GREAT NEWS: Popular Pastor Receives ‘Global Religious’ Award For Devotedly Winning The Heart Of Many Christians Around The World…

GREAT NEWS: Popular Pastor Receives ‘Global Religious’ Award For Devotedly Winning The Heart Of Many Christians Around The World

Johnson: Award winning gospel producer for Pastor Mike Jr. needs new kidney; ‘I’ve seen God do it before’

This is an opinion column.

I’m gone win

You gone win

Everybody ‘round me winnin’

Rod Turner didn’t know better. He was a sophomore at Miles College. “Just a kid,” he’s telling me now. A kid from a musically gifted family in the Birmingham neighborhoods of Inglenook and Prattville. Grandma was an organist and album producer. Dad played the bass. Uncles and aunties sang.

“I just had to pick up an instrument,” Turner says, starting to laugh, “and not sing. I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

He picked up a few: piano and organ, drums, alto sax, harmonica, “and a little bit of guitar.”

Turner tickled the keys on that day at Miles, having sneaked downstairs at Prentice Hall to get in a little practice before the start of youth services led by a young minister he’d recently met.

The two young men reconnected and vibed that day. The minister listened. The keyboardist shared a few tracks he’d created. The minister was “really cool,” Turner recalls. He returned downstairs time and time again, sneaking for time on the keys before service. “I didn’t know any better,” he says. “I was in there just being a musician.”

The minister kept listening. “One day he told, me, ‘Man, you’re going to be special; stick with me.’”

Believers don’t believe in happenstance. In coincidence or fate. Our steps are guided. Ordered.

Turner indeed stuck with the young minister: Mike McClure, Jr., who—fast forward—is now Senior Pastor of Rock City Church in Birmingham (full disclosure: RC is my home church), where Turner, 34, is Music Director. Most every Sunday, Turner’s on the keys during praise and worship just as he once sneaked to do in the basement at Miles.

Because he didn’t know any better.

McClure, (popularly known as Pastor Mike or PMJ), is now one of the most decorated artists in gospel music. He’s won 19 Stellar Awards, the genre’s highest accolade, and is the reigning three-time Artist of the Year.

Last year, Turner became a Stellar artist, acknowledged as a producer on tracks for “Winning,” which won Album of the Year and Contemporary Album of the Year.

Stick with me.

Turner was on stage at Boutwell Auditorium that Sunday in 2019 when Pastor Mike, during a sermon, began to riff on the magnitude of God’s future blessings. “And it’s gonna be… big,” he declared. Turner hit it with a resounding chord.

After service, Pastor Mike called Turner: “Man, we need to do something with that.”

Turner couldn’t sleep that night, so he started building a track. “I didn’t want anything depressing,” he says. “PMJ always said: How you say something really matters; it has to coincide with how the music sounds.” Turner thought guitars. He thought rockish.

“High energy and of lifting,” he is saying. “In gospel music, a lot of encouraging songs are slow and draggy. Some of them are really good, but God, in that moment while I was making the track, just gave me a vision of something energetic, yet still anointed. Something simple, but anybody and everybody could sing it.”

And it was big.

Turner was accompanying Pastor Mike on an out-of-town preaching gig. By then “Big”, blessed by producer/distributor Kerry Douglas of Blacksmoke Music Worldwide, and was receiving a bit of radio love. “We were just excited about it being out,” Turner recalls. “Excited about people hearing it.”

Pastor Mike called Turner’s hotel room. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, I gotta tell you something,” he said excitedly. “The song’s No. 1, doc! ‘Big’ is No. 1. I told you. I told you I was going to take you to the top.”

Stick with me.

“He sounded like Muhammad Ali: ‘I told you. I told you,’ Turner remembers. “I’m like, ‘Man, this is crazy.’ That moment was crazy. All of us were so proud because we did it. We said we would, we prayed on it, and God fulfilled it.”

“Big” spent 48 weeks on the gospel airplay chart—10 weeks at number one.

Woke up to a bill on the dresser

Tired, and I’m tryna keep my head up

Everything’s looking like I’m gonna lose

Believers also know there will be triumphs and trials. Conquest and challenges. Seasons of strain. Sometimes severe.

Turner first learned of his high blood pressure as a high-school senior, during a routine physical before Ramsey High School’s football season. He played the entire year without any issues, still.

During a subsequent exam for college, he was asked: “Do you take high blood pressure medicine?”

After saying he was not, Turner was told his blood pressure was high—”Like 171 over 80,” he remembers. “I think nothing of it, just going on with my life. I’m young, eating good, not feeling bad in any way.”

Fast forward again: Years later, Turner’s mother said he looked pale and asked him to take his blood pressure. It was 208 over 110. Mom started praying.