By Mike Ellis
Anderson Independent-Mail
ANDERSON, S.C. — Baptist pastor Tony Tilley carries a deep knowledge of the Bible into the pulpit, along with his quiet charm and a .40-caliber Glock strapped to his ankle.
“I know it’s kind of a goofy thing probably to carry it even in church on Sunday,” Tilley said. “But it’s just out of habit. When I leave the house, I always carry my gun with me wherever I go.”
Sgt. Tilley also is the spokesman for the Anderson Police Department. When he goes to Freedom Baptist Ministries on Sundays, he carries his badge and sidearm, just like every other day.
Kathryn Richardson, general consul of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, said that either as the head pastor or a police officer, Tilley can carry his weapon in church.
The strict laws of the legal world are mirrored by a diligent adherence to the classic tenants of the ecclesiastical world for the soft-spoken Tilley.
There’s no tension for him between the two.
Armed with faith and a baby Glock
“There are so many similarities between what I do here in the ministry and what I do on the streets enforcing the law,” he said, “particularly when it comes to the counseling with people and talking with them and trying to instruct people in the right ways.”
In his faith, Tilley said, authority is given “to man to take care of legal issues and to make sure people are doing what they’re supposed to do. It even gives us authority to punish, within the laws of the land.”
Tilley has worked as a road patrol officer, a school resource officer, investigator and chaplain. He is now a community resource officer.
“Lots of people say they just can’t see how it’s possible to do one and do the other, but there are a lot of similarities,” he said.
When he was a road patrol officer, the police work was not as close to his pastoral duties. But his more recent roles as an officer assigned to the Anderson County Alternative School and community liaison officer closely mirror his work related to his faith, he said.
Sgt. Tony Tilley stands outside of Freedom Baptist Ministries, where he preaches on Sundays with his baby Glock in an ankle holster.
The language changes, but both jobs are about helping people to Tilley.
“Everybody in the police department knows I’m a pastor,” he said. “Most of the time the people I get out with or I’m arresting or I’m dealing with - other than the community groups - they don’t know this. I maintain a standard of professionalism, so I don’t do any evangelizing or proselytizing on the job.”
While Tilley tries to separate the faith aspect from his police work, sometimes the two worlds cannot be kept apart.
While out on patrol one Friday night in the fall of 2006, Tilley noticed a suspicious car sitting in the parking lot of River Street Baptist Church. He had called the tag numbers into dispatch when the church’s music minister stepped out of the car.
The two started talking, and the music minister recognized Tilley’s name from when Tilley was a pastor in Due West.
“I filled the pulpit for them that Sunday and wound up being their pastor for 16 or 17 months or so,” Tilley said.
A split in the River Street membership led to a group of deacons and other church members leaving to start a new ministry.
About two dozen people met in Bobby Hanks’ living room, in the house he personally built on Hanks Circle, the road he personally built.
“Tony joined up with us when we were still at my house three or four months into trying to build the church,” Hanks said. “Our little group kept going, and Tony decided he would preach for us. And we were happy to have him.”
The small, fledgling congregation moved out of Hanks’ house and rented the Broadway Lake Community Center on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. Before the center was demolished for a newer one, they rented a small church building just down the road.
Under the name Freedom Baptist Ministries, the group has been there for about three years.
The block building houses about a dozen small pews, and more than half of them were filled on a Sunday in August when Tilley’s daughter sang.
The police work takes much of his time, and many church duties are taken up by deacons and elders from the church family of about 60. Tilley deeply appreciates the freedom his small congregation gives him when they step up to minister within the church when he cannot.
“There’s just something about that man,” said Merilyn Rich. “He’s quite the leader.”
Another parishioner, Sandra Burgess, said she’s learned more from Tilley than any other preacher in her life.
“And I’m 62,” she said.
In mid-August, a church member, Justin Moore, was a day away from going off to boot camp as an Air Force recruit, and the church gathered to eat fried chicken and banana pudding together after service.
“It’s nice to have a cop as a pastor. It’s cool,” Moore said. “I see him on TV sometimes.”
Tilley had just finished his sermon about incomplete obedience.
He focused on Biblical figure Jacob, and about on my personal reluctance to become a preacher. It is hard not to also see his sermon about the perils of incomplete obedience through the eyes of a police officer.
“It’s not enough just to obey God half-heartedly; it’s not enough just to obey God in the things that please us or the things that we choose,” he said from the pulpit. “I’ve been a pastor for 16 years, and you don’t know how many times someone has said, ‘Well, I think God will understand.’”
His voice, ordinarily pitched to calm the arrestees or members of the media he deals with, begins to boom and, as he hits his stride, his hands start chopping the air. He paces back and forth.
Tilley said that while he can be hard on the Biblical Jacob, whom he talked about that Sunday, he reserved the bulk of his critiques for himself.
“I’ve had to come face to face with the reality that if I had just obeyed God completely and gone as far as God would have me go rather than stopping short, than I wouldn’t be in this mess,” he said.
Tilley’s own incomplete obedience involved dragging his feet when called to the ministry, he said.
“I denied that call for a long time,” he said. “I was determined that was something I wasn’t going to do. But I was not going to be satisfied until I answered God’s call.”
Since picking up on that call in 1993, he’s filled in at church pulpits, been a pastor and has done evangelical work.
Starting in 2004, he hosted “Fulfilling the Commands,” a radio sermon at 10 a.m. on Saturdays, broadcast on WRIX. The program was on the air for more than a year and a half.
Tilley had served as a police officer and police chaplain in Due West, where he also became a preacher in 1995. In 2002 he became a reserve officer in Anderson and a full-time patrol officer by 2004.
His sermon that Sunday talked of obedience and of forgiveness.
“He is the Lord of second chances, third chances, fourth chances, fifth chances and so on,” Tilley preached.
Being able to come back into the fold, whether in the legal or spiritual sense, is something he holds dear.
While on patrol one night, when Tilley also was a preacher at River Street Baptist, he got a call that would slam together his police work and faith; incomplete obedience and forgiveness.
A woman was causing a disturbance as the Anderson County Fair was leaving town.
“It was late at night, I went out and found her, wound up arresting that lady that night and then bringing her to jail,” Tilley said. “A couple of weeks later she came into church while I was preaching. And, believe it or not, when the invitation was given, she came down to the altar. I arrested a lady on Saturday night and two weeks later, on a Sunday, I was praying with her at the altar.”
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