On Sunday mornings in Memphis, just down the road from Graceland, the most seductive voice in soul music history puts on a black robe, steps behind a pulpit, and goes to work. The congregation at the Full Gospel Tabernacle is a cross-section of the city itself — Black and white, old and young, dressed in Sunday best or jeans and khakis. Their pastor preaches a while, then he sings. Then he preaches some more. Nobody in that room seems to find this strange. To them, he isn’t the man from the posters. He’s the Reverend. And the Reverend shows up every week.
Sunday Morning on Hale Road
Al Green has now been preaching longer than he was a pop star. He was ordained in 1976 and established the Full Gospel Tabernacle that same year, buying the church building on Hale Road in Memphis — legend has it he paid for it using a blank piece of paper as a check. Nearly fifty years later, he is still there: Sunday services, Wednesday Bible study, and, by many accounts, daily rounds visiting the sick and doing charity work around the city.
Ask Memphians about the Tabernacle and a certain pride creeps into their voices. This isn’t a celebrity church — there are no velvet ropes, no VIP pews, no backstage passes. It’s a working congregation in a working neighborhood, and its pastor treats it that way. The robe isn’t a costume. It’s a uniform, and he’s been reporting for duty for nearly half a century.
Those who have attended describe a service like nothing else in American church life. Green blends the hip-grinding showmanship of the soul singer with the fire of a Pentecostal preacher, moving between sermon and song so naturally that the line disappears. A gold cross hangs from a long chain around his neck. When the spirit moves him, the falsetto that once sold millions of records rises up — only now it’s aimed at heaven. The man who once sang about love as if it were a spiritual condition now sings about the spiritual condition directly.
The Night That Changed Everything
Every conversion story has its crisis, and Green’s is a matter of painful public record. On October 18, 1974, at the absolute peak of his fame, his girlfriend Mary Woodson scalded him with a pot of boiling grits in his Memphis home and then took her own life. Green suffered severe burns across his back, stomach, and arms, injuries that required skin grafts and weeks in Baptist Memorial Hospital.
Green has never treated the tragedy as gossip, and neither should we. What matters for his story is what he did with it. He called it a wake-up call. In the years that followed, he spoke of Woodson not with bitterness but with a grief that never quite left him. “I loved her then, I love her now, and I’ll always love her,” he once said. She had told him, before the end, that he was going to have a church. At the time he laughed it off — he was a pop singer, not a preacher. She saw something in him he couldn’t yet see in himself.
The Fall That Sealed It
The ministry didn’t happen all at once. Green kept recording secular music through the late seventies, though his heart was clearly drifting. Then, in 1979, while performing in Cincinnati, he fell from the stage and injured himself. He took it as a message — God’s way, he felt, of telling him to hurry up and choose. Within a year he had walked away from pop stardom to devote himself fully to his church and to gospel music. Friends from those years describe a man visibly unburdening — the touring, the pressure, the double life falling away like a heavy coat. What replaced it was routine: sermons to write, a congregation to shepherd, a God to serve. He has never described the decision as brave. He describes it as obvious — the only choice that ever really made sense.
It was not a small sacrifice. He was abandoning the most successful soul career of the decade at an age when most singers are just hitting their stride. But Green has always described it less as giving something up than as finally going home. Gospel was his first language, after all — the music he sang as a boy with his brothers in the Greene Brothers, before Jackie Wilson ever tempted him away. The church didn’t take Al Green from the world. It gave him back to the place he started.
The Gospel Decade
What followed was one of the most remarkable second acts in American music. From 1981 to 1989, Green recorded a series of gospel albums — six of them for the Christian label Myrrh Records — and the industry that had crowned him the king of secular seduction now watched him conquer sacred music too. The title song of his first gospel album, 1980’s “The Lord Will Make a Way,” won him the first of eight Grammy Awards in the soul gospel categories. He would win so many, so regularly, that the gospel Grammys of the eighties practically belonged to him.
He didn’t cloister himself, either. In 1982 he co-starred with Patti LaBelle in the Broadway musical “Your Arms Too Short to Box with God.” In 1984, director Robert Mugge released the documentary “Gospel According to Al Green,” capturing the Reverend mid-sermon, mid-song, mid-transformation. In 1985 he reunited with Willie Mitchell for the gospel album “He Is the Light,” and in 1987 “Soul Survivor” gave him “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” — a number 22 R&B hit, his first Top 40 R&B single in a decade, sung for the Lord but grooving like the old days. The message was unmistakable: you could take the boy out of soul music, but you couldn’t take soul music out of the boy — even when he was singing it to Jesus.
By 1988, the wall between his two worlds had begun to crumble. His duet with Annie Lennox, “Put a Little Love in Your Heart,” returned him to the pop charts — and proved what his congregation had known all along: the voice didn’t care what you called the song. It only cared whether you meant it.
A Father of Seven
Behind the pulpit, there is a large and complicated family. Green married his backing vocalist Shirley Kyles in 1977; the marriage produced three daughters — Alva, Rubi, and Kora — before ending in divorce in 1983 after a painful and well-documented split. In all, Green has seven children: sons Chris Burse Sr., Al Green Jr., and Trevor, and daughters Alva, Rubi, Kora, and Kala.
Those who have interviewed him about his family describe a proud, doting father. Years ago he happily reported that his older daughters, then college students, were beginning their own recording projects, and he described his younger children with the delight of a man who sees himself in each of them — one a bookworm like him, one a showboat like him, one headstrong like him. Fame gave him many things, but listen to him talk and you realize: the children were the point all along. The gold records gather dust. The children gather round. He knows which matters.
The Ministry of Showing Up
What does a soul legend actually do on a Tuesday? According to those who know, Green’s weeks are full of the unglamorous work of pastoring: counseling, visiting the sick, charity work, keeping the doors of the Tabernacle open. His offices near the church include a recording studio and rehearsal hall, and he has continued to record and tour through the decades — but the center of gravity is unmistakable. It is the church, the congregation, the community.
There is something deeply moving about the image of one of the most famous voices on earth spending his days on hospital visits no camera will ever see. Stardom is about being watched. Ministry, as Green practices it, is about watching over. He made the trade deliberately, and by every available account, he has never regretted it. And here’s the thing the cameras miss: the Tabernacle’s doors stay open because its pastor keeps them open — not with money, though there’s been plenty of that, but with presence. Week after week, year after year, the most famous voice in soul music shows up for people the world will never hear about. That is the ministry. Everything else is commentary.
Forgiveness as a Life’s Work
If there is a single thread running through Al Green’s second life, it is forgiveness — given and, perhaps harder, received. He forgave the woman whose actions scarred his body and haunted his conscience. He has spoken with compassion about the people who hurt him and, by his own admission in sworn testimony years ago, about the ways he himself failed the people who loved him. His marriage to Shirley ended amid mutual accusations and real pain, and Green has never pretended those years were simple.
But listen to him preach, and you hear a man who believes grace is not a theory. It’s a practice, renewed weekly, sometimes daily. The grits, the burns, the broken marriage, the fall from the stage — in Green’s telling, these are not tragedies that happened to him. They are the curriculum that made him a pastor. “Take me to the river,” he once sang, and in the end, the river took him. It’s why his services feel less like performances than homecomings. The man in the pulpit isn’t preaching down to anyone. He’s testifying alongside them — a fellow traveler who found his way through, and comes back every Sunday to show the rest of us the road.
Still Preaching
The honors of his later years — the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, eleven Grammys, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2014 — sit lightly on him. He lives quietly near Memphis, preaches most Sundays, and still performs the old songs with undiminished sweetness when the occasion calls. The setlists haven’t changed much — “Let’s Stay Together,” “Love and Happiness,” the songs that made him immortal — but the context has. Sung by a man in his seventies who has buried friends, raised children, and preached thousands of sermons, they sound less like seductions now and more like benedictions. The voice, everyone agrees, is still there: pure quicksilver, untouched by time. When he took his seat at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2014, his fellow legends sang his songs back to him — the highest compliment the music world knows how to pay. He accepted it the way he’s accepted everything since 1979: graciously, briefly, eyes on something beyond the stage.
There are two Al Greens in the American imagination: the silk-voiced lover of the seventies and the robed preacher of the decades since. The truth is simpler and stranger — there was only ever one of him, a man who understood, earlier than most, that love and faith are not opposites but the same force wearing different clothes. Whether he was whispering into a microphone at Royal Studios or raising his hands over a congregation on Hale Road, the message never changed. Love is sacred. Forgiveness is real. And the Reverend, all these years later, is still showing up to say so.
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