Turning on the light in a dark building

Two miles north by the railroad tracks is a windowless shoebox of a one-story building I used to ponder when stuck in traffic waiting for the train to pass. The unadorned sign said “Excitement Video” and it loaned pleasures of the sort that once came wrapped in paper bags at apothecaries but now are available at the click of a mouse on your home computer. Maybe that’s why the owners decided to sell.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story actually begins in Kerala, a state on the Malabar Coast of southern India, where a man surnamed George had three daughters but no sons. The man and his wife prayed to the Lord for a son, vowing that if they received one, they would give him back to God for Kingdom work, much like the mother of Samuel.

God granted their request and they named their son Matthew. When he was 12, and the family wanted to go to United States but had no money, Matthew told them he believed the Lord would provide. Providentially, when they approached a relative for help, the cousin gave them 20,000 rupees, enough for their plane tickets. The day after their plane took off from Bombay on May 20, 1991, the former prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, was assassinated while campaigning, and the airports were shut down for five days. If the Georges had not departed when they did, they would not have been able to do so when the airport reopened, as their visas expired on May 21.

Matthew was a good student in science, and when he graduated from high school in the United States, the Georges told him: You can go into medicine or engineering, but our prayer was for you to be a minister of the gospel, and someday you will do that. They asked him to pray about it, and the next morning Matthew chose the ministry. In the Lord’s graciousness, Matthew was able to enroll in a seminary in nearby Valley Forge, Pa., though they had been told it was too late to apply. The president of the seminary gave Matthew scholarship money from his own resources.

After eight years as a youth pastor in Philadelphia, Matthew sought and received his pastor’s blessings to start a new church, and for $40 a month he rented space five miles from here. This brings us up to the “Excitement Video” part of the tale. Throughout the course of four successive rentals Matthew felt the Holy Spirit prompting him to pursue the “adult entertainment” location. He walked into the establishment and spoke to one of the owners who said he was not interested in selling. Nevertheless, Matthew could not shake the idea, and one day he learned on a local radio station that the porn movie place was closing.

Matthew went to the township commissioners to ask for the required zoning for a church only to learn that the structure was already zoned for religious use. The small band of believers bought the building and spent this past January renovating it. For a while Matthew pastored two churches but then found a man of God from Jamaica named Brian Brown to take over at the ex-X-rated location while he moved on to serve the other church full time.

As for me, the way I came to hear about this neighborhood development was through a man in my church who emailed our prayer chain leader: “Hey, you know that porn video store we’ve been praying about for 10 years, asking God to turn it into a church? Well, He did it!” That man’s name is Robert Blake, and he gave his testimony at one of the first worship services in the redeemed real estate near the railroad tracks.

The “Excitement Video” sign is gone now, and a new sign reads, “Christ-Centered Church: Rooted in the Word, Watered by the Spirit, Raised by God.” And so a net that once caught men for the kingdom of darkness now catches men for the kingdom of light. And blessed are those who saw the possibilities with eyes of faith and didn’t merely daydream in the traffic jam.