Jesus Hi-Way Man" is on the road again in his Chevy 1500, homemade trailer in tow, the whole rig plastered with Bible verses, evangelical aphorisms and admonitions to repent.

"We have to work because the night is coming," warns Jesus Hi-Way Man, whose off-road identity is the evangelist Allen Fulwood, an elder in the Love of God Apostolic Faith Church, where founder and pastor Bishop Chapell Petersen ordained him as a preacher.

"God's Word on the Hi-Way" is delivered in black letters on neat white plaques like the nameplates of home improvement contractors.

"Find Jesus Christ Before the Undertaker Finds You."

"Peace is a 5-letter Word Spelled Jesus."

"In Hell There Is No Water, No Mercy, No Repentance, No Fire Escape."

"If Life is Puzzle for You Jesus Christ Is Your Missing Piece."

"Our job and our duty is to get the sinner man to repent," the elder says. "This is my reason for the decoration of the truck.

"See, there are so many people who do not get to church. But with me passing through they can read the Word. There have been people drawn to the church from seeing and reading the signs. This is our duty to get the sinner man."

He puts signs on the truck as directed by the Holy Spirit.

"There have been times I have been sleeping and when I woke up there was on my mind a sign that should be written," he explains.

Today Elder Fulwood's mission is to get a new transformer that will improve the quality of the amplification of his message when he preaches on the streets and parking lots of Baltimore.

He pulls into a lot off Belvedere Avenue just east of Reisterstown Road. He's swings out of his truck, passing out religious tracts as soon as he hits the pavement.

"We must do what we can today!" he likes to say. "Because tomorrow is promised to no man."

Striding west on Belvedere in a gait at once brisk and heavy-footed, his black robe billowing, Fulwood looks like a pilgrim en route to the Holy Land. He's a tall, spare man with a scraggly black mustache accenting a strong, determined face, mapped with lines and folds earned over his 70 years. His hands are large and extraordinarily expressive when he preaches.

Be ready

"I'm warning the people," he says, handing out his tracts at a bus stop. "We must be ready when He comes."

Cookie Boyd, a young woman in white pedal pushers, brown patterned blouse, with gold-colored finger- and toenails, comes over shyly to say hello. The spirit moves him to work these streets fairly often and he knows her.

"How is Mama doing?" he asks.

"She's back in the hospital," Boyd says.

He hands her a couple of bills from his wallet.

"Give her this," he says. "This will help her.

"Her mother's not well," he explains. "And this is what we have to do. We don't lose anything. The Lord always gives it back to us."

Along with his black robe, unwittingly worn inside out this day, he wears a black baseball cap emblazoned with a cross and the words "Jesus Hi-Way Man," black jeans, shirt and Nike walkers with a cross at his neck and another like a side arm in a woolly holster at his waist. The holstered cross is decorated with a crystal jewel, reflective metal foil and a metal coquille St. Jacques, the scallop shell emblematic of the pilgrim.

"This cross has a miracle," he says. "I was at a flea market when I saw it. I had spent out. But something said: 'Buy it.' I said, 'This must be God talking.'

"I said, 'Madame, I don't have any money but what are you asking for this beautiful cross?'

"She replied: 'Is 50 cents too much?'

"When God says move and you move, you work a miracle," Fulwood says. Now he carries the cross everywhere. "When I go to bed now it takes the place on the pillow where my wife slept."

His wife of 39 years and his partner in his street evangelism, Edith Sara Rosalee Burroughs Fulwood, passed away in April.

"We all have to go," he says. "Man was born to decease. And we have never understood it that the Bible lets us know we should rejoice when one go out and mourn when one come in. After all, if we leave this world and we leave it right, all our troubles will be over."

He's sure his wife left this world right.

The evangelist proceeds up Reisterstown Road with his long-legged lope, gently pressing his message on everyone he sees. He climbs up onto a porch to bring the word to a trio of carpenters.

"You have some people let you know flat out they want no part of what you are doing," he says. "We got to go on. When Christ was on the Earth, some wouldn't accept him. We got to go on, nevertheless."

He keeps up a running conversation while he walks, but he never forgets to attend to his primary mission. He passes out tracts like a politician shaking hands on Election Day.

He's been on the road as an evangelist for about seven years.

"This is a thing that has been appointed by the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ," he says later, reflecting on his ministry at his comfortable home in Morgan Park.

Tomorrow may not come

"We must do what we can today because tomorrow is promised to no man," he says. "Look at people walking the street, being shot down, they didn't have time to say, 'Lord have mercy!' "

Fulwood figures he's been saved since 1961. He felt a call to the ministry, but ignored it until he joined the Love of God church, at 3216 W. Baltimore St., in 1991.

"We are small in numbers," Fulwood says. "But we're pretty large in Christ."

He preached his first sermon at the church soon after he joined. He plays organ at the church and the guitar -- a beautiful Chet Atkins model -- when he preaches out on the streets. He's an inspired musician.

"Mister, let me tell you something, it can talk like a natural man, yes it can!" he says. "I play nothing but spiritual music, strictly. I take my music with me where I go. Good old songs: 'What a Friend We Have in Jesus,' 'Nearer My God to Thee,' 'Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross,' 'When the Saints Go Marching In.' That old kind.

"I play the old-time way. I play music country style. I was born and raised up in the country."

A brother-in-law who used to play the blues taught him a couple of chords when he first started to play.

"But when I got down to business," he says, "the Lord showed me what there was to be done."

It was his Love of God pastor, Bishop Petersen, who encouraged him in his highway ministry.

To the hedges and highways

"How far I have to go up the road I do not know. But God knows." Fulwood says. "The Bible says go into the hedges and highways and bid them to come.

"To tell you the truth like it is, the works of God are out in the street. When the disciples were on this Earth with the Lord Jesus Christ, they were always on the go."

He's gone as far afield as Delaware, Virginia, Washington, and as far as South Carolina, where he has relatives. He was born in Sumter, S.C.

"And raised up on a small plantation between Sumter and what you would call a one-horse town known as Turbeville, S.C."

His people were sharecroppers who raised cotton, tobacco and corn. And he worked the fields. He came to Baltimore in 1941 as a young boy, then went back to South Carolina for a spell.

"My mother [Rebecca] and my daddy, Archie Fulwood, they always had been on the Christian side and as a little barefoot boy they raised me up in the church."

But when he returned to Baltimore in 1944, he didn't get to church very much.

"I got on the lively side," he says. He's never been a drinker, smoked or done dope, but he confesses he did gamble a bit. He worked around a bit then got a job at Bethlehem Steel. He worked 39 years making steel at Sparrows Point. He left in 1989 with his hearing damaged by the "terrible, terrible pounding noise.

"We went on a long steel strike in 1959 and this is when I got back into the church. And when I got back into the church, I stayed."

He admires Bishop Petersen as a great preacher, but he has not copied his pulpit manner.

"The spirit of God leads me, tells me what to do," Fulwood says. "I have been preaching all these years and I have never written a manuscript ...

"I do whatever is to be done by the direction of the Holy Spirit," he says. "Whenever there is a problem to be confronted, you will wait silently, then surely you can feel it, but you will almost hear a soft, low tone of voice revealing to you what to do. You always wait for this. You don't go off half-cocked."

Goes where he's led

He goes out with his van, too, pretty much as the spirit moves. "I go where I'm led to go."

Along with all his other labors in the vineyards of the Lord, he preaches a 15-minute sermon -- the "Voice of the Hi-Way Man" -- every Tuesday at 10: 45 a.m. over WGBR, the gospel station.

"In 1994, I started broadcasting," he says. "At the direction of the Lord."

He preaches on the air pretty much the way he does at a highway stop or in church. "I just let the Lord have his way."

His sermons are warm, low-keyand conversational, without flamboyance, but propelled by the urgency of his message, and touched perhaps by the accents of the South Carolina of his youth. He sounds like a favorite uncle giving advice on how to make an investment for your education.

He sometimes preaches at other churches, too. But, he says, he doesn't get invited back very much.

"I give them the word. I don't bite my tongue," he says. "I don't sugar-coat."

His main interest is the truck.

"Because people in the church, they are lazy. But you find that xTC poor, struggling sinner man out there when you give him true salvation, he will listen to it. And most of the time he will accept.

"And the Bible tells you the angels in heaven rejoice over one sinner man when he be saved."

But it's like fishing, he concedes.

"A man sometimes goes fishing and he don't catch any fish. Sometimes you don't even get a bite."

Pub Date: 7/31/98