He accepted the call 31 years ago and soon got a chance to give a guest sermon, thanks to a network of older traveling preachers that embraced him.
"I was sweating -- wet like someone had poured a bucket of water on me," Brown recalled. But he had soaked up the oratorical tricks of the charismatic preachers he heard in his youth, and by the end he had the whole church clapping. Four months later, he was elected pastor of his first church. One month after that, he had four churches.
One of Brown's old mentors, the Rev. L.B. Oliver, is still on the traveling circuit nearly half a century after he began spreading the word of God. Oliver, 76, serves as pastor of six churches and is optimistic that a new generation of traveling preachers will emerge.
"The little churches are the heartbeat of America. Without them we would be in trouble," said Oliver, who believes African Americans lose a part of themselves when they leave the churches behind.
Brown is not so sure today's young preachers would make the sacrifice. For years, he has been augmenting his pay by preaching during the week at revivals, where wayward souls are coaxed back to the Lord. He also has been selling cassettes and compact discs of his sermons, and is planning to start selling DVDs.
On one recording, of a revival in Bastrop, La., Brown bluntly drummed home the message that women should resist the temptation of premarital sex.
"Let me tell you something: The average man will make a whore out of a woman," he said. "But when he get ready to marry, he don't want to marry no whore."
Brown recalled his courtship with his wife, Gwendolyn, whose father was a preacher and whose brother heads a 9,000-member church in La Puente, east of downtown Los Angeles.
"What she let me know was, there wasn't going to be no layin' and playin', huffin' and puffin' -- on credit," he said, as the audience broke up in laughter. "What she told me was ... change my name. And I don't have to tell you what happened after that."
The couple recently celebrated their 17th anniversary.
Brown said one lesson he learned as a traveling preacher was that a man of God had to tailor the gospel to his audience. "If you can't make your sermon relevant to what's happening now," he said, "you're just reading the Bible."
AS a radar detector scanned for state troopers, Gwendolyn raced across a steel bridge spanning the Mississippi River while Brown rested in the passenger seat.
