Riverbend founding pastor Mann dies
Gerald Mann led Riverbend Church for more than 25 years.
Gerald Mann, who established one of Austin’s largest megachurches and had a national ministry with his broadcasts, dies.
As Parkinson’s chipped away at a presence that made him one of the nation’s most prominent preachers, Gerald Mann was fond of reminding people, “God help the man who doesn’t know what time it is in his life.”
That life ended Saturday for Mann, 77, the founder of one Austin’s largest megachurches and friend to luminaries such as former President Bill Clinton and legendary University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal.
Mann is survived by his wife, Sandy, and three children.
Aside from them, Riverbend Church will be Mann’s legacy. He founded the church in 1979. It grew from a handful of families to more than 4,500 when Mann retired in 2005.
“Everyone brought pens to the sermon, so we could take home what he was saying,” said neighbor and close friend Roy Spence, the founder of prominent advertising company GSD&M. Asked to describe Mann’s personality, Spence settled on the first half of a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature.”
Mann grew up as the second of three children in West Columbia, a small community south of Houston. At age 21, according to a 2005 American-Statesman profile, he attended an Easter Sunday service with his then-wife, Lois Wright Mann. Mann recalled a “hollering” preacher and an
altar call, and the next thing he knew, he was standing in front of the minister accepting Christ.
“People ask me how I became a believer,” he told the American-Statesman. “I say by abduction.”
At Riverbend, there was little fire and brimstone in Mann’s 18-minute sermons (a time limit he determined best suited the typical American’s attention span). He was accused of relying on image and quips at the expense of theological depth. He believed that hell is real but that even those sent there will have a second chance.
Under his watch, Riverbend’s lush, sprawling campus along the Colorado River attracted hundreds of members who were in 12-steps programs.
Mann, whose ministry was broadcast nationally, did not ask for money on TV, his friends said. He tried to avoid any appearance of joining what he termed the “holler for dollar boys.”
His ability to move among the famous and powerful helped with fundraising, however. His friends Gary Bradley, then one of Austin’s most successful real estate developers, and John Wooley, the former Schlotzsky’s Inc. chief executive officer, gave Mann’s ministry a parcel of land on Lake Austin. Riverbend later sold that land and used the $2 million profit to develop its current location along Capital of Texas Highway (Loop 360) in Northwest Austin. Mann gave a blessing at the prayer breakfast at which Clinton asked the nation to forgive him for the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Spence said Mann’s focus was reaching anyone in need of fellowship.
Mann was friends with Johnny Ray Watson, a prodigiously talented but little-known African-American gospel singer whom he made artist-in-residence for the almost entirely white Riverbend congregation. Years after Mann retired and the residency ended, they remained close; Watson called him “Dr. Gerald.”
On the drive to watch one of Watson’s last performances before his death in 2014, Mann tried to describe his friend’s sound.
His eyebrows bunched in frustration as words that once flowed like a river failed to come out even as a burble. When Mann entered Riverbend for the show, he shuffled using a walker, that once-overwhelming presence diminished to less than a whisper. Yet all heads in the room turned upon his entrance.
Spence, in describing how his friend dealt with the frustrations of a failing body, mentioned Mann’s desire to serve others, alluding to the second half of the Shaw quote. That part, which comes after the exhortation to be “a force of nature,” states that no one should be “a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
A few days ago, Mann was visited by Bradley and Sterling Lands, a fellow pastor and East Austin minority rights activist. Bradley said that through Parkinson’s, dementia and pain, Mann recognized them, forcing the muscles of his mouth to twitch into what for a younger version of him would have been a smile, his eyes lighting up as blue as ever.