The Full Gospel Tabernacle, at 787 Hale Road in Whitehaven, about two miles from Graceland, is the church Al Green bought in 1976, while he was still a working soul star. A white building with a green roof and a central steeple, it holds a twelve-foot mural of the Rapture that shows the Memphis skyline. By the Encyclopedia of Arkansas's account he paid for it with a blank sheet of paper as a check. The story usually told about the church gets its order wrong. Green had been born again in 1973. On October 18, 1974, Mary Woodson burned him with a pot of hot grits at his Memphis home and then took her own life. His co-author Davin Seay said the event crystallized a need to move on, but it was not what turned him toward God, and he went on recording secular soul for several more years. He was ordained around the time he bought the church. The break came in 1979, when he fell from a stage in Ohio and took it as a message. He gave up pop and spent the next decade singing gospel and preaching. He did not fully return to secular music until the 2000s. Born Albert Greene in Forrest City, Arkansas, in 1946, he had come up through Willie Mitchell's Royal Studios in South Memphis, about eight miles north. The church remains an active congregation, and services there have long drawn visitors from far outside Whitehaven.
Getting there
35.0262, -90.0379
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