The church started without its pastor.

Gospel chords welcomed the congregation into the sunlit sanctuary of Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church. Inside, the ceilings stretched toward heaven and a massive speaker system sent music spilling into nearby Eastlake Park. The hymns trickled through the campus, down a tile hallway and into a narrow dressing room, where Pastor Terry E. Mackey stood with a roomful of volunteer assistants, coating his throat with hot tea and searching his schedule for five free minutes.

"So you have the service here, and then you're going to the East Valley," said Tonjua Sibley, a nurse practitioner who spent Sundays monitoring her pastor's health, even though he always felt fine.

"And then the brunch," Mackey added. It was the final Sunday of Black History Month, and the church chose to celebrate with a buffet and a jazz quartet.

"The brunch," Sibley said, as if she'd forgotten. "Are you going to get any down time?"

Mackey sipped his Starbucks and shook his head. Between sermons, he knew, he had just enough time to shed one sweat-soaked shirt and pull on the next dry one. Then he'd climb into the church van and ride across the Valley, toward another group of near-strangers who looked at him and thought of the man he’d been hired to replace.

It had been almost three months since Mackey moved from Houston to Pilgrim Rest, a 4,000-member church that anchors Phoenix's black Christian community. He brought a stack of speaking awards and a reputation as one of America’s most dynamic young preachers.

But in Phoenix, he's known first as the pastor who came after Bishop Alexis A. Thomas.

The 50-year-old Thomas died unexpectedly in January 2018, ripping a hole in the city's civil-rights coalition and the church he'd led for 33 years.

Now, Mackey labors under the legacy of a man he never met.

He preaches from the Bishop's stage. He sits in the Bishop's office chair.

Congregants drop by during office hours to share their favorite stories. They listen for hints of the Bishop in Mackey's rumbling preacher's voice. They see the Bishop in the way he jabs his fingers and stamps his feet and sends his sermons snowballing, working himself into a righteous rhapsody that they swear looks just like Bishop Thomas.

Mackey admits a resemblance. He’s 36 years old, with a round face that somehow seems both younger and older. He keeps his hair shaved short, but leaves a thin line of a mustache above his lip. On his wrist he straps a wide-faced watch and an Alpha Phi Alpha rubber wristband. He once told the congregation that his feet presented a problem: He wore only size 10.5 shoes, and he’d heard that Bishop Thomas wore at least size 13s.

"So there's no way that I can walk in his shoes," he said, "but nobody can beat me in my shoes."

Just after 7:30 a.m., a burly church volunteer named Frank Colvard stepped into the dressing room. A silver crucifix hung around his neck. Its chain tangled with the coil of a Secret Service-style earpiece.

"When do you want to come out?" he asked.

Mackey held up one finger and took another sip of tea.

"Right now," he said.

Colvard opened the door, and a wave of gospel music crashed into the room. "Pastor coming down hallway 1," a security guard whispered into his wrist. Mackey turned down the hall and toward the music, passing more security and church volunteers and, just at eye level, framed photos of Bishop Thomas.

Mackey stepped into the sanctuary, and massive picture windows covered him in light. "Go out and greet somebody today," the worship leader said, and so the pastor headed up the aisles, squeezing shoulders and shuffling into pews to hug people who couldn’t come to him. "Y'all think I've been forgetting about y'all," he told a family in the back corner. "I don’t forget."

The music started again. Mackey jogged to his front-row pew and pulled out his phone, re-reading the sermon he would give three times that day.

A girls' dance team drew a standing ovation, and the choir sang one last song. When they finished, Mackey took his phone and a dry sweat rag and jogged onto the stage. He turned to face his congregation. The organist pounded a rhythm. The church cheered over it. "Amen!" a man shouted from the back.

Mackey said nothing. He broke into a gap-toothed smile and held both hands high, twisting them up to wave at every person who came to his church.

Just like Bishop Thomas used to do.

♦ ♦ ♦

Mackey knew the Bishop by reputation alone.

For as long as he had been preaching, he heard tales of the powerful preacher out west. Mackey streamed the Bishop’s sermons on YouTube and marveled at how he made every church member feel like he was speaking only to them.

After the Bishop’s sudden death, Mackey closed himself in his Houston office and opened another stream. He watched a live feed of Thomas' funeral, listening as politicians, police chiefs and preachers lauded his life.

Watch Bishop Alexis Thomas memorial

“I have never witnessed such a phenomenon,” said the Rev. Bernard Black, the pastor of South Phoenix Missionary Baptist Church and an elder statesman of Phoenix’s black clergy.

“He was a change agent,” said the Rev. Benjamin Thomas Sr., a lawyer and the pastor of Historic Tanner Chapel AME Baptist Church.

“Bishop Thomas was the greatest communicator of God’s Word that I have ever seen,” former Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton said. In a separate statement, Stanton called him “the soul of our city.”

Pastor was too small a word. Bishop Thomas was a powerful black man in a city that has elected only white mayors. He marched on the state Capitol, consulted black businesses and built a multimillion-dollar campus across the street from Eastlake Park, where civil-rights leaders once planned their own protests. Pilgrim Rest embraced that history.

"People look to that church and its pastor to be leaders," said Pastor Warren H. Stewart Sr., of Phoenix's First Institutional Baptist Church. "Not just at that church, but in the broader community."

And suddenly, in 2018, that leader was gone.

Pilgrim Rest had no succession plan. Bishop Thomas had been there longer than almost everybody else, and planned to stay at least another decade. The church had never considered who might come next, so after his death administrators hired a recruiting firm and drafted lengthy criteria that described somebody just like Bishop Thomas. In the meantime, they filled Sunday services with a rotation of visiting pastors.

Near the top of its guest list was a young preacher in Houston.

“We had known about Pastor Mackey for quite some time,” church administrator Richard Yarbough said.

Mackey had become one of Baptist America’s rising stars. Ministry was all he’d ever known. He was a preacher’s kid who announced his own calling at 13 years old, then spent his teenage years preaching six days a week. In eight years at Houston’s Riceville Mt. Olive Baptist Church, he’d doubled church revenue and tripled its weekly attendance. His resume brimmed with degrees and awards for speech and service. He was just as comfortable quoting Kipling and Kierkegaard as he was rattling off every name the Bible used for their Lord.

Lord, just give me a sign, he prayed when Pilgrim Rest’s invitation came. He felt God pull him west, so he and his wife flew in for an August weekend. Neither of them had ever been to Phoenix.

They knew it was a one-Sunday stint. But the city felt like it fit.

Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church finds their new pastor in Terry E. Mackey

Mackey’s sermon connected with the congregation, and when Lynn read a biography of Bishop Thomas, she kept finding flashes of her husband. Both men started as child preachers. Both had a son named Micah. The Bishop’s mother was named Barbara; so was the Mackeys' newborn daughter.

“Baby,” Lynn told him before they left, “we will be back again.”

Four months later, Pilgrim Rest named Mackey its new pastor.

On the day of the announcement, he opened Facebook and found more than 3,000 new friend requests. He promised he would get through them all eventually, and when he arrived he made a request of his own.

He wanted a copy of the Bishop’s autobiography.

♦ ♦ ♦

Three hours and two sermons after he started, Mackey stood on the stage of Gilbert’s Campo Verde High School — Pilgrim Rest calls it the East Valley campus — and scanned a packed auditorium, searching for somebody who wanted to join his church.

“Come on, brother,” he said, beckoning new members forward. “Come on, sister.”

He envisioned Pilgrim Rest as a place where everybody felt welcome. It would shed its label as an “African-American church” and reach across the city, stretching itself across race and geography and socioeconomics. It would seek out people experiencing homelessness. If members couldn't find a ministry, Pilgrim Rest would create one for them. And everybody would feel connected.

“I want our church to be a microcosm of the city,” he said.

He took pride in his ability to grow a congregation. In three months, he’d brought over 250 people into the church. But he knew there was a thin line between a growing church and a swollen one. Every new member pulled Pilgrim Rest further from its past.

“I see another brother coming,” Mackey said now, as a man emerged from the back of the room. He was young and white, with a two-button suit and shoulder-length blond hair. The man shook Mackey’s hand and turned toward his new congregation. “Bless you, young man,” Mackey said.

Then a family of four shuffled into an aisle, as if pulled by the same power. A second young man joined them. Mackey shook their hands and waited for more. The pianist played on. Mackey counted out 10 long seconds, but nobody else came forward. Then the numbers ran out, and it was time to go.

He raised a hand once more, and Pilgrim Rest’s six newest members bowed their heads in prayer.

“Go in peace,” he said, then he handed the microphone to the next speaker and speed-walked off stage. Sibley, the nurse practitioner, and Lewis Green, Mackey’s security guard and driver, waited for him behind the thick green curtain. They were already late for the 11 a.m. service back at the campus near downtown.

They hurried through a hallway and into the high school’s theater dressing room, where two more volunteers awaited their instructions.

Mackey disappeared into a bathroom to put on a dry shirt. Sibley packed her purses and showed the two women everything they would have to do. She reminded them to make the pastor a Vitamin B12 drink, because caffeine might give him the shakes, and to hand him a cup of fruit as soon as the van pulled away. He always needed to hydrate, and he appreciated a clean sweat towel.

“Does he have any diabetes, blood pressure, that stuff?” a nurse asked.

Sibley zipped a bag and shook her head.

“He’s new to us, we’re new to him,” she said. “Get him what he needs, so he can give us what we need.”

♦ ♦ ♦

What he needed was a congregation that could match his energy.

“Is there anybody in here that can help me close my little sermon out?” Mackey bellowed into the Phoenix sanctuary, sliding toward the finale of his third straight sermon. He bounced on both feet, and sweat flew from his head. The organist pounded heavy bass chords, and Mackey ended every phrase with a full glottal stop, then took a deep wheeze and started into the next.

“Neighbor!" he rumbled, bringing the word to a hard stop. "How do you worship him? Do you worship him waving your hands? Do you worship him opening your mouth?

"Whatever way you worship, come on, let’s do it right now.”

Watch Pastor Terry Mackey and the lively Pilgrim Rest service

The band backed him up, and a thousand people rose from their pews. Worshippers wailed and danced and threw up their hands. In the back of the room, a middle-age man broke into a full sprint. In the front row, Lynn corralled their children and cupped a hand around her mouth. “Preach it, Mack!” she hollered. Mackey stood at center stage and shimmied in place.

Four steps down, his 4-year-old son, Timothy, mimed his father’s moves.

The church called him “Pastor Tim.” He liked to wander the space in front of his parents’ pew, holding a tiny microphone and preaching alongside his dad. When Mackey sprinted across the stage, Timothy chased after him. He arched his back and clapped his hands and stomped his feet, just like his father.

But once Mackey worked into a rhythm, not even Pastor Tim could keep up.

All day he’d preached about worship and the importance of giving everything to the Lord. Now he needed to be an example. He barreled toward the end of his sermon, picking up speed and power as one exclamation gave way to the next. He didn’t stop to catch his breath. He didn’t stop to find the words.

Once he got going, all he could do was hold the microphone and let God work through him.

♦ ♦ ♦

After Mackey caught his breath, after the choir filed offstage and eight more people joined Pilgrim Rest and the congregation heard from its second mayoral candidate in two weeks, the pastor stepped back into the center aisle. Worshippers crowded around him, waiting their turn for a few seconds of his attention.

“Bless you,” an elderly woman told him, smiling beneath her wide-brimmed hat.

“Hang in there,” a man in a cream-colored suit told him. “We’re gonna make it good for you.”

“Hey, Bishop,” a young woman started to say. It wasn’t until Mackey turned to face her that she realized her mistake.

Mackey didn’t mention it. He just listened, hugged her and moved on.

A few minutes later, he slipped from the crowd and back into the dressing room, searching for tea and another set of fresh clothes. An assistant cradled his daughter and offered to steam his suit. Another reviewed the afternoon’s schedule. A nurse strapped a blood-pressure cuff around his wrist. Lynn entered the room, and they changed into somber suits. Then they took a breath and headed into the church’s gymnasium, where they were the last to arrive at Pilgrim Rest’s jazz brunch.

Mackey felt no fatigue. By now his body was built to preach. So even after he circled the gym and sat through a two-hour meal, Mackey’s throat was smooth and his legs were strong. He just needed a moment to clear his mind.

The jazz quartet played on. Mackey took Timothy’s hand and led him toward his third-floor office.

“Are we going to another church?” the boy asked.

“Yeah,” Mackey replied. “We’re going to another church.”

Mackey still had one sermon left. He’d been invited to preach at South Phoenix Missionary Baptist Church, a small congregation celebrating its 61st anniversary. Its pastor, the 91-year-old Rev. Black, had seen Mackey preach only once. Already he declared the young man “one of the greatest preachers of our time.”

The afternoon service would be Mackey’s first official outing as the pastor of Pilgrim Rest.

He cracked open his office door, and Timothy ran inside. The room remained mostly bare. Entire bookshelves sat empty. The walls were sheets of solid white.

Timothy browsed the bookshelves, looking for something colorful. Lewis Green found a chair in the corner. Mackey dropped into his desk chair and pushed away from the desk.

“This used to belong to Bishop Thomas,” he said, tapping an armrest.

After 10 minutes of peace, it was time to leave again.

South Phoenix Missionary Baptist was a necktie kind of place, and Mackey realized he had left his in the dressing room. He crossed the campus and unlocked the side door.

The long hallway was empty. All that remained were the black-and-white photos along the wall.

Mackey moved slowly forward. The soft sound of footsteps echoed off the tile. At each black frame, he stopped, leaned in close and examined Pilgrim Rest’s past.

There was Bishop Thomas praying over a woman, his steady hand resting on her head. There he was, knees bent and head bowed, being ordained a bishop of the church. There he was in mid-sermon, with a microphone in his hand and fire in his eyes, looking like he was about to leap off the ground.

Then Mackey turned down the hall and opened his dressing-room door. A silver necktie hung on the coat rack. He lifted it from its hook and draped it around his neck. “I should at least look like I’m the pastor,” he said.

Reach reporter Alden Woods at awoods@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8829. Follow him on Twitter @ac_woods.