Tommy Brigham, Jr. points to the discipleship of three men who helped him grow one particular aspect of his faith.
“Really helping to understand how to put your faith into action has really been by the shaping of others in my life,” he told Matt Wilson in a recent episode of Wilson’s Living Life on Purpose podcast.
Brigham credits his late business partner Molton Williams, Drayton Nabors and a man he calls his closest friend, Richard Simmons, with guiding him to understand that putting his faith into action is a calling and essential to spiritual growth.
And Brigham’s call began to lead him in a direction which carried him across societal lines and behind locked doors.
“Early on in my walk with Christ I got involved with Prison Fellowship,” he explained. “It puts you in a paradigm where I’m coming from one socio-economic circumstance into the prisons.”
Brigham is one of Alabama’s most accomplished real estate developers, a recipient of countless awards in the business community.
Yet, that experience with Prison Fellowship allowed him to look at his own city and state from an entirely new vantage point.
“It gives you a different perspective,” he recalled. “And then along the way we got involved with going to an intercity church. Our kids got exposed to worship with the African-American community. One of my partners today is an African-American woman. That all started back then.”
Brigham’s outreach became an enduring part of his life and that of his family.
“Race relationships became a part of our journey in life and in our faith,” he emphasized. “That led to being part of starting First Priority with a group and involved with kids. That was a foundational part of my own personal experience that caused me to recognize that there’s a lot out there to be involved with.”
Developing a friendship with one pastor in Birmingham set in motion events which would allow Brigham to undertake one of the more unique partnerships in his successful career in business.
He became friends with Tom Wilder, pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, a church Brigham called “the most bombed church in America” as a result of it being a target of Klan bombings during the civil rights movement.
“We became friends and built a personal relationship trying to make sure that we understood each other as who God made us out to be not how we looked through the political lens,” said Brigham. “How we looked through our core values and our common faith.”
After years of friendship with Wilder, Brigham felt called to a new venture in real estate, even while admitting to himself it was getting a little late in his career.
So Brigham approached Wilder’s wife, Mechelle, with whom he had worked previously.
“That whole thing was what would it look like if we formed a real estate company with a white boy from Mountain Brook and a black girl from Montgomery,” remarked Brigham.
Mechelle Wilder was the youngest of 11 kids and a scholarship graduate from Samford University.
Brigham recollected his pitch to Mechelle Wilder.
“’This is the time in life where we have got to take a risk,’” he remembered saying. “‘Our community needs to hear this, see this. They need to see a white guy and a black woman, gender, race, the whole deal, and how do we do this and do it in a meaningful way because we share the same core values, we’re good friends, you’re an unbelievable professionally-talented person, and I just think it’s the right time for our city and who knows what God would do with that. And we don’t always share the same views politically, and that’s okay, because we love each other through our differences.’”
Together they formed ARC Realty.
For the company partners, their mission is in the name. ‘ARC’ stands for ‘A Relationship Company’ and is built on the message of Philippians 2:3-4:
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. (ESV)
The meaning of those verses is clear to Brigham.
“That means that when our agents walk in the door, when our employees walk in the door, we’re serving them,” he said. “Our first and foremost focus is to serve them with whatever tools, technology, training, professional standards we can provide because we want the buyer and seller to feel the same way. We want our agents serving above self.”
He explained that this approach works regardless of your beliefs and people always agree.
For him, it comes back to Augustine’s instruction to “preach the gospel at all times, when necessary use words.”
“Just try and live it,” said Brigham. “If the Lord opens a door for you to engage in a conversation, it takes place. But you have got to the best of your ability try to figure out how to live it.”
Part of that is opening your heart to the circumstances and experiences of people much different than ourselves, according to Brigham.
“If you’ve never worn the shoes of the other person, it’s hard to really understand him,” he said. “So you’ve got to try and figure out how to wear those shoes, and it just takes hard work. It’s not easy. I have a lot of really good African-American friends, and I love my brothers and sisters in the African-American community. And we have some tough conversations. I need to hear the voice that they have because it’s different than the way I grew up.”
Listen to the rest of Matt Wilson’s conversation with Tommy Brigham:
For more stories of how people have lived their lives with a purpose, listen and subscribe to Living Life on Purpose with Matt Wilson on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify and Google Play. Matt’s guests include Andy Andrews, UAB head football coach Bill Clark and many others.
