Before his peers would label him a heretic, the late Bishop Carlton D. Pearson was once one of the best known preachers in the nation.
His skilled biblical oration, steeped in the Black Pentecostal tradition and melded with white evangelicalism, helped swell the membership of the storefront church he started in 1981 in Jenks, Oklahoma, to a full-service, multiracial congregation of more than 5,000.
