Allan Appel photo
Pastor Harold Brooks (right) and Rosie Hoke.
To hear Rosie Hoke tell it, Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church — a century old this year — was born with a miracle.
The year was 1923, two years before Hoke was born, and her older sister went suddenly blind. None of the New Haven docs could help. The desperate parents, walking downtown one day, noticed a sign for a revival meeting in a storefront window. The preacher could both preach and heal.
And it worked!
A century later, Hoke, now 98 and the Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church’s (BHC) oldest member, told that story of the beginnings of the long-standing Dixwell church.
The occasion was a Sunday service celebrating the centennial of what has become a thriving institution helping to anchor the Dixwell neighborhood not only spiritually but also as a significant builder of affordable and senior housing.
Sunday early evening at the church, on 782 Orchard St., Hoke’s was one of many stories that percolated through a festive and hallelujah-filled celebratory service.
The service was one of many events unfolding through the end of October to mark the anniversary, including many of what are being called “homecoming events” like inviting back a bevy of preachers spawned by BHC as well as the children and grandchildren of pioneering families like Hoke’s.
Church's Social Integration Program Executive Director Blanche Reeves Tucker
“As I think on a hundred years,” we don’t appreciate our past sufficiently, said Pastor Harold Brooks, the third generation leader, since 2021, of BHC after his father Bishop Theodore Brooks and grandfather, George Brooks.
He sketched for this reporter the origins of the church in the sudden arising and thriving of a new expression of Christianity centered on physical and emotional expression of the spirit. It was called Pentecostalism and emerged from what has become known as the years-long Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles beginning in 1905 and making its way to New Haven by the early 1920s.
Many of its practices, subscribed to by white people as well as Black, like giving full physical expression to a descent of the spirit into a worshipper’s body and soul and speaking in tongues, were controversial. “Pentecost was not widely accepted,” Brooks said. “We are standing on the shoulders of giants. These were pioneers.”
Today Pentecostalism is growing worldwide and Beulah’s regular Sunday church attendance averages 150 (with a lot of participants on Zoom). That’s still a tad down from the pre-Covid days, but with many young families recently joining the church, Brooks added.
Recollections and visions of the founding families were very much on the mind of Sunday’s invited pastor, Alan Thorne, who married into one of BHC’s pioneer families, became an assistant pastor at BHC under current pastor Harold Brooks’s father Bishop Theodore Brooks, and now heads a sister Pentecostal church in Norwalk, Grace Mercy and Peace Ministries.
“Make some noise,” Pastor Thorne said as he assumed the pulpit, after Brooks’ introduction, and he looked out on a sea of familiar faces. “Jump up and down, do some flips if you have to. Do whatever the Holy Ghost wants. God’s work is on an individual level. He’s always working something in you, or working something out of you,” Thorne preached. “Come on, Beulah Heights! One hundred years!”
Remembering or hearing of the previous locations of the church on Broad Street, Admiral, then Goffe at Webster, but always in the Dixwell neighborhood, Rosie Hoke said, “What keeps me coming back is that the church is my second home, whenever you enter there is rejoicing and the spirit of God.”
Yet there is another kind of home – affordable, in the neighborhood, good for young families and for the elderly and built by the church’s development arm – that is also central to the BHC mission.
What makes BHC unusual is that they were early on developing affordable housing in the neighborhood establishing in 1994 the Beulah Land Development Corporation. Over the past two decades it has developed about 50 units of affordable housing, said Pastor Brooks.
That includes razing and building anew or gut-renovating most of the formerly dilapidated buildings on the west side of Orchard down to Henry Street.
At the other end of Orchard, the church also redeveloped as affordable rental senior housing The Walter S. Brooks Elderly Homes at Ormont Court. They’re named for Walter Brooks, Bishop Theodore Brooks’s brother, a builder and former state representative who was instrumental in obtaining blighted properties on Orchard and fulfilling the church’s vision of affordable shelter.
And the newest project is at Joe Grate’s Lot, where Orchard angles in to Dixwell, where 69 units, 55 of which are planned to be affordable, is in progress.
Affordable shelter and home ownership make for strong families, and as churches make for strong families too, that’s why BHC is an affordable housing builder, said Brooks, whose twin brother Darrel is the chief officer of the development corporation.
And there’s a good Biblical text for that too, Pastor Brooks explained: Jeremiah 29:4 – 7, where “the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ‘Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.’”
Even while being “disciplined,” Pastor Brooks added, the defeated Judeans must “build strong homes to occupy even in exile –the understated metaphor is also that this isn’t the final stop. Ultimately it’s heaven.”
Meanwhile in the church’s spacious sanctuary, Alan Thorne called out to the congregants, “I pray, Lord, you will meet us right where we are. Grab your neighbor’s hand and say, I’m praising God for you.”
Pastor Thorne surrounded by his uncle and aunt Robert Thorne, Jr. and Cynthia Thorne
He asked everyone to turn to the Book of Samuel, chapter 20, fascinating stuff about how a people transitions from judges to kings, how a king like Saul just doesn’t have the leadership skills, but then David comes along, and he does, along with, of course, the anointing of God.
Who is an effective leader? How to make transition work? And a very appropriate lesson to preach on the occasion of a centennial.
For more information about the line-up of centennial preachers and other events culminating at the end of October, go to the church site.
It is a wonderful organization meeting the needs of the community for decades. 55 years years ago we sold our home in Westville to the church as a home for Bishop George Brooks. This was at a time when housing discrimination was supposed to be illegal, but was still prevalent. Neighbors were furious with us and tried to buy it for more money. We honored the deal (we were not leaving the neighborhood, just needed a different style home without steps). After getting to know the Brooks family our former neighbors all changed their tune and were glad they had moved in.