Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301210266
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAULA MONAREZ LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
ENTERTAINER DELLA REESE REVELS IN NEW ROLE AS MINISTER
As she stepped to the podium, her white ensemble shimmering in the lights, Della Reese appeared ready to belt out a smoky jazz tune.Instead, the 61-year-old singer-actress and former star of the short-lived television sitcom "Royal Family" surveyed the crowd and began to speak.
"What you sow is what you reap," the entertainer shouted to an audience of about 100, sitting attentively in folding chairs in an unheated building near Culver City. "Let me say it again. What you sow is what you reap. Everything comes full circle. So if you've stepped on somebody's toes, you'd better be sure someone is going to do the same to you."
Della Reese the singer, Della Reese the actress is also Della Reese the minister. And the first Sunday of the year she was preaching to her congregation at the Understanding Principles for Better Living, a church she founded in July.
"I never intended to become a minister," she said while sitting behind a glass-topped desk in her Bel Air home that she shares with her husband-manager Franklin Thomas Lett and seven dogs. "I wanted to teach these principles. But I had so many requests for people wanting me to officiate weddings and funerals and such that I finally asked God and he told me to do it."
Reared in a Southern Baptist church in Detroit, Reese, the youngest of five girls and one boy, is a self-proclaimed rebel.
"I was put out of every church I went to because I questioned everything," she chuckled as she recalled her childhood. "I would join the choir and then after awhile start asking questions. I couldn't understand why they made God sound so fierce and angry, making it sound like he was out to get me, and that I had to follow all these rules. I knew he was loving and liked me the way I was."
Reese moved in and out of churches until she finally stopped going altogether when she was in her 20s.
"What was the point?" she said. "I just couldn't agree with what they were teaching."
But all that changed in 1979 after a blood clot ruptured in her brain.
"The doctors said I was going to die," said Reese, as she showed the area where the aneurysm occurred. "They told me I would be blind. They told me I wouldn't be able to walk properly again . . . "
She paused, leaned back in her chair and smiled broadly.
"Well, I didn't die," she said as she erupted in a boisterous laugh. "I can see just as well as anybody else. And I walk just fine, thank you. I knew then that I had to tell the world. So I decided to become a teacher."
She credits her recovery to God and the principles she learned through the teachings of the Rev. Johnnie Colemon, who founded the Universal Foundation for Better Living, a nondenominational "new thought" movement based in Chicago.
Reese had attended one of Colemon's services while she was living in Chicago and performing in a play in the late '70s.
"I was amazed. Here was this woman saying everything I had believed all along. That God loved me and I could have and do everything I wanted. She got to me," Reese said.
She began attending services every chance she got and took a few classes at the Johnnie Colemon Institute. After she suffered her aneurysm, she used the principles learned from Colemon.
"I told myself I wouldn't die. God is life. I knew he would repair it."
Following her recovery, Reese took more courses at the institute, and in 1984 began classes at her Bel Air home. Soon it was wall-to-wall people, she said.
"That's when they began asking me to officiate different events," she said.
It took Reese four more years of studying at the institute before she became an ordained minister in 1987.
"I couldn't go full time because of my career," said Reese, who earned a gold record in 1959 for "Don't You Know" and has also been nominated for an Emmy and a Grammy.
Her church is one of 22 affiliated with Colemon's Universal Foundation for Better Living.
Reese receives no salary from the church. In fact, she puts a lot of her own money in to keep things going, she said.
After conducting services in rented churches around the city, she and her congregation finally found and bought a building.
Her members said despite Reese's celebrity status, she is very reachable and a good minister.
"Usually you call a pastor and you'll get the deacon, the elder and, even, his secretary, before you get him," said Gwen Stuart-Singleton, 44, of Los Angeles, who has attended the church since July. "Della isn't like that. You can reach her 24 hours day. She's there whenever you need her. She's not afraid to give you her telephone number."
Stuart-Singleton said she was hesitant at first about joining the congregation of a popular entertainer.
"I thought it might be a looky-look church because she is so well-known," Stuart-Singleton said. "I also wondered how an entertainer was going to tell me about God. But she busted all those bubbles. I had no idea she was so versed in the Bible."
Reese said people might drop in at a service because of who she is, but she doesn't mind.
"I don't care what brings them in," she said. "As long as they get the message."
But her ties to the music industry do allow Reese to have a professional-sounding choir and band. Her fourth husband, Lett, sings in the choir. Together they write and put together most of the music for the church.
There have been celebrities who have visited the church, including the cast of her television sitcom "Royal Family," a few members of "Different World," "The Prince of Bel Air" and others, she said.
"The entertainment industry has accepted me as a minister," she said. "In fact, we used to have classes on `Royal Family.' Everyone was very receptive."