Flashback: Detroit pastor now fights to touch souls, shelter homeless

BY MITCH ALBOM • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • May 3, 2009

The man who lost his toes to frostbite lays down on a mattress, and the man who lost his teeth to street fights checks the final name off his clipboard. The room quiets and the lights dim and Henry Covington, the pastor, who turned this church gym into a floor of hope at the bottom of the world, walks a rickety balcony and surveys the homeless men below.

They say the meek will inherit the earth, but there is nothing meek about Henry Covington. He weighs, by his own admission, north of 450 pounds, his arms roll out from the sleeves of his T-shirt, and his broad chest spreads atop his broad belly, suggesting a powerful athlete once operated beneath all that flesh.

But whatever his strength, Covington - whom they call "The Rev"- can't hold up the building, and his Pilgrim Church/I Am My Brother's Keeper Ministries in Detroit is falling down around him. The roof has a giant hole. The front vestibule leaks rain. DTE Energy shut off the heat when the bills piled up - and how wouldn't they pile up when the hot air shoots up through a roof hole? - so now, during services, the congregation sits in a small area cordoned off by plastic sheeting, trying to stay warm.

But they get by. That is Covington's mantra. >>>