c. 2004 Religion News Service

FLINT, Mich. Thomas Tarpley was only 4 when he got drunk on homemade wine. By the time he was in his mid-20s, the high school dropout had tried just about every kind of booze and drugs as a full-blown alcoholic.

Today, Tarpley, 62, is pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Flint. “I spent 20-some years out on the street, drinking, drugging, abusing and addicted to almost everything out there you could name,” said Tarpley. “But I was always functional, always able to maintain a job.”

It was while he worked as a highly successful insurance agent that Tarpley said the fun ended.

“I didn’t enjoy what I was doing,” he reflected in his office at the church. “And then I just had this feeling that I should be doing something else, but I couldn’t put my hand on it.

“People started to come to me to do certain things in ministry, which I did not want to do because I had a definite fear of speaking in public and preaching and things like that.”

With him and wife, Gloria, bringing in a six-figure income, Tarpley said he started accepting invitations to speak despite his doubts.

“So one day I woke up and said (to God), `OK, if you want it to happen, you make it happen,”’ Tarpley said. “And he did. It was just unbelievable the things that started happening in my life.”

He enrolled at Cleary College in Ypsilanti and came out with a bachelor’s degree in 1997 with a 3.7 grade-point average before going on to Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky and earning a master of divinity degree in 2001.

Each weekend during that time, Tarpley made a 1,000-mile round trip from Kentucky to Detroit, where he was supervising pastor of Cass Community United Methodist Church in that city’s tough Cass Corridor area.

Although the Tarpleys took a huge pay cut Tarpley made $10,800 a year at Cass while in the seminary, and his wife quit her job to work for much less at Asbury they say they became debt-free in 31/2 years.

Tarpley became pastor of Trinity about a year ago and in May was ordained an elder in a ceremony at Adrian College.

It was a long road to sobriety and ordination for the Tennessee-born clergyman.

When he and his brother, who died at 39 after wrapping his car around a utility pole after a night of drinking, were young, their parents separated and the boys went with their mother to live in Pontiac, Mich., before they were sent to live with their grandparents while their mother worked to try to afford having them live at home.

That’s when Tarpley’s older brother, Carlyle, brewed wine after watching his grandfather whip up a batch.

“That was the beginning of a trail that would lead to years of pain and suffering, ups and downs and finally the realization that I am an alcoholic who cannot drink one drink of alcohol if I expect to lead a normal life,” Tarpley later wrote in a paper for college titled “My Spiritual Journey.”

When he was just six months from high school graduation, Tarpley got angry at a teacher, knocked him down and walked out. It wasn’t until he was in the Army, from 1964 to 1966, that he earned a general equivalency diploma while always having a cabinet full of alcohol in his room, he said.

At 17, Tarpley said, he managed a Pontiac pool room that doubled as an after-hours gambling joint. He landed in the Army at age 20 and married in 1968. That marriage lasted only about six years. He married Gloria in 1975.

“I was a very shy and an intimidated individual and the only way to get through life was to drink because I could hide behind that,” Tarpley said.

“I didn’t like me as a person. If I used these mind-altering drugs, I could be who I wanted to be.”

Tarpley says he was never arrested, but he recalls going along with others on robberies, home lootings and other crimes.

Tarpley, who is in his 16th year of sobriety, still attends Alcoholics Anonymous sessions regularly and hopes to start a program at Trinity.

“The people know my history,” he said. “I made sure that I told them when I got here.”

He has strong support in the congregation.

“I think he’s cool because of the way he has turned his life around,” said Isaiah Roberson, 14.

Keffie Deen, a neighborhood resident who has been attending the church for about a year, said Tarpley is a good communicator. “He relates his experiences fully for the people to see and lets us know that `God has brought me this far.”’

For his part, Tarpley said: “I’ve learned to like myself. That’s probably the best feeling I have had other than my ordination last month.

“I guess God used a lot of things to get me to like Alcoholics Anonymous and church, the seminary and a lot of other things. I feel that everything that happened to me was for a reason.”

DEA/PH END JAKSA