James' World 2

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The reverend’s intellectualism and distinctive brand of man-up Christianity draws a wide audience to his church, the largest in New York.

One Saturday in mid-September, the Rev. A. R. Bernard took to the blue carpeted stage of the Christian Cultural Center, the 96,000-square-foot megachurch he built 16 years ago at the edge of Starrett City, in Brooklyn, with his usual accouterments: a smartphone, a bottle of water and a large glass marker board that he would soon cover in bullet points drawn from the playbooks of marketing specialists. Mr. Bernard, 63, is tall and slender, and on this day he wore a distressed black leather jacket, a white polo shirt, bluejeans and white tennis shoes — casual Saturday attire. On Sunday, you would find him impeccably tailored in a light wool suit and tortoiseshell glasses, looking more like the banker he once was than the pastor of a congregation of nearly 40,000.

Cameras on telescoping booms were cantilevered over the stage, which is bland and massive, like the set of a daytime talk show. It was the final morning of a weeklong women’s conference, and the female audience of more than 1,000 took out their own devices and cued up their Bible apps, poised to take notes.

When the pastor speaks, everyone takes notes, not just the younger congregants.

His church, the largest in New York City, has long been considered a required stop on the way to City Hall and beyond. Having served as an adviser to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for all three terms, Mr. Bernard counts the billionaire among his many powerful friends. (In 2013, he flirted briefly with his own mayoral bid.) Mr. Bernard has met with the last two popes, and when Reuven Rivlin, the president of Israel, visited New York for the first time last year, he attended service at the church days before he addressed the United Nations. Mr. Bernard is a registered Republican, but he voted twice for Bill Clinton and twice for President Obama. The Clintons are old friends; they made sure to visit the church last spring in the days before the New York primary.

Mr. Bernard may have a reputation as a kingmaker, or “spiritual power broker,” as Bill Cunningham, the political consultant and former communications director for Mr. Bloomberg, described him recently, following a storied tradition of influential black pastors in New York City. But his tweedy intellectualism and distinctive brand of muscular, man-up Christianity also draw stars of pop music, film and sports to East New York.

He has been a spiritual adviser to Denzel and Pauletta Washington, and to the former pro football player Curtis Martin. Alonzo Mourning, a former pro basketball player, used to charter a plane to fly from Florida to attend Mr. Bernard’s services. Kenneth P. Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney, who died last week from cancer, had been a congregant for decades, and his memorial service — his homegoing, in church parlance — was to be celebrated at the Christian Cultural Center on Saturday.

“He’s made me a better person through his teachings,” Pauletta Washington said. “My husband as well.”

Once a Nation of Islam follower and teenage civil rights activist who read Alan Watts and Krishnamurti before he read the Bible, Mr. Bernard presents more like a professor than a bible thumper. That he is a motorcycle-riding family man and father of seven sons as well as a martial arts devotee — inked into Mr. Bernard’s forearm is a Chinese character that translates as “the unfettered mind” — adds to his allure.

On that Saturday morning in Brooklyn, Mr. Bernard was writing swiftly on his marker board while the women in the audience called out encouragements. “You have a responsibility to get smarter,” he told them. “If you’re the smartest one in your group, get a new group. Develop your strengths. Manage your weaknesses.” As always, Mr. Bernard closed with this refrain: “Did you get anything out of this today?”

Then Karen Bernard, his high school sweetheart and wife of 44 years, stepped onto the dais and swiftly upstaged him. Though she has multiple sclerosis, she waved away the stool a burly security guard had brought for her and stood next to her husband, a smartly dressed figure in black patent leather platform shoes with stiletto heels, a delicate diamond bracelet circling her ankle. As her husband described the pneumonia that hit him hard last month — unlike Hillary Clinton, he was benched for two solid weeks — and how his wife had cared for him, Ms. Bernard scanned the crowd, eyebrows eloquently aloft, and said with perfect comedic timing, “Isn’t that what you do with a baby?”

Mr. Bernard winced as the crowd roared its approval.

Ms. Bernard is the not-so-secret sauce in Mr. Bernard’s global ministry. Their long marriage has been a touchstone in his preaching, and he has used their marital struggles as teaching aids. Mr. Bernard will tell you that his work has often been his mistress, and Ms. Bernard will just as quickly tell you how mad that has made her, and for how long (on this morning, she pinched his arm hard to make her point, which delighted her rapt audience).

In the early 1980s, Ms. Bernard miscarried twins while Mr. Bernard was on the road, she said. She blamed him for being absent, and she stayed bitter, she said, for a solid decade. “I thought about leaving him,” she said, but with seven sons, “I had nowhere to go. And my sons needed their father. And I loved him.”

It was after the Saturday service, and the Bernards were in the large, formal dining room of Mr. Bernard’s office suite at the church, an elegant, carpeted apartment with gleaming mahogany furniture that recalls the West Wing. There was a cadre of security guards brandishing walkie-talkies, along with a sizable crowd of family members, church employees and congregants, all milling about the many rooms, which are organized around a large, oval-shaped central hall.

“She had cause to walk away,” Mr. Bernard said, “but she stayed, and I really went to work on myself. I discovered a lot of things about myself I didn’t like. I’m a workaholic. I was all in. That’s when I began to develop teachings about men and men’s responsibilities. She hung in there, and things began to change, and the church just began to explode.”

The two met in high school in East New York, when he was 15 and she was 16. Mr. Bernard’s mother, Adelina Bernard, had been a Panamanian sprinter who qualified for the 1952 Summer Olympics but wasn’t able to compete because an affair with an older man left her pregnant, after which he rejected her and their son. She and Mr. Bernard moved to New York City when he was 4.

As a fatherless, brainy teenager, he found a heady, male-centric blend of activism and spirituality in the Nation of Islam. But when he was a young associate at Banker’s Trust, and a colleague brought him and Ms. Bernard to hear Nicky Cruz, once the leader of the Mau Maus gang, speak about his own conversion to Christianity, Mr. Bernard’s world was upended.

He and Ms. Bernard began to host a Bible study in their Williamsburg kitchen, and it wasn’t long before they figured out that Mr. Bernard was very good at preaching. A deft speaker who uses traditional pastoral tropes like call and response, Mr. Bernard crafts his 45-minute sermons like mash-ups of a university lecture and a Baptist revival, though Mr. Bernard’s church is pointedly nondenominational.

“Coming from a heavy black radical activism, to embrace Jesus was a major thing for me,” he said. “Christianity was the religion of the oppressor, so I had to work through what I knew historically.” Investigating the religion and its central text as an academic would, he began to realize, Mr. Bernard said, “that I had an ability to articulate what I was reading and studying in a way that was not common within any denomination. I also realized that banking was not going to be my life’s calling.”

By the mid-1990s, his church was so popular that it had rapidly expanded from a congregation of 685 to more than 10,000. People came from all five boroughs, as they do today, some traveling hours to do so, and were folded into three Sunday services held in a former Key Food supermarket building in Brownsville, around which lines would start to form as early as 4 a.m. Nightclub goers on their way home grew curious about the crowds, which further swelled the church’s ranks. You might run into Cheryl James and Sandra Denton, two of the members of Salt-N-Pepa, the hip-hop trio; Angela Bassett; or Kim Cattrall, who played the sultry publicist on “Sex and the City.”

In the late 1990s, Disque Deane, the real estate investor and leader of the partnership behind Starrett City, the country’s largest federally subsidized housing complex, approached Mr. Bernard with a proposal for a 15-acre parcel on the edge of his development. As the pastor recalled, “He said, ‘I have a billion-dollar complex I need to preserve, and I’ve been studying you and I want you to build a church.” Mr. Deane did not finance the deal, Mr. Bernard added; the church raised the money and bought 11½ acres. When the $12.6 million complex was nearly complete, Ms. Bernard looked around and told her husband, “It’s not big enough.”

Like the Rev. Floyd Flake, senior pastor of the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral in Queens, and the Rev. Calvin Butts, who leads the 200-year-old Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Mr. Bernard now commands an enormous, culturally diverse congregation made up of parishioners traveling from all over the state, Mr. Cunningham said.

“So he crosses a lot of lines, a lot of boundaries,” Mr. Cunningham added. “If you’re a politician and you have a message about jobs or the economy or crime and you’re addressing that megachurch, your message will ripple out to all these different communities.”

Initially, Mr. Bernard’s sermons about male responsibility were attracting a lot of young men, which in turn, brought in more women. Church congregations typically skew more female than male, but at one point more than half of the Christian Cultural Center’s membership was male. (Now the split is 60/40 female to male, like many college campuses.)

The meat of those sermons is collected in “Four Things Women Want From a Man,” Mr. Bernard’s second book, out last May. It’s a slight book, as self-help primers tend to be, but there are a few pearls. Mr. Bernard uses the bible’s first couple, Adam and Eve, as his central metaphor. Adam, alone at first, is a clueless workaholic; Eve, created by God to help Adam get his act together, has better people skills and can multitask, even though Adam thinks she’s a nag.

Man up, men, Mr. Bernard exhorts, or you’ll lose her. Echoing animal behaviorists, he suggests women offer positive reinforcement if their menfolk behave properly.

Mr. Martin, the former football star, is one male congregant who has been avidly following Mr. Bernard’s teachings; he said the pastor is both his friend and a father figure. “He is the single most influential male in my adult life,” he said. Now 43, Mr. Martin began attending his church in the late 1990s, when he signed with the Jets. “A friend of mine said, ‘You’ve got to hear this guy speak,’” he said. “And I just kept going back. I’m a very practical person, and I think he has a tremendous gift for making what is complicated extremely simple. He can talk about God in a way that makes you attracted to God so you don’t get lost in all the rules and regulations.”

Mr. Martin brought his friend Carra Wallace, now chief diversity officer in New York City’s office of the comptroller. She was coming off a divorce — “I like to say I married late and divorced early,” she said — and was attracted to Mr. Bernard’s teaching method: “You take notes, you’re able to study and think about it.” These days, Ms. Wallace attends the 8 a.m. service, an hour’s train ride from her home in Battery Park City. “You get your message in, and then you have your day.”

Mr. Bernard, who is the chief executive of his church, as well as its senior pastor (his six-figure salary is determined by a board), is at heart a practical evangelist. When it was reported in the run-up to the presidential election in 2012 that African-American ministers were encouraging their congregations not to vote because of President Obama’s position on gay marriage, Mr. Bernard bristled at being lumped into that group.

“Let me give you three powerful reasons why I would never tell my congregation not to vote: Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney,” he told a reporter on MSNBC, referring to the young civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. “Don’t let same-sex marriage be the deciding factor.” He went on to give a meticulous, and theologically agile, mini-lecture on the separation of church and state, on why same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue, and how his own faith nonetheless requires that he obey its tenets.

Last year, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, Mr. Bernard delivered a sermon about how societal norms and laws change over time. “I used the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit as one example,” he said. “That’s the law, but most people are doing 65, so that’s the norm. If they hit 95, which is the extreme, the police will pull them over. Over time, cultural practices can move from extreme to norm to law.”

Change is a process, not an event, he likes to say.

This election year has come with its own challenges. In June, when Donald J. Trump’s team invited a group of evangelicals to advise the candidate, Mr. Bernard was among them. Mr. Bernard has since stepped away from that role, he said, because he felt more like “window dressing,” as he put it, than a genuine adviser. The two had met years ago, weirdly, at Maya Angelou’s 80th birthday party, where Mr. Bernard was the keynote speaker; the setting was Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which perhaps explains the unlikely pairing of that presidential hopeful with the poet and civil right activist.

“If I’m going to advise you,” Mr. Bernard said, “it’s because I’m going to really, genuinely advise you. O.K., politics is a weird game, I get it. But when I found out that no matter what we were saying, he continued the same path, I said: ‘You know what? I need to step back and remain neutral.’”

Ms. Bernard, with typical candor, said, “I never met Trump, but Trump just has issues, and it’s obvious he has issues.”

Two weeks ago, when Elena George, a celebrity makeup artist, was preparing Donna Brazile, the veteran political analyst now serving as interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, for her role on CNN’s round table after the first presidential debate, they phoned Mr. Bernard to join them in a prayer. “I told Donna, ‘We need reinforcement,’” Ms. George recalled.

“He quoted scripture,” Ms. Brazile said. “And it was helpful.”

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