Gregory Toussaint

Gregory Toussaint is a Haitian-born pastor, author, and broadcaster whose eighteen-year effort to plant a permanent church in North Miami ended on July 5, 2024, when he opened a 60,000-square-foot, $60 million headquarters that drew over 4,000 worshippers each night of its opening weekend.

He grew up in Carrefour, a commune on the southern edge of Port-au-Prince, and his early churchgoing was a matter of family loyalty rather than personal faith. He has been direct about it: “When I was in Haiti, I went to church just to please my father, but I wasn’t saved yet. I didn’t personally make the decision to follow Christ.” That decision came during his undergraduate years at York College in Queens, New York, and its effects were rapid. He began preaching internationally not long after, and kept at it for more than fifteen years, crossing continents as an itinerant evangelist.

But itineracy wore on him in a specific way. “I sometimes found that I could preach for 10 years in a church without perceiving significant changes, or at least without being present long enough to witness them,” he has said. “This was for me a source of dissatisfaction in my ministry as an evangelist.” The work of transformation, he concluded, requires witness, and witness requires staying. That conviction is why he and his wife Patricia founded Tabernacle of Glory in Miami in late 2006.

They have two sons, Gregory Jr. and Joshua.

From the beginning, the church positioned itself as a place for people whom more established congregations had turned away. Toussaint has spoken about receiving young people “rejected by traditional churches because of their youthful mistakes,” along with former prostitutes, drug addicts, and gang members. The theology was not soft on behavior, but it wasn’t quick to give up on people either. That distinction, between judgment and abandonment, is what Toussaint says made pastoral ministry worth the sacrifice of the traveling life.

For the church’s first nine years, services ran in a leased second-floor space inside North Miami’s Bank of America building. After that came a decade at North Miami Senior High School. The borrowed spaces weren’t without cost: limited hours, no permanent address, and the institutional fragility that follows a congregation that can’t fully control its own calendar. While the church was still without its own building, Toussaint expanded the ministry’s reach in December 2012 by founding Radio Shekinah, an evangelical radio station he owns and hosts. Its digital platform, Shekinah.fm, reached Haitian communities far outside South Florida and gave the ministry a stable public identity even as its physical home remained in flux.

The path to the new building was longer and harder than most of the congregation knew until Toussaint described it at the inauguration: more than a dozen lenders had turned him down. He resolved to raise the $2.5 million purchase price for the land himself, then spent another decade building the funds needed for construction. The finished facility, at 390 NW 161st Street in North Miami, was designed by Texas-based Siebenlist Architects, which won the 2021 Build Architecture Award for the project. Its main sanctuary seats 2,500. During the opening weekend of July 5 to 7, overflow crowds sat in an air-conditioned tent outside, watching on projector screens, because the building couldn’t hold everyone who came. The inauguration ran concurrently with the church’s annual 40-day fasting program and a 10-day conference, so the new building was fully operational from its first hours.

Several elected officials attended. Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, District Chairman Oliver G. Gilbert III, and Commissioner Marleine Bastien were present, alongside business and community leaders from across the region. Gilbert called Toussaint “a preacher in this community.” Bastien described the inauguration as “a historic event for the Haitian community in Florida.” Congregant Marguerite Guerrier put it more plainly: “This achievement is a source of pride for the entire Haitian community. It goes beyond religion and divisions and represents a new beginning for Haitians living in Florida.”

The North Miami campus now serves as the global headquarters for 62 Tabernacle of Glory branches, with congregations in France, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil. Services are held in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and French. The ministry is also developing the Shekinah Family Credit Union as a financial services extension of the church.

The opening didn’t go unchallenged. On social media, critics argued that $60 million was the wrong kind of investment for a community with immediate material needs. “That money would have been better spent creating businesses to employ Haitians rather than erecting a house of worship,” wrote Pierre Pierre Perkens on X. The critique was pointed and widely shared. Toussaint didn’t avoid it in his inauguration speech. He said the years of rejection by lenders and the decade-long fundraising campaign were themselves the answer, and that a congregation without a permanent building is “vulnerable to disappearance, almost at any time.” “We were limited to the hours available to us,” he added.

There’s something true in both positions, and the friction between them doesn’t resolve neatly. Religious institutions and economic institutions aren’t interchangeable, but for communities whose physical presence has been precarious across generations, permanence isn’t a luxury purchase. It’s a statement that you’re planning to be here next year, and the year after. That argument is older than this congregation. It’s in the history of every diaspora community that ever broke ground on a building its critics said it couldn’t afford.

As a writer, Toussaint has developed a body of practical devotional work grounded in the spiritual-warfare theology that shapes his preaching. His 365 Oraciones de Guerra Espiritual series, published in Spanish, gives readers a structured daily prayer for each day of the year. According to the book’s own description, the volumes address marriage, family, children, finances, ministry, illness, and what Toussaint calls “divine connections,” the relationships that arrive by providence rather than personal effort. The second edition of Volume 1 was released around June 2, 2023, with Volume 2 and Volume 4 also available. These aren’t works of theological argument. They’re structured tools, built for daily use and designed to cover the areas where believers most often don’t know where to start or what to say.

The choice of Spanish for the series wasn’t incidental. Tabernacle of Glory’s South Florida location and its four-language worship services place it at the intersection of Haitian, Caribbean, and Latin American evangelical culture. A Spanish-language prayer series reaches across that whole community in a way that publishing in Creole or English alone wouldn’t. The radio platform, the multilingual congregations, the 62 international branches, the prayer books, and the new building are all expressions of the same underlying conviction: that lasting change requires lasting presence, and lasting presence requires brick and mortar.