ALBANY, Ga. — On Sunday afternoon, Congressman Sanford Bishop was at Evangelical Faith Ministries in Albany, his final stop on an election-season tour of more than 30 mostly black churches in the final weeks of a bitterly fought contest to keep his seat in the U.S. House.

Bishop had been to the church before — many times.

He asked Apostle Felix Revills to anoint him with oil.

Revills obliged, as his father Apostle Isaiah Revills did 18 years earlier when Bishop first won a seat in congress.

The oil ran down Bishop's back and onto his suit as Revills and the deacons laid their hands on the congressman's head.

"I believed my faith would be granted," Bishop said early Wednesday morning as he told the story to his weary supporters celebrating an unlikely victory over Republican challenger Mike Keown, a Southern Baptist minister from Thomas County.

As Tuesday night turned into Wednesday morning, it was all about faith.

Bishop has been on the ballot — either for a seat in the Georgia General Assembly or Congress — every two years since 1976.

He has never lost.

And he didn't this time. Of the nearly 168,000 votes cast, the final tally showed Bishop had 4,776 more votes than Keown.

Numbers alone don't tell the story.

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