ATLANTA — At age 21, Willie A. Watkins discovered himself “on the opposite finish of the stick.”
He didn’t say what that meant precisely — simply that it landed him in entrance of a choose.
“What do you wish to do in life?” he recalled the choose asking him.
“Proper now I’m working in a funeral dwelling,” Watkins mentioned. “I wish to be an undertaker.”
The choose replied, “The highway you’re touring, you ain’t gonna be no undertaker. You’re going to be taken underneath.”
Subsequent to an image of the late Andrew J. Hairston, Jonathan Givens leads Hairston’s household into the auditorium of the Simpson Avenue Church of Christ. Givens, senior minister for the Southside Church of Christ in Montgomery, Ala., served as minister for the Hairston household.
However the choose did greater than self-discipline Watkins. He promised to keep watch over him and assist him keep on the appropriate path.
He made good on that promise, Watkins mentioned. “He at all times had an encouraging phrase for me. God first. Prayer second. Keep targeted, and God will direct your path.”
On Saturday, a gray-haired Watkins shared that story on the “Homegoing Service” for the choose, Andrew Jasper Hairston.
Then, because the congregation sang “Mansion, Gown and Crown,” staffers with the Willie A. Watkins Funeral Residence escorted Hairston’s casket from the Simpson Avenue Church of Christ auditorium.
The Andrew Hairston Memorial Refrain sings hymns together with “Waymaker” through the Homegoing Service on the Simpson Avenue Church of Christ.
Ministers, Atlanta metropolis officers and believers from throughout the U.S. and the African nation of Liberia lined the pews for the three-and-a-half-hour service.
Audio system highlighted Hairston’s accomplishments: Legal professional for Martin Luther King Jr. Prosecutor of infamous pornographer Larry Flynt. Atlanta’s first Black chief Justice of the Peace choose. Navy chaplain. And preacher at Simpson Avenue for some 55 years.
Hairston died Jan. 14. He was 92.
Associated: Preacher, prosecutor and civil rights crusader Andrew Hairston dies at 92
“He held many titles that plenty of Black women and men, particularly of his era, would dream of,” mentioned Kenneth Rucker II, one among Hairston’s 5 grandchildren.
He took the title of “Pawpaw” with equal seriousness and dedication, Rucker mentioned.
When Rucker was 11 and his dad deployed to Kuwait for a yr, “my grandfather would take me to get my hair reduce after which take me and my sister to get KFC,” Rucker mentioned. “After I outgrew my fits, he and my grandmother paid for brand new fits.”
‘Can you retain my girlfriend firm?’
Hairston and his spouse, Jeanne, met after his commencement from Southwestern Christian Faculty in Texas. Of their later years, every time Hairston wanted to be away from the home, he’d name Pat Applewhite, a 49-year member at Simpson Avenue.
“Applewhite, that is brother Hairston,” he’d say. “Can you retain my girlfriend firm?”
Pat Applewhite speaks through the Hairston memorial service.
“Sure, chief. When do you want me?” Applewhite replied. She’d go to with Jeanne till she received one other cellphone name. “Applewhite, that is brother Hairston. You might be launched.”
“I’d look over at sister Hairston, and he or she’d be there smiling,” Applewhite recalled. “She’d say, ‘Is that my boyfriend?’”
After almost 70 years of marriage, Jeanne Hairston died on Oct. 10, 2022.
One other grandson, Alexander Hairston, learn a poem, “The Pillar.” He thanked his grandparents for offering “the blueprint on how you can dwell life properly.”
“You had been there for our first steps, our first heartbeats, our first video games,” the youthful Hairston mentioned. “You had been the power that runs by means of our veins.”
Alexander Hairston reads an unique poem, “The Pillar,” written for his grandfather.
Not a ‘hellfire-and-brimstone’ preacher
Charlie Simmons was 17 when Andrew Hairston started preaching for Simpson Avenue in 1961. It didn’t take lengthy for the 29-year-old preacher to influence Simmons to be immersed in baptism.
“We had by no means seen anyone work like him. That’s why all of us received two jobs,” mentioned Simmons, now 81 and a deacon at Simpson Avenue.
Charlie Simmons, proper, greets fellow Christians as he walks towards the Simpson Avenue Church of Christ constructing from a close-by college, used for overflow parking.
Tony Phillips was 12 when Hairston baptized him in 1976. Now metropolis administrator for the Atlanta suburb of Fairburn, Ga., Phillips additionally serves in ministry for the Camp Creek Church of Christ in Atlanta.
Throughout the town, “I doubt you can go to a congregation and never discover people who, in some unspecified time in the future, had been underneath his ministry,” Phillips mentioned.
“I doubt you can go to a congregation and never discover people who, in some unspecified time in the future, had been underneath his ministry.”
Willie Jackson first attended Simpson Avenue 4 many years in the past. After listening to Hairston’s sermon, Jackson known as his mom and mentioned, “Oh Lord, hellfire and brimstone is gone!”
As a substitute of pounding the pulpit and specializing in divine wrath, “he was targeted on you and your relationship with God,” Jackson mentioned. “And it was simply so particular.”
He liked Liberia, waited for God’s justice
Hairston’s ministry prolonged far past Georgia.
Members of Atlanta’s Liberian neighborhood attended the service. Considered one of them, Mabel Inexperienced, praised Hairston for the help he gave them within the Nineteen Seventies as they navigated U.S. immigration regulation.
“His love for Liberia is immeasurable,” Inexperienced mentioned. Together with minister R.C. Wells, Hairston launched Wells-Hairston Excessive College in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. A whole bunch of scholars have graduated from the college, together with George Weah, a soccer star who served as Liberia’s president from 2018 to 2024.
Associated: Fare thee Wells
Six years in the past, O.J. Shabazz and different Christians integrated a basis for the college. On the memorial service, Shabazz, minister for the Harlem Church of Christ in New York, assured Hairston’s household that he was dedicated to “preserve the doorways of the college open” and proceed the work Wells and Hairston began.
Jerry Taylor, a longtime minister and Bible professor at Abilene Christian College in Texas, mentioned that Hairston “considered the pulpit as a solemn platform from which he eloquently addressed the necessary home and worldwide problems with the day.
An usher greets guests at first of the Homegoing Service for Andrew Hairston.
“Within the night years of his life, Dr. Hairston grew troubled by the nationwide erosion of the ideas he had spent his lengthy life defending,” Taylor mentioned. As a Black man who grew up within the Jim Crow South, Hairston knew the hazards of racism veiled as authorities coverage, Taylor added. However he additionally knew concerning the apostle John’s imaginative and prescient in Revelation 18, which predicted the autumn of “Babylon the nice” and the vindication of God’s individuals.
“This hope,” Taylor mentioned, “sustained Dr. Hairston within the darkest hours of disappointment.”
A carpenter’s belt in his wardrobe
Though Hairston was an advocate for justice, “his sermons had been by no means targeted on civil rights,” mentioned Geraldine Sharpe, who served because the minister’s clerical assistant. “His advocacy was for training and righteousness … which positioned him within the middle of the civil rights motion.”
Geraldine Sharpe speaks concerning the legacy of Andrew Hairston through the memorial service.
He needed women and men to become involved in ministry. He revealed a research on the function of ladies within the church, “and for years one among our sisters in Christ served as director of our academic program,” Sharpe mentioned. Numerous Christian ladies have served as academics and ministry administrators at Simpson Avenue.
Hairston was a builder — of lives and of edifices.
“I used to be shocked that he got here in at some point sporting a carpenter’s belt,” Sharpe mentioned. On the church’s former facility, Hairston helped to assemble and restore his workplace and the women’ lounge.
A historic marker outdoors the Simpson Avenue Church of Christ’s constructing notes the accomplishments of Andrew Hairston.
That outdated constructing collapsed in 2011, 4 years after the church constructed a brand new assembly place throughout the road. Final yr, the church completed demolition of its former amenities and broke floor on an house constructing. Partnering with authorities businesses, the church plans to create reasonably priced housing for residents who’d in any other case be priced out of the neighborhood by gentrification and concrete renewal.
Sharpe was born within the neighborhood close to the church constructing. She moved away for some time, however returned partly due to the church’s housing initiative, a longtime dream of Hairston’s.
“We’d contemplate placing a carpenter’s belt in our wardrobes in order that we might all have a spot to stash our love, our blessings, our need to assist others.”
“We’d contemplate placing a carpenter’s belt in our wardrobes,” she mentioned, “in order that we might all have a spot to stash our love, our blessings, our need to assist others.”
The positioning of the previous Simpson Avenue constructing has development gadgets for a future reasonably priced housing growth.
Above all else, Hairston was a servant, mentioned Rucker, his grandson, who studied at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. His grandfather believed that success — as a preacher, a choose or an undertaker — required a denial of self, as Jesus tells his followers in Mark 10:45: “The Son of Man didn’t come to be served, however to serve, and to offer His life a ransom for a lot of.”
“He believed that all of us have a objective,” Rucker mentioned, “and that we must always come collectively to serve one another.”
Kenneth Rucker II eulogizes his grandfather, Andrew J. Hairston, from the pulpit of the Simpson Avenue Church of Christ in Atlanta.
ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact [email protected]. Comply with him on X @eriktryggestad.
Mourners go to the casket holding Andrew J. Hairston as Chris Turner leads singing on the Simpson Avenue Church of Christ in Atlanta.
Ministers from throughout the nation embrace members of the Hairston household through the memorial service.
A household pays their respects at Andrew Hairston’s casket earlier than the memorial service.
Ushers positioned packing containers of tissues all through the auditorium of the Simpson Avenue Church of Christ earlier than the memorial service.
Ministers from throughout the nation take a gaggle photograph on the conclusion of the memorial service for Andrew Hairston.
