Meet the Founder
Ted Watkins
Ask anyone in Jackson how they know Ted Watkins, and you might get an odd answer: some of them don't call him Ted at all.
They call him Glory Glory.
It's how he greets everyone — not "hello," but "Glory Glory" — and after many years, it's stuck. Some people in Clarke County may not even know his real name. They just know Glory.
It's a fitting name for a man who built Restoration Hall Inc. out of his own rock bottom.
Before he was Reverend Watkins — before Restoration Hall, before the group home, before twenty-two years of sobriety — Ted was homeless, addicted to crack cocaine and alcohol, caught in a pattern that started long before he understood it.
He was given away by his mother at three months old. He never saw her again. The one time he met his father, the encounter ended with two bottles of beer — his first taste of the same alcohol that would define much of his own life.
Ted doesn't excuse what he did with his life because of what was done to him. But he's learned there's a pattern in families — one that repeats itself generation after generation, until somebody breaks it.
"I had to come to realize, by taking accountability, that I'm the one who did these things to myself. Nobody else. That's when things started getting really good — when I took accountability."
ROCK BOTTOM
MAY 16, 2004
Ted names the date the way most people name a birthday. Because that's what it was.
After an experience that led him to a recovery ministry in Mobile, Alabama, Ted asked God for one thing: to be free of the crack cocaine, the alcohol, and the life that came with it. On May 16, 2004, that's exactly what happened.
Ted has been clean for 22 years. He calls it what it is: a miracle.
FROM RESTORATION TO A CALLING
Not long after, Ted started reading the Bible. He saw Matthew 25:40–41, where Jesus speaks of caring for "the least of these." Something clicked.
Restoration. Restoring lives back to what they were meant to be — the way God restored his life.
Even the name carries a piece of his own journey. Ted started out washing cars, and got good enough at it that restoring something — making it look new again — became more than a job. It became the idea behind Restoration Hall itself.
Ted incorporated the ministry in 2004. His wife, Minister Caron Watkins, stood beside him in those early years as the vision took shape. She's since passed, but Ted carries her memory in everything Restoration Hall continues to do.
ONE MAN, THREE CALLINGS
Ask Ted how being a Marine, a pastor, and a business owner shaped Restoration Hall, and he doesn't separate the three. They're all the same man.
The Marine in him brought the integrity, the persistence, and a brotherhood that never saw color — just people. The pastor in him brought faith that shows up every single day, not just on Sundays. The business owner brought the discipline to build it.
"My faith is real every day. He's brought me through — through overcoming, through the valley — and I've been a witness to it. Not just in His word, but in my own life."
THE WORK
Ask Ted which part of Restoration Hall's work has moved him most, and he doesn't hesitate: mentoring.
"A lot of times I didn't talk about things. I just showed them. I didn't holler at them or fuss at them. I just said, 'Look — God can do it for me. He can do it for you.' And I left it at that. Because even though they hear you, they see you more."
Presence over preaching. That's the foundation everything at Restoration Hall is built on.
Today, that philosophy is taking a new shape: a group home in Jackson, Alabama, for young men ages 13 to 18 who are at risk of entering — or re-entering — the juvenile justice system.
"That's my dream. God allowed me to go from a dream to a destiny. Opening the group home is both."
Ted knows what's missing for so many of these young men, because he lived without it himself: attention, affection, someone who simply shows up. Without it, kids find other ways to get noticed — and too often, those ways lead to trouble.
"I don't have to do like other folks do. I don't have to follow the pattern. I can be different. I can just do right."
"If I can help just one," Ted says, "and that one comes back and says it's because of me — that's the legacy."