Beaufort preacher became world famous. Here’s how his first church will honor his legacy

In 1950, when he was just a wee 14 year old, Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter began big-time preaching as an assistant pastor at a Baptist church in Ridgeland, South Carolina. Eikerenkoetter, who was considered “anointed,” quickly embraced the life of an evangelist, traveling across the rural coastal Sea Islands conducting preaching, teaching and healing services that drew people by the thousands. Miracles, they say, would sometimes occur when he preached.

The real miracle may have been how this son of the south shot to world wide fame, reaching millions with an unconventional Christian message and making millions along the way. Once, Eikerenkoetter lent his voice to a hit country song penned by country great Hank Williams Sr. And he may have even inspired the rock legend John Lennon of The Beatles.

After his rapid rise following his humble beginnings, Eikerenkoetter became so well known he was just Rev. Ike.

“He was so popular,” said Bishop Jack Bomar, the presiding bishop of United Church in Beaufort. Rev. Ike launched the church 61 years ago and it helped launch him to elite heights of evangelical preaching.

Bomar was at the United Church Tuesday where around 100 members of Rev. Ike’s first church, his son and wife and guests sang and prayed to mark the beginning of construction of the Rev. Ike Resource Center on the Duke Street property.

The center will cement the legacy of the Ridgeland to riches story of the famous preacher who got his start in the Beaufort area.

The 4,000 square-foot exhibit hall will be a global destination that will “inspire and introduce visitors to the message, the ministry, the man and the mind known as Rev. Ike,” according to the church, while serving as a repository of the celebrated evangelist’s artifacts, personal belongings, writings and recordings.

After a stints at Bible college and in the Air Force, Eikerenkoetter and others started United Church of Jesus Christ for All People in Beaufort in 1962. His Sunday sermons were also heard across the region on WBEU-AM, Beaufort’s first commercial radio station.

It was just the beginning. He headed north, first to Boston, then New York. By the 1960s and 1970s, the world was the congregation for the handsome, charismatic and sometimes controversial prosperity preacher who dressed to the nines and owned a fleet of fancy cars. The teenage preacher from the Lowcountry of South Carolina became one of the most well-known televangelists in the country, with his voice and positive message reaching millions over countless radio and television stations and packing venues like Madison Square Garden in New York. Rev. Ike looked more like a 1950s rock star than a pious religious leader. Eikerenkoetter’s patented dress leather loafers, decorated with rhinestones and metal, are even on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

But his real legacy and talent was his motivating and nontraditional messages on the “science of living” aimed at helping the poor overcome.

“He was destined to do this,” Bomar said.

Almost 15 years after his death at age 74 in 2009, Rev. Ike and his catchy credos — such as “You Can’t Lose With the Stuff I Use” and “Some may say money is the root of all evil, but being in poverty is a damn shame!” — seem to be as relevant as ever, thanks in part to social media platforms like TikTok, where clips of his preaching routinely garner more than 100,000 views. Some people at the Beaufort ceremony, Bomar pointed out, “probably don’t know what a TikTok is.”

“You are not going to get anywhere in life spiritually or otherwise until you come to that point where you don’t give a damn what people think about you,” Rev. Ike, dressed in a flashy pink suit, says in one TikTok message in which he advised religious folks to cover their ears.

Besides construction of the new resource center, a new book on Rev. Ike’s life, co-authored by his son, Xavier Eikerenkoetter and Chicken Soup for the Soul book series founder Mark Victor Hansen, is set to be released in December. Xavier Eikerenkoetter, who lives in Napa, Calif., and Rev. Ike’s wife, Eula, who lives in Newport News, Va., attended the groundbreaking.

“I love this today,” said Eula, who played a major role in managing her husband’s ministry, told the Beaufort congregation. Two things she wanted to see happen before she “transitions,” she said, was the publishing of the book about her husband and construction of the center honoring his legacy.

The Rev. Dr. Kevin Kitrell Ross, who Rev. Ike mentored, said Eikerenkoetter was raised by a single mother in abject poverty. But he was brash and brilliant and he used those attributes along with his good looks to dominate prime time TV and radio in the 1960s and 1970s and fill stadiums preaching a message free from dogma of traditional Black churches of the time, he said.

“The message,” Ross says of the Rev. Ike, “is a transcendent message.”

Rev. Ike was criticized for taking advantage of the poor, Ross said, but Eikerenkoetter countered that the less fortunate were shackled by “slave theology” that made them feel inferior. They could escape their situations, he thought, if they changed their self image. Preaching a science of living and “God in you” philosophy, he taught that people can be and have what they want — in the here and now, “not in the sweet by and by.”

“I am,” Rev. Ike told the New York Times in a 1972 story, “the first black man in America to preach positive self‐image psychology to the black masses within a church setting.”

Rev. Ike’s message reached far beyond Black audiences.

In 2005, May Pang, the former personal assistant to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, claimed the refrain in Lennon’s 1974 hit, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” came from Rev. Ike. Lennon, she said, was channel surfing one night when he came across Rev. Ike and heard him say that line, which he liked and ended up using in the song.

In 1986, Hank Williams Jr. recorded a song originally written and performed by his father, Hank Williams Sr., called “Mind Your Own Business.” Featuring not only Hank Williams Jr. but also rocker Tom Petty and country greats Reba McEntire and Willie Nelson — and evangelist Rev. Ike — the remake topped the country singles charts for two weeks.

Rev. Ike preached many of his messages in a former Loews movie cathedral at the corner of Broadway and 175th Street in New York’s Washington Heights. His ministry bought the famous theater in 1969 and renamed it United Palace. It served as a glitzy home base for weekly “healing and blessing services” and the television ministry for more than 50 years, with some calling it the “longest running show on Broadway.”

“Close your eyes and see green,” Reverend Ike would tell his 5,000 parishioners from a red-carpeted stage at his United Church Science of Living Institute headquarters in the former Loew’s film palace, according to the Times story.

Growing up in New York City, John Crouch heard some of Rev. Ike’s messages. Today, he’s an architect who lives in Charleston. He was hired to design the Rev. Ike resource center that will be constructed next to United Church in Beaufort. Crouch still can’t believe it. “Full circle is exactly what I did when it came to Rev. Ike,” Crouch said.

Rev. Ike has come full circle now, too.

A recreation of the landmark “miracle star of faith” that crowns the dome of the United Palace in New York where he once preached to thousands and millions more via radio and TV will sit atop the new center honoring him in Beaufort where his journey began.