying because I had had a fight with my mother,'' recounts Louise Chubbs, a retired elementary school teacher. ``He says, 'See what happens when you play with God?' ''

They celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary earlier this year.

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Chubbs got his first peek at Greensboro and Providence Baptist Church in 1966. The church had lost its pastor and its historic sanctuary in the redevelopment of East Market Street. The dwindling membership was meeting at Harrison Auditorium at A&T.

Henry Frye was a struggling young lawyer; Bill Martin a college student with an eye on political science; Eunice Dudley a secretary, and her husband, Joe, a small-time salesman with a dream, when the pastoral search committee invited Chubbs in for a trial sermon.

He wasn't sure he wanted to be their pastor. At 29, he already had a 600-member church.

That Sunday, just a handful of people showed up.

``I looked out, and they all looked like they were asleep,'' says Chubbs. ``I didn't preach the whole sermon, I just cut it off. I told my wife, 'We'll never have to come back.' ''

Chubbs isn't sure why he took the job, except that the Lord works in mysterious ways. He came to Greensboro as the pastor of a church with no real home.

Although the church didn't have a building, it did have structure, and that appealed to the meticulous Chubbs. He's a man with a file of every sermon he has ever preached at Providence, a man whose office is neatly ordered, right down to the knickknacks on his desk.

Providence had bylaws and followed them, right down to what happened to the money in the church collection plate.

About a year after he arrived, in December 1967, the congregation moved into its 538-seat sanctuary on Tuscaloosa Street, with 12 classrooms, offices, a library and a fellowship hall. Word of Providence's renewal drew back old members and attracted new ones.

The congregation was accustomed to pastors who were dignified and could preach. Chubbs brought emotion and flair to the Sunday sermons, with a commanding baritone that rises at least an octave at moments of passion. Dressed in a flowing white and crimson robe, he paces back and forth behind the podium, raising his hands to the sky. Often, he cries.

But his laughter and sense of fun is equally endearing to the congregation.

Member Gladys Robinson's daughter would grab him around the leg, and he'd try to walk with the giggling child. He was the first up - and drew a long line - in the church's dunking booth during one summer picnic. The women in the church kitchen would shoo him away when he came in eating his way from one pot to the next and asking why every church event had something to do with food.

``The problem with preachers is we often create a gulf between us and our members - for whatever reason, I don't know - and we make them afraid to come across,'' says Chubbs.

All members of the congregation knew their pastor scheduled his days around his son's soccer games. Chubbs was smitten from the first day he laid eyes on Howard Douglas Chubbs, who now designs and builds software systems for IBM in Atlanta. He and his wife agreed to give him some space when he went away to Morehouse College in Atlanta. But that didn't keep Chubbs from secretly calling him every Thursday night.

``My mother would be worried that they hadn't heard from me in weeks, and he'd say, 'Louise, let the boy grow up. He's all right, otherwise he'd call,' '' the younger Chubbs says. ``It was only recently that my mother found out about the calls.''

Chubbs' easygoing manner helped break through the church's snobbish reputation, which it had been fighting for years. The church, founded by former slaves, had become known as the church of educated black Greensboro, partially because of its large following from A&T.

``I remember back in 1968 when we were joining the church, and he said even though we had just joined, our membership was just as important as somebody who had been here 30 years,'' says Ralph Shelton, who was then a college student.

Shelton is the president of Southeast Fuels. But you won't find that information on the church bulletin. A few years ago, Chubbs had all the titles in front of names removed from the Sunday church bulletins, which list the members participating in the service. No more ``Dr.'' in front of plastic surgeon Gerald Truesdale or ``attorney'' in front of Pella Stokes.

``I glory in their accomplishments because most of them, like I, started at the bottom. But I don't want it ever to appear that they are my only concerns,'' Chubbs says.

Every Sunday before morning service, he stops by hospitals and nursing homes, visiting members who are on the church's sick list.

``They will tease him at the hospital, they'll say, 'Rev. Chubbs, a lot of ministers don't do this, they send their assistants. You must have too much time on your hands,' '' says Louise Chubbs. ``But this is a part of his ministry he cherishes.''

Chubbs believes that to whom much is given, much is expected.

His message, says Martin, is that whether you are a teacher or a state senator, you should help others to the best of your ability. Martin's Web page often quotes from Chubbs' Sunday sermons, such as the recent ``On Caring About and Caring For,'' which prompted Martin to do some soul-searching about the state budget.

``Could we have handled the budget situation better?'' writes Martin, who leads the Senate's appropriations subcommittee on health and human services, which recommended closing all three schools for the deaf and Dorothea Dix mental hospital. ``Have we, thus, done things that will result in more misery for our fellow human beings?''

Members say Chubbs provides gentle guidance by word and by example.

Gladys Robinson, a brash and outspoken supporter of minorities and the poor, had lost two runs at elective office when Chubbs offered a word of advice.

``He reminded me that I could get more done - that you can get more bees with honey than with vinegar. It wasn't about giving in to stuff, it was more about how you are able to reach people and talk about the issues rather than being confrontational and turning people off. I've changed in my approach.''

She says she believes that change helped her get nominated and accepted to the UNC Board of Governors earlier this year.

Chubbs has practiced what he preached to Robinson throughout his career, especially during the turbulent '60s, when he first arrived in Greensboro. At the time, racial tensions were running high.

``I believe there's a place for militance, and there's a place for conciliation,'' Chubbs said. His nonconfrontational style attracted the attention of the white power structure in Greensboro. Chubbs was invited to join the Chamber of Commerce board of directors and other groups.

``I knew I was a token, but just sitting on the outside and complaining and cursing folk is a waste of time,'' Chubbs said.

There have been occasions when Chubbs himself lost patience with the progress of black-white relations. It wasn't in the '60s, but just last year, when Frye lost in the November elections for chief Supreme Court justice. Frye barely carried Guilford County.

``I got mad,'' Chubbs admits. ``The tally showed me there were some attitudes here I didn't want to believe were still here.''

Chubbs continues to work within community groups, including Action Greensboro, a project to vitalize the city economically and socially. In Action Greensboro, he sees the future of the city and a movement that needs the involvement of black people.

``The church can't sit idly by,'' Chubbs says. ``If we think that we are immune to change, then just let the membership lose their jobs.''

As a community leader, he's not the brick but the mortar, drawing people together and providing a steady hand. One on one, he's the strong and comforting presence people seek when times are tough.

He was called to the chancellor's side as the National Guard marched onto the A&T campus in 1968. When Shirley Frye was dealing with a series of deaths in her family - the last being her mother - Chubbs drove nearly 120 miles just to give the vice president of community affairs for WFMY-TV (Channel 2) a hug. When City Councilwoman Yvonne Johnson's mother wanted a Baptist preacher to talk to during a hospital stay, Chubbs visited her every day for nearly a month.

The emotional toll of the ministry can be high. One year, the church suffered five deaths - each a person he had known and loved for decades - in three weeks.

``He said 'Louise, I know if I go to that cemetery one more time I'm going to fall in,' '' his wife recalls.

The ministry isn't easy, he says.

``One thing most people fail to realize is the preacher is no less human and no more divine than any other Christian,'' Chubbs says. ``Each loss diminishes you because you've invested love in those people.''

Chubbs found personal renewal in a 1994 trip to Israel with Arabs, Muslims, Christians and Jews through a joint effort of the local Jewish Federation and the National Conference for Community and Justice.

His feet barely touched the ground in Israel, so elated was he to be at the birthplace of Christianity.

Just as the spirit had touched him as a boy, he again felt the stirring in his soul as he spoke, baptized and was baptized at the Jordan River.

``It put me in touch with the roots of my faith,'' Chubbs says. ``In Israel, even with the bombs and violence, there is a presence that still hovers over the land.

``It authenticated my conviction that I am doing what God wants me to do.''