“Sometimes you hear him before you see him,” said Wyndham Hotel bellhop Floyd Jones as he looked across the street at the singing pastor banging a tune on his keyboard.
Sporting a suit jacket accompanied by a bright red tie, a United States Army baseball hat and a graying pony-tail, Robert Joseph Eckroate, 53, said he is just doing what God wants him to do. Eckroate said God gave him a calling to help people find the Lord by preaching his word on the street.
“I am like a watchman, it’s not easy to do,” Eckroate said. “You have to be a man to do this job.”
Pastor Robert stands at the corner of North Central Avenue and East Adams Street six days a week, pounding on his electronic keyboard that he sets on top of a College Times newspaper dispenser and sings what he calls “The Fire of God.”
Eckroate has been preaching on the street for about nine years and said his relationship with God is through prayer and dreams he has. The songs he plays are what God tells him to play and they are all about Jesus.
The veteran was in the Army 30 years ago where he was full of hate and anger, and that is when he found God and began reading his word, Eckroate said. Ever since then Eckroate wanted to be a missionary.
Eckroate said he lives in a mission house for $50 dollars a week with other missionaries who he calls his “brothers,” and works with the Church on the Street Dream Center to help people. He has been involved with the Dream Center for 18 years and attends church services there.
Prior to his preaching, Eckroate has prayer time outside of Starbucks. This is the time he connects with God and mentally prepares before his day of teaching. Sometimes Eckroate invites others to join hands in prayer.
“I see him here almost every day,” said Mark McNeal, an employee at the Starbucks across the street from Eckroate’s corner. “If it’s too hot, sometimes he will skip that day, but that’s about it.”
Eckroate does not let people’s judgments stop him from what he is doing. He says some people react negatively to his preaching because they are full of hate and anger.
“They hate God, therefore they don’t want to hear the music and they don’t want to hear the preaching,” Eckroate said.
As two businessmen walked past Eckroate preaching on the opposite corner, they pointed and laughed, while others are oblivious to the man and ignore him completely. In another instance, a group of people walked past and one man made a joke of Eckroate saying, “good lunchtime music, huh?”
“A lot of people heckle him, but he’s just doing what he believes in,” Jones said. “It’s not an act, he’s a good guy.”
Eckroate had to defend himself one time when a man tried to kill him with a knife, he said.
Eckroate said he is a dedicated man and he treats his preaching as a job, except he does not receive any source of income from it.
“Why are you bringing America to judgment when this is a nation that has done more than anybody else in the world?” Eckroate said he often asks God. “God showed it is because he called America to be a nation of love not a nation of hate and violence and anger and killings in the schools.”
Eckroate grew up in Mexico with his mother and came to Phoenix when he was 6 years old. He said he will continue preaching in Phoenix on the same street corner until God tells him otherwise.
Contact the reporter at aebnet@asu.edu
