COVER STORY DR. ANITA PHILLIPS - EVOLUTION OF THE PK

EVOLUTION OF THE P.K. - DR. ANITA PHILLIPS

By: Peggy Tatum

Raised by pastors, Anita Phillips and her older sister Valerie appeared to have the perfect childhood; it wasn’t. Anita was often awakened by her sister’s screams as she insisted that demons were standing in their bedroom door. While their parents covered Valerie in constant prayer, throughout her life, she was battered by a mental illness that lead to decades of addiction. Emotionally drained and spiritually lost, wondering why God didn’t seem to answer her parents’ prayers, Dr. Anita dedicated her life to seeking spiritual and scholarly understanding of mental health and illness. Her insights are unlike anything you’ve heard before.

I caught Dr. Anita at the kickoff of her Turn The Light Out Tour where she encourages people of faith to voice their authentic experiences, educates our community about mental health and illness and empowers each individual to both prevent and respond to mental health issues in their lives and relationships. This information needs to be provided to churches around the globe. Bishop T.D. and Lady Serita Jakes have embraced Dr. Anita’s platform and she will be presenting a Master Class at Woman Thou Art Loosed Conference Octo-

We are featuring Dr. Anita in our Evolution of a PK Series. I am confident that her outlook on being a PK and the work that she is doing with mental health will prompt you to google and find out more about this woman. Just simply visit www.anitaphillips.com for more info. Here

“My husband and I raised our children very intentionally to sidestep the pitfalls of previous generations who did their best and how we are able to do it better. My kids are so far ‘very good’ and

Anita’s daughter will be 16 in June. She is a phenomenal ballet dancer. She’s smart as a whip and a mini-therapist as a result of living with her mom. Her son is 20 and a sophomore at Harvard University with an internship with Facebook so he already just killing the game. “We’re so of them. As pastor of these children, our goal was to make a relationship with God synonymous with our identity as a family. Not as a ministry but as a family. This is what the Phillips do. We serve God; however, you end up serving him in your life whether it’s at church or in a profession, we’re Christians.”

“I am a third-generation pastor’s wife. What’s cool about that is none of our husbands were pastors when we married them. My family is like a lot of black families. Their roots lie in North Carolina. Mom’s family is from Wilson and dad’s is from Rose Hill. My grandparents founded St. Rose in Wilson. My husband is a 5th generation pastor. We are trying to take all the lessons from the past generation and continue to improve the work that we do.”

Anita’s husband, Michael, took over the church from his mom. “His dad passed away when he was a kid and mom stepped in. He took the church over 14 years ago. She was worn down from all the hard work. They were down to 80 members, now we’re up to about 3,000. “Down here you have these great big churches but the farther north you go it’s harder to get people to come to church, so we are excited about how God is growing our ministry in Baltimore City.”

“Michael is a mind-blowing phenomenal preacher. I never get tired of hearing him and I’ve never heard him preach the same sermon. He is who he says he is. He’s a good man, a good father, he loves the Lord, he treats me well, he spoils me to death. One of the reasons I feel our kids are so healthy as PKs is because they don’t see anything different at home as they see at church. Children are damaged by the incongruence very often. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a pastor is sinning or doing anything wrong. We have to be careful about how we let our hair down at home. If we are having a day that we are venting about a frustrating member, we don’t do it in front of our kids. If we are going through a trial at our ministry, that’s not for our kids to hear about. They are not mature enough to handle suffering and trials. It’s too much for them. They are not cognitively prepared. Sometimes it’s not so much that the pastor is cussing or sinning or cheating or drinking but allowing the pain of ministry to be seen by our children before they are mature enough to process. It is damaging, so we have been really careful to protect them from the pain that they are not ready for without painting a false picture of the work”.

Anita feels like her son will do ministry. She assured him that he can have a career and still do ministry. It doesn’t have to be your whole life. It can be your second life or your third life. “He is an amazing speaker. When he gets up to speak, it arrests the attention of people. God doesn’t give us gifts like that if he’s not going to use him to spread his Word. Just like me and my sister did when we were little, my kids fake preach and we joke about it. If we say something funny, my son will turn it into a sermon and act like he’s preaching. I say it’s all fun and games now but that’s the sign of a gift. I don’t know how, when and what God will do, but I believe there is ministry for my son.”

“I am waiting to see what my daughter is going to burst into being. She definitely has the tradition of the women in our family line. My mom was the first woman to preach in many COGIC pulpits when women were not allowed to stand in the pulpit. People would demand her, and they would override the pastor to request Evangelist Graham. I remember I was my mom’s armor bearer at 10 years old. That’s when we ran revivals. I would be at church every night with my mom and I loved it. I grew up watching a woman proclaiming the gospel so that shaped me and spoke to what was in me already. One night we were leaving the church and I was giving her such a fit about women not being able to preach and like they gave her some privilege after they stuffed $10 in a brown envelope as an offering. We were driving home and she said ‘don’t never worry about what anybody else says, you do you. They can say women don’t preach and they will have to make up a different word for what I just did and I am going to keep doing it. Always do you.’ That was a very important mandate for me and so my daughter definitely has that power woman thing in her in her own way and I think she might sneak up on us and surprise us all and be THE preacher. I wonder but for now she’s a dancer who is interested in PR and that’s okay because she can have more than one life.

That’s important in the 21st century because ministry is different than it use to be. People should be able to earn a living without completely always depending on the ministry. When you are super dependent on the offering plate it can get hard. If you have ambitions of being a certain type of person and ministry is the only way for that, it can get tough. It’s good to be multifaceted.”

Dr. Anita Phillips serves alongside her husband Pastor Michael Phillips at The Kingdom Life Church in Baltimore, Maryland. www.thekingdomlife.com