Chesapeake pastor answers his calling, day or night

The Rev. Jake Manley had seen all kinds of hurt in 32 years of pastoring.

There were girls who exchanged sex for drugs and men who toted guns on neighborhood streets and got high while their families went hungry. There were mothers who buried teenage sons and mothers who testified for sons who stood accused.

Manley had seen miracles, too, and South Norfolk seemed due for one near the end of a particularly deadly summer.

Now a man stood inside his church in Chesapeake, a phone pressed to his ear, vowing to get even for the death of a friend.

Manley had known Calvin Coley for a just a few weeks. He had been ordered by his probation officer to serve at Bethany Baptist Church.

Coley vacuumed floors and cleaned church vans and moved furniture - whatever was asked of him. Still, he was angry.

Manley, 85, approached Coley like he had approached so many anguished and angry men before him.

Son, Manley began, vengeance is the Lord's. If you do anything to this guy, that's another mother that's hurt. That's another life we can't bring back.

Manley sits in a spacious, brightly lit church office and feels the October rain in his bad knee. He is between pre-marriage counseling appointments.

"I won't marry anybody without two," he said. "I don't like divorces, and I don't like men who don't take care of their wives."

The revered reverend of Bethany Baptist Church, membership 2,500 or so, has been married to Audrey for 64 years. Sixty-five, Manley said, if he lives to see Dec. 11.

He does not move as fast as he once did. But he still ministers on Sundays and spends seven or eight hours a day at church and takes calls at all hours of the night. When two young men were shot to death within hours of each other on July 1, Manley hosted crime meetings in the church's vast sanctuary.

He meets gang members alone in dark parking lots when they ask for him, and he goes to homes of strangers when they call.

"Those boys and girls are human beings. I feel it is my obligation to go," Manley said.

Manley grew up near Ahoskie, N.C., in a place called Rich Square - "nothing but a plantation kind of town," he said.

Life there was not easy for him and his sharecropper parents, just a generation removed from slavery. They raised cotton and corn and tobacco and got food and clothes in return. Manley shook his head, remembering.

"It's tough on a plantation, honey. It's tough. Just think about working for no pay, from sunlight to sun dark, for food and a couple of pairs of overalls. You could only go to school two months a year - January and February. In March, the boss made us go back to work."

An aunt born into slavery told stories that still weigh on him after all these years, stories about women who had no say over their bodies and the husbands and the fathers who couldn't protect them.

Manley, the fifth of eight children, worked alongside his family in the fields and worshipped on Sundays because his mother insisted. Church suited him; Manley was just 14 when he became superintendent of the church's youth department. He was still a child, he said, when he first felt the call to minister.

But a life centered around God seemed dull. He wanted out of Rich Square.

Manley left home at 17 without telling his father. He is still sorry, still hesitant to confess that part of the story. He joined a brother in Portsmouth and worked in a shipyard.

"It was dirty, hard work," Manley said. "But being unlearned, I didn't know how to fill out an application. They made me what they wanted me to be."

World War II had begun by then, and Manley was drafted into the Navy. He traveled to Florida and Kansas and Guam and the Philippines and so many other places he can no longer recall them all.

"Wherever the airplanes needed work, that's where we went. Not that I worked on the airplanes," Manley said. "My job was to feed the officers. That's all we could do in those days. You probably don't remember those dark days."

He paused before going on. "It wasn't because people were bad. It's just what they believed in."

Manley spent two decades in the Navy. He and Audrey raised five children. He worked at a bank sorting and delivering mail - a job that, at last, required no hard labor.

Throughout, he felt the call.

"Every night, I was having dreams," Manley said. "I didn't want to accept it. I ran from it."

Then came the morning of April 12, 1974.

Manley, at the wheel of a tractor-trailer on U.S. 460 in Ivor, struck a school bus full of children. The impact was so great the bus seats moved, The Virginian-Pilot reported at the time. The door flung open and one child was tossed out and more than a dozen went to the hospital.

Manley, who was not charged, remembers lying in a hospital bed with a busted knee, his leg stuck straight out.

"The Lord came to me," he recalled, "just as clear as you sit before me now. He said, 'I'm not going to let one of those kids die.' I don't know if I was dreaming or not."

Manley said he started crying.

The 20-year-old bus driver, her view blocked by a big tree that morning, was crossing three lanes of traffic, according to news accounts. Manley had tried to swerve, striking the bus behind the driver's seat.

All the children recovered.

Manley gave his first sermon by year's end.

By the late 1980s, the pastor had been touched by the effects of drug abuse and violence.

"He was walking the streets and sidewalks of neighborhoods alone," said Lin Hill, director of South Norfolk Christian Outreach Ministry. Some "told him he was crazy, that he was going to get killed. He stuck to it."

Manley had led a congregation of a dozen at the start of his career, worrying that a lack of education left him ill-suited. But he said he knew his church must be a refuge that went beyond Sunday services.

In 1988, Manley began Showers of Blessings, a ministry that has since served thousands. Many had been locked up; some are recovering addicts.

Some are ordered by the court into the program. They share stories and read from worn Bibles and listen to sermons geared especially toward them.

"Our program calls for changing the way you think," Manley told a mother seeking help for her son one recent afternoon. "We need to know everything. He needs to be as open as possible with all his charges."

"He wants to get his life together," the mother said.

Showers of Blessings and two other Bethany Baptist ministries - My Brother's Keeper and My Sister's Keeper, which help people released from prison start their lives over - provide needed services, Chesapeake Commonwealth's Attorney Nancy Parr said.

"He is a man who has very deep faith and practices it in every walk of his life," she said. "He acts on his beliefs and he gives so much back to the community."

Wanda Bernard-Bailey, Chesapeake's deputy city manager, met Manley two years ago when he was named to the city's gang task force.

Police were enforcing laws. Prosecutors were trying cases. Manley, Bernard-Bailey said, was out there talking to gang members and drug dealers.

"They probably have been hurt or harmed emotionally, and they don't trust easily," she said. "He knows that they trust him. His knowledge gave us a perspective that maybe we wouldn't have had."

Manley has accompanied some participants of his Showers of Blessings program to court. At times, he has spoken to judges on their behalf.

He has paid for funerals. And he has convinced some gang members to turn over guns and attend church on Sunday mornings.

The killing that seemed to begin all of a sudden the first morning in July of this year showed no sign of stopping.

Over the next three months, five young men had been killed. Manley worried it would continue as long as people like Calvin Coley thought about taking revenge.

Son, Manley told him, if you can stop this child from being killed, please do it. If you listen to me, I guarantee God will work in your life.

Coley put his head in hands and began to cry.

"He cried and cried," Manley said.

Coley called his friends and told them to put down their guns.

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5208, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com