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Sean Feucht and the Let Us Worship team moved their New Year’s Eve party from a baseball field to the sanctuary of City View Assembly of God Church in San Diego due to rainy weather. But the night before the event, “Antifa or somebody, the LGBT community, vandalized the church,” Let Us worship evangelist and co-leader Jay Koopman told Charisma News.

“They tagged windows, the walls, the signs, the whole freaking church.”

The graffiti read, among other things, “[Obscenity] Sean Feucht,” “Queers Bash Back” and “[Obscenity] Christian Nationalists,” Koopman said.

“They tagged everywhere,” he said. “This is a massive campus, one of the most beautiful campuses in San Diego. They hit every wall, every window.”

Troy Singleterry has served as pastor of City View (formerly called San Diego First Assembly of God) for eight years. The century-old church, which sits immediately off the 805 freeway, was birthed out of an Aimee Semple McPherson revival at Balboa Park.

“When I saw it this morning I was like, oh, my gosh, I’ve never had anything like this happen to me or my church before,” Singleterry said. “My phone’s been blowing up from people all over the country. ‘We’re praying for you! Don’t give up. Is there anything we can do to help?’ The overwhelming support, both locally and nationally, has been unbelievable.”

Singleterry’s first reaction was sadness for those who did it.

“I wish I could have ministered the good news of the gospel to them,” he told Charisma News. “My heart was for who they are. What they did can be fixed, but it’s an individual that needs to be delivered and set free by the grace of God.”

When members of the church and other area Christians learned about the vandalism, they came out immediately to clean the graffiti. After a few hours, “It looks better than it did before,” said Singleterry.

A police report was filed and officers planned to be present at the New Year’s Eve rally and at church the following Sunday morning to provide protection.

“It was heartbreaking that people would tag a church building,” said Koopman. “I’ve worked with gangs in the inner city of Los Angeles for over 20 years and even the gang members know not to tag a church building. Church is always neutral ground. So when satanists and Antifa tag a church they’ve crossed a line even gang members won’t cross.”

Feucht and Koopman are now calling for all Southern California pastors to stand with City View Church.

“When the church is persecuted, it’s the greatest time to come together,” Koopman said. “When the enemy attacks, it’s because he’s afraid of the move of God that’s about to hit this church and about to hit America. We are going to rally the body of Christ in all of Southern California. We’re fighters, and I and Sean, on behalf of Let Us Worship, are calling all pastors and leaders to stand with Pastor Troy. When you come against one you come against us all. If you attack one of us, you attack all of us.”

Singleterry agrees.

“We’re not backing down,” he says. “God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power, love and a sound mind. As the capital-C church we’re going forward to possess the harvest God has called us to reach.” {eoa}

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Joel Kilpatrick is a writer living in Southern California who has authored or ghostwritten dozens of books. Kilpatrick, who served as associate editor of the Pentecostal Evangel in the 1990s, is also a credentialed Assemblies of God minister.

Gregorio, 24, grew up in a violent home in West LA, then became a violent young man himself, committing crimes until he finally faced multiple life sentences.

“I had a Christian girlfriend who would tell me about God and to read the Bible. To make her happy I would, but my heart wasn’t there,” Gregorio says.

To avoid a life sentence, he applied to every recovery program he could while in prison.

“I was done with this lifestyle,” he says. “I didn’t want to do this anymore. I wanted to change. I wanted a way out. I just didn’t know how to do it.”

“God, if You’re real, I’m done with this life,” he cried out. “Give me a program. Help me to change.”

The very next day, a pastor visited his prison unit, came directly to Gregorio’s cell and told him about the Dream Center. Gregorio applied, was accepted and is now halfway through the yearlong men’s discipleship program.

“The day I came, I was dropped off by the Sheriff’s Department,” he recalls. “As soon as I stepped on the campus, I saw people smiling. They were happy. To be honest, I thought, What is wrong with them?”

Now, he’s smiling, too.

“Every other place, I was frowned upon because of my violent past and my gang affiliations,” he says. “But not at the Dream Center. The Dream Center took me in. I’m just so thankful to God. There’s no way to explain it. I wake up here and look around and am so amazed. ‘I’m really here. God has been so good to me. He has brought me here.'”

Gregorio now visits his kids and helps them with their homework. His son loves attending church at Angelus Temple.

He calls the atmosphere at the Dream Center “beautiful.” He loves the morning prayer walks that set the tone for the day. He loves learning about the Bible—and he especially loves serving in the kitchen.

“It’s amazing because I get to prepare the food and cook it,” he says. “Then we stand on the line and hand it to families. There were times when I was young and we didn’t have that assurance of that next meal. So for me, it’s so much more to give a child a plate of food when they need it.”

He enjoys friendships in place of rivalries with men of diverse backgrounds as well.

“I get to call other men ‘brothers’ and love on them and be loved by other people,” he says. “We’re all at peace. That’s the biggest thing here. Never in my life have I experienced peace until I came here, and I experienced it through God.”

The Dream Center, he says, is “the closest thing to heaven that I could explain.”

“I don’t want to limit God on what He could do with me,” Gregorio says. “Whatever He wants me to do, I will do it, because of what God has delivered me from. All I want is to serve Him. I’m thankful. I really am. People who are rejected by the world find acceptance in this place.”

Jenesis, 20, experienced multiple forms of abuse as a child, was raised by a drug-addicted mother, then at age 13, found her own grandmother dead of a drug overdose. She bounced around government-subsidized apartments in some of Los Angeles’ roughest areas while dreaming of being a songwriter and jotting down lyrics and songs ideas. She also used drugs herself from an early age.

“Back then I would record voice memos of lyrical poems or do little voice demos on voice messages,” she says. “At times, I walked under the freeway to get home, and I would whip out my phone in the tunnel. Even if it sounded bad, at least I had the words.”

At her low point, she lived on the streets. While sitting in a subway station one day watching people pass by, she heard a word in her heart: “You don’t belong here. There’s something better for you.” Days later she received a call from her former pastor, who urged her to go to the Dream Center, which she did in March 2021.

“As soon as I walked through the door, a weight fell off me,” Jenesis says. “Something in my head said, ‘You’re safe here now. No one’s going to touch you or abuse you. Everybody’s got your back. You don’t need to be scared.'”

The program has provided her with “20 different moms in one place,” she says. “To see them loving on God and loving on me and surrendering their lives—it’s a huge thing,” she says. But structure, schedules and rules haven’t been easy to follow for someone accustomed to living with no rules at all.

“Here, there are rules set, a schedule set and you don’t just do as you please,” Jenesis says. “That’s hard, being told what to do. I’ve never really had structure in my life—people telling you when to eat, when to sleep, when to wake up.” But she has embraced the change and learned to love herself for who she is.

“All the lies I believed as a kid because of what happened—that I’m worthless—I break those beliefs down. Those were of the devil,” Jenesis says. “At the time, I didn’t understand. I thought I would always feel like this and be like that.”

She still wonders why God chose to rescue her.

“I come from the most rundown city of LA and a really rough background. As far as I was concerned, I was a nobody and nothing, but coming here, I feel I have a purpose in life, and I’m somebody,” Jenesis says. “I feel I have a light in me that could reach people my age, and [I could] be a leader. My goal is to show people my age who are going through the same thing I went through that there is hope. You are worthy and you are loved. It’s true, and that’s what keeps me going.”

When California shut down schools, churches and public life, it created an epidemic of anxiety, depression and loneliness, especially among young people.

There is “an insane need for community” among kids, says Alexa Duerst, 26, youth and young adults pastor at the Los Angeles Dream Center.

“When you’re told something is hopeless for so long, it’s hard to recover from that,” she says. “That’s really been the narrative everywhere you turn. ‘This thing is hopeless.’ We started with a two-week lockdown, and now we’re on to, what—Year Two or Three? After a certain amount of time, it’s hard to find hope.”

Early in the lockdowns, Matthew Barnett asked Duerst to create some way for kids to get out of the house and be together in a positive environment.

“When things were shutting down, he said, ‘What can we do to build things up?'” says Duerst.

In the parking lot beneath the shade of solar panels, they created a makeshift school by putting desks out for kids to sit at while taking online classes or doing homework.

“We had our IT guy put Wi-Fi in and set up some computers and gave them all headphones,” Duerst says. “Kids came and used our laptops or brought their own. We fed them breakfast and lunch. They were going to online school, and we helped with homework.”

To maintain accountability and structure, Duerst and team had binders for each child which included emergency contact information—and their class schedules so the Dream Center team could keep them on task.

“I would know if a kid was over playing basketball and he was supposed to be in a math class,” Duerst says.

They called her the “principal,” and they thrived on being together.

“They were just trying to be kids,” she says. “That was the beautiful thing. It was a place for them to be kids again and not have this looming pandemic over their heads.”

Turnout to Dream Center youth events has exploded in recent months. “It’s crazy. We can’t even contain the number of kids who come out,” Barnett says.

Sunday and Thursday meetings, Tuesday Bible studies and regular events such as “summer socials” are helping kids overcome unprecedented levels of depression, caused particularly by LA’s heavy-handed public health mandates.

“We’re seeing repercussions of anxiety that’s been instilled in them,” Duerst says. “The ongoing fear, the lack of community, the lack of social interaction for those two years—we’re seeing the effects today.” Some kids are afraid of being in public or interacting socially.

“One kid we saw today has a great family, a great home, he comes to our church, his mom is super-involved, but he’s struggling,” Duerst says. “It’s like he hasn’t been able to interact and be with kids for so long. That’s really been affecting him.”

The youth ministry’s job, she says, is “Creating spaces for them to be kids again. And they need a personal revelation of God in their lives, a personal relationship with Jesus.” But the Dream Center, she says, will always “be a beacon of hope in the city.”

Fifty-four years ago, a young California evangelist named Mario Murillo emerged as a key voice in the Jesus Movement. His fiery message, accompanied by signs and wonders, profoundly influenced a generation of leaders.

Today, Murillo is holding tent crusades up and down California’s Highway 99, drawing thousands to services where they encounter the power and grace of God. The meetings, foretold in a dream, are one evidence of the arrival of a large-scale move of God that many have expected and prophesied.

“Powerful. Unbelievable,” is how Greg Fairrington, founder and pastor of Destiny Christian Church Assembly of God in Rocklin, California, a suburb of Sacramento, describes the tent meetings Mario held in Sacramento earlier this year. “Nobody was expecting the crowds that came out. People told me, ‘Don’t do that. Outdoor revival meetings are a thing of the past.’ We had 4,000 people come, four nights in a row, but the best was the hundreds of people who came to give their hearts to the Lord. The presence of God was so evident. There was a spirit of expectation every single night.”

Further south, in Fresno, Jim Franklin, longtime pastor of Cornerstone Church Assembly of God, has attended all but one of Murillo’s nearly 40 “highway” meetings, and hosted some of the first.

“These meetings are amazing,” Franklin says. “They are a return not to the days of old but to the days of the power of God. The crowds grow every night.”

Franklin firmly believes something new is sweeping California.

“I want to be part of it,” he says. “I believe in the vision God gave Mario. As a local pastor, I have to engage in the revival that is happening now, not just wait for it to happen with me.”

The Highway 99 tent revival began with an unusual experience in Stockton, an hour south of Sacramento. In 2014, Murillo was taking a nap after preaching a morning meeting and had a spiritual dream (“I’m not given to that kind of thing myself,” he says). In it, he was hovering over California and saw Highway 99 stretching from beginning to end, 470 miles or so from south of Bakersfield to Red Bluff. The highway then turned into a river, and Murillo heard a voice say, “This is a corridor of My glory.”

Thinking it was a word for Stockton, he shared it that night and let it go. But five years later, his ministry was given a tent and a thousand chairs, and he says it became clear he was to start doing tent crusades at the bottom of Highway 99 and work his way up. He wondered, “What in the world does a highway have to do with it?”

He then realized that Highway 99 is California’s devastated corridor, passing through some of the richest agricultural land in America, but also some of the poorest cities. Rocked by drought, the housing bust, political mismanagement and the arrival of foreign gangs, the Central Valley still produces much of the world’s almonds, fruit and vegetables, but also an outsized amount of violence, poverty and despair.

Sparking a Flame

When planning the first set of meetings in Bakersfield, at Canyon Hills Assembly of God, with Pastor Wendell Vinson, Murillo says he didn’t expect crowds.

“I thought I was just kind of obeying God, and we’ll see,” he says. “But then the sovereign hand of God began to descend on each crusade that we did, and the momentum began to get stronger and stronger.”

Thousands showed up in major cities along the 99, including Fresno, Bakersfield, Modesto and Sacramento. “Amazing miracles” took place, Murillo says.

He dubbed the meetings “Living Proof,” because he preached a straightforward gospel message, then saw it confirmed with signs and wonders. Linda Noonan, who has served in Assemblies of God ministries and churches for several decades, was on a prayer team for the Sacramento meetings. She had never attended a tent revival before.

“I was sitting up in the front. [Murillo] had an altar call, and people just swarmed our altars,” she says. “I had never seen that before. It was the most beautiful thing, and I started weeping. I didn’t expect that.”

Noonan, who has attended Destiny for 27 years, sat next to a woman in a wheelchair at a pre-meeting dinner. That night, Murillo called the woman out and said, “God is healing you.” The woman stood up from her wheelchair and walked up to the platform.

“That was miraculous,” Noonan says. “I had people come [receive prayer] for salvation, for healing, for a miracle in their life. … It’s phenomenal, what’s going on.”

Fairrington says there is “a genuine hunger for God that I have never seen before. People want the truth, something they can put their hope in, not something just to make them feel good.”

Murillo’s meetings “felt like the book of Acts being revisited—signs, wonders, and the miraculous,” Fairrington says. “People were healed every single night, and we’re still sharing the reports of that four months later.”

In Redding, California, a few miles north of where Highway 99 terminates, Bill Johnson, senior leader at Bethel Church, recalls being strongly impacted by Murillo’s ministry in the early 1970s. Johnson calls Murillo “a messenger from God for me in my youth.”

“While my generation was celebrating compromise and independence from God, Mario made no concessions,” Johnson says. “He preached a no-compromise gospel. That gospel was backed with power. It’s exactly what I needed in order for me to be willing to forsake every other ambition in life but to serve Jesus.”

At the time, Johnson’s parents, Earl and Darliene, were leading Bethel, and Bill and many others were in the midst of what came to be known as the Jesus Movement. Murillo’s ministry center in Berkeley, called Resurrection City, drew many young people for outreaches that marked their entire lives.

“I’ve told him and others many, many times that I owe him my life,” Bill says. “I know it was Jesus who saved me. But it was Mario who brought me into a life-changing encounter with the love of God—it was authentic, life-changing, filled with power—the only kind of gospel worthy of giving our life for.”

Spreading the Fire

In Laverne, Tennessee, just south of Nashville, evangelists Jennifer and Munday Martin heard about Murillo’s tent meetings in early 2021.

“We said, ‘There’s a movement happening right now,'” Jennifer explains. “‘We need to do that here. Let’s see what God does.'”

An unexpected donation allowed them to buy a tent, and favor allowed them to place it in a field along Interstate 24 in Murfreesboro for three weeks, starting last April. The Martins sensed “something different and special was going on,” but neither expected the Holy Spirit to lead meetings the way he did, forcefully encountering and driving darkness out of young people. Spontaneous responses often overwhelmed their preaching, with people coming forward, crying out to God and being baptized in the Holy Spirit.

“Preteen kids would walk up weeping, with stammering lips,” Jennifer says. “Nobody taught them praying in tongues. Nobody was praying for them. It was just them and God.”

Then demons started manifesting, which Jennifer had never witnessed except on internet videos. By faith, she, Munday and a team of volunteers cast them out. She estimates they have performed more than 100 deliverances since April.

“The tent was such a free atmosphere that people could open up, and the Holy Spirit could finally get to the places in them that needed healing,” she says. Still, it was initially so far beyond their normal experience that “we didn’t even know how to do this. I felt like God dropped us in a different pond and said, ‘Figure out how to swim.’ He didn’t prepare me, didn’t tell me in any dreams that this would happen.”

Many were baptized in a silver horse trough volunteers filled with water every night at the local Speedway gas station. Visitors said the meetings had a Brownsville-like environment with a strong repentance message. In May, the Martins moved the services indoors on Friday nights at a nearby church. Everyone is invited to eat a free dinner together before meetings begin, which has helped create what Jennifer describes as “a family.”

Birthing a Revival

Due west of Highway 99, during the riots and lockdowns of 2020, another outdoor evangelistic event was born. “Let Us Worship,” led by worship leader and recent congressional candidate Sean Feucht, bloomed from an oceanside gathering to the most popular traveling meeting in America.

Jay Koopman, associate pastor of Ché Ahn’s Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena and a Teen Challenge graduate with an eye-popping testimony, has preached in all 130 of the events except the first two. Koopman and Feucht were only passing acquaintances until both took flak from some Christians for not submitting to all government guidelines. In the same week that Feucht held the first Let Us Worship events, Harvest Rock Church sued California’s ultra-liberal governor. The ministers, both around 40 years of age, bonded under friendly fire from fellow believers.

“He was getting rejected for doing what he was doing, I was getting rejected for suing Gov. Newsom with Pastor Ché, but out of that birthed a move of God, man, and we locked in forces, because we were like Jonathan and David,” Koopman says. “We just said, ‘We’ve got to do this.'”

The largest church gathering in America in 2020 was the Let Us Worship event at the National Mall on Sept. 11, 2020, he says. Koopman describes their gatherings as having “that impartation from Brownsville,” which he experienced as a young Christian. People ran to the altars to get right with God.

Sometimes the collision of kingdoms is dramatic.

A recent event in Portland, Oregon, was preceded by an attack on a church outreach in the same park Let Us Worship would use the very next day. About 6,000 believers showed up, and “the power of God hit that place,” Koopman says. “Needles, heroin, drugs all thrown on the stage. One of the antifa members ended up coming down, demonically possessed, and gets completely delivered—and that’s on video.”

In places like California and Oregon, known for their liberalism, “people are carrying a fire like never before,” Koopman says. “They are preaching on airplanes, they are open-air preaching on trains, they are preaching in restaurants, and so it’s giving the church this boldness to not just fight for America, but also to win souls and make disciples.”

In little more than 12 months, with no paid marketing, Let Us Worship has gone from being a worship-centered protest of church shutdowns, to what Koopman calls “a full-blown revival.”

“The Lord was shifting us from being this worship movement to being this revival movement,” he says. “We kept prophesying revival, but we didn’t know it was going to happen like this.”

Multiplying the Momentum

In part, that has meant reviving Christians who lapsed into sin during extended lockdowns.

“The body of Christ has been shut down for so long because of COVID, and a lot of them got back into bondage and started coping,” Koopman says. “The Christian church needs to be set free and healed.”

The Let us Worship team plans to start holding statewide events, as the team continues to function as a firestarter of revival that flows into local churches.

Murillo says more and more people are ready to give Jesus a try. “Everyone is stunned by how many people want to be saved.”

Miracles also play a major role. He tells of a man healed of an injury due to a punctured lung. He speaks of a woman he called out of a crowd who was healed of liver cancer and neuropathy that caused extreme pain in her hands and feet. He says a major drug dealer walked down the aisle while he was preaching, waved at Murillo and announced, “I need to get saved right now,” then threw a big bag of marijuana on the ground and started stomping on it.

Murillo’s ministry has had to buy a new, larger tent to accommodate the crowds. “The momentum is just intensified,” he says.

He is now receiving invitations from other states, such as New York, where he will hold his first tent crusade outside of California this fall.

“People are hungry for miracles in this time,” says Franklin of Fresno, whose church continues to reap a harvest of people from Murillo’s meetings. “They don’t need another fancy sermon. They don’t need another show or song; they need a demonstration of the power of God that is relevant to their lives in these critical times.”

READ MORE: Find more stories about how God is sweeping the land in revival at .

Joel Kilpatrick is an award-winning journalist and author whose work has appeared in Time magazine, The Washington Post, USA Today, CBS Radio, The Dallas Morning News and many of newspapers and magazines. He has authored and ghostwritten more than 60 books, including a New York Times bestseller.

This article was excerpted from the November issue of Charisma magazine. If you don’t subscribe to Charisma, click here to get every issue delivered to your mailbox. During this time of change, your subscription is a vote of confidence for the kind of Spirit-filled content we offer. In the same way you would support a ministry with a donation, subscribing is your way to support Charisma. Also, we encourage you to give gift subscriptions at , and share our articles on social media.

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Iranian pastor Haik Hovsepian was murdered in 1994, but his voice is still heard—thanks to a fascinating documentary about his courage.

In 1994, Haik Hovsepian, the leader of the Protestant churches in Iran, rose to the defense of a man sentenced to die for converting from Islam to Christianity. Leading an international protest, Hovsepian campaigned successfully for the condemned Christian’s release.

But three days later, Hovsepian himself disappeared. His body was soon found riddled with knife wounds. Two other prominent Iranian Christians were martyred six months later, leaving the church stunned and grieving. Hovsepian left behind a wife and four children.

Today, half a world away in Burbank, California, two of Hovsepian’s sons, now professional television producers, have created a gripping documentary about their father’s life and death. Using real footage from inside Iran, the documentary depicts life under one of the world’s most Christ-hostile regimes and issues a call to action to the American church for support and prayer.

“We thought this would be a very powerful story,” says Joseph Hovsepian, 34, Haik’s eldest son and producer and director of A Cry From Iran. “At the time, my view was very personal. I saw it as something that would please our family and families of martyrs and the Iranian church.

“But later, after living in America and seeing Christians who didn’t care or know about the persecuted church, we saw another need—to inform Westerners [about the persecution in Iran] so they could start supporting the church there with the power of prayer and in every way.”

At the Hovsepian home, photos of Haik’s smiling face are placed throughout the house, including above the video-editing suite where Joseph and brother Andre, 24, make a living. It was Haik who had encouraged Joseph to develop his talent for video production back in Iran.

“Against the Islamic laws of the time, the Assemblies of God was very open to music and technology,” Joseph says. “My father was a big supporter of technology. He believed you could use it to the glory of God.”

Haik probably didn’t realize that the footage his teenage son was taking of underground church services, conferences, even funerals for martyred believers would one day be used to tell his own story and the story of other Christians killed during the wave of persecution in the mid-1990s. “I believe it was the work of the Holy Spirit preparing us for such a day to tell such a story,” Joseph says.

After Haik’s murder, the grief-stricken sons were initially overcome with hatred toward those who had killed their father. “We had a hard time even dealing with Muslims and looking in the mullahs’ faces on the streets,” Joseph says. “But as the Lord started healing our hearts and bringing forgiveness, filling us up with more peace and care for the enemy and for the country of Iran, then [we decided to stay] for the sake of encouraging the church and other martyrs—soon there were several of them.”

Iran is experiencing one of the greatest revivals of modern times–due to supernatural phenomena such as dreams and visions.

Joseph began to contemplate making a documentary about his father, and as the media director for the Assemblies of God in Iran, he honed his skills with a Super-8 camera and an editing machine. A family friend paid Joseph’s way to study filmmaking and Bible in the U.K.

Before the Hovsepian family moved together to the U.S. in 1999, they traveled to a European country and then claimed refugee status there. Their suitcases were crammed full of home-video tapes that one day would provide the raw footage for A Cry From Iran. “We had this hope that somehow we would still be passionate and beneficial for the church of Iran [after we moved to the U.S.],” Andre says.

In Southern California they discovered that the Iranian Christian community was already reaching back to Iran via satellite TV and the Internet. The brothers began producing and hosting programs for Farsi-language television. They became part of a technological revolution that in the last seven years has utterly transformed the way Christians live in Iran.

Emerging From Silence

Until recently, the church in Iran was isolated from the global Christian community. “We went through 10 years of not feeling in touch with the church in Iran except when people came in and out,” says one longtime missionary to Iran who, like many others Charisma interviewed, asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal.

When Iranian Christians dared to contact believers outside the country, they used false return addresses, moved fax machines house to house and spoke by phone in Armenian and Syrian rather than Farsi to make it harder for the government to monitor them.

But according to many with firsthand knowledge, Iran is now experiencing one of the great revivals of modern times due to supernatural phenomena such as dreams and visions, and to satellite television and the Internet, which now connect Iranian believers instantly—and, for the most part, safely—to Christians around the world. The church in Iran has grown from a few thousand people in the mid-1990s to several hundred thousand people today.

“Iran remains one of the worst places in the world for a Christian to live out their faith, preceded only by North Korea and Saudi Arabia,” says Carl Moeller, president and chief executive officer of Open Doors USA.

“The abuse of Christians, literally, in the justice system is legendary. Christians do not have the same rights as the other Islamic citizens. They are routinely discriminated against, restricted, and in many cases when they seek to evangelize and disciple, church leaders are arrested, interrogated, tortured and even killed for their faith in Jesus Christ.

“However, the church there is growing incredibly. In Iran there is a revival that maybe is only rivaled by the Chinese revival [of recent years]. Honest, seeking Muslims are having dreams of Jesus Christ.

“Some are being approached by what we can only call angels in parks and being confronted with their personal sins and told they need to come to Jesus Christ. It’s a revival the likes of which we’ve rarely seen in the history of the church. It’s been Holy Spirit-driven through dreams and visions and the technology available to us in the 21st century.”

Another longtime missionary to Iran says that “the rate of growth of Christianity in Iran is unprecedented for a Muslim country, especially for Iran. We’ll hear that in a certain city there are [dozens of] house churches, whereas there were none before.”

An Iranian exile who now produces programs for satellite television says: “For the past three years, [we have seen] the answer to all our prayers for the past 14 years with what’s happening now through the satellite dishes, the house-church movements, the masses coming to Christ. You still see stats that Christians are less than 1 percent of Iran’s population, but I don’t believe that statistic anymore. I think it’s much more than that.”

“It’s normal for Jesus to come to people in their dreams to heal them or witness to them.” –Iranian missionary

An underground missionary who works with International Antioch Ministries says the number of people attending his house churches in Iran doubles every six months. Attendance is fueled in part by dreams and healings. “It’s a normal phenomenon that Jesus comes to people in their dreams and witnesses to them or heals them,” he says.

A longtime Presbyterian missionary to Iran agrees, saying that after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, “some would say something happened spiritually in the heavenlies. From that time on, Iranians began to have more dreams of Christ.

“They would come to church because they had a dream. Some of them were seeing healings. This awakened their interest in the gospel.”

That interest is being met with an unprecedented availability of Christian programming and online discipleship material. Tat Stewart is chairman of Sat-7 PARS, a 24-hour satellite channel to Farsi-speaking nations such as Iran and Afghanistan. In the last seven years satellite TV aimed at Iran has exploded, he says.

There are now at least three round-the-clock Christian stations producing content in Farsi and reaching untold millions. Sat-7 PARS receives hundreds of e-mail messages and telephone calls from eager Iranian viewers each month. They request Bibles and further teaching.

Many Farsi-language Christian programs are aimed at edifying Iran’s house churches. One program, which airs on secular stations in Iran, teaches people how to hold church services in their homes. Another hosts a panel of Iranian-American pastors who answer questions submitted by Christians in Iran, ranging from what to do when a member is arrested to how to find other Christian young people for their children to marry. Other programs offer Farsi praise music, verse-by-verse exposition of the Gospels, theological teaching and youth-oriented content.

The result is that “people are converting by the masses,” says one Iranian-American television producer. “We know from the e-mails we receive, the phone calls and faxes that it’s a great move of God among Iranians. In the face of persecution and danger, the house church is growing like crazy.

“Last year was amazing. There are so many now. We go onto the Internet for a conference, and people come online from places I’ve never heard of. They give testimonies about how they converted to Christianity and started working on their families.”

Some Iranian pastors in the U.S. have begun holding regular live Internet conferences and Bible studies with Christians in Iran. One pastor listened recently as a home group in Iran sang a worship song to him over the Internet.

“You could hear the kids and women. It brings tears to your eyes,” he says. “These people are persecuted, poor. It’s a danger if someone hears their voices. We teach them to sing really low and clap with two fingers.”

The revival comes as many Iranians seem to have grown disillusioned with Islam and with their current government. “It’s not the Iran of five or six years ago,” says one Iranian-American television host. “People are more secular. Our challenge for the past three years wasn’t Islam but meditation and all this New Age mentality people are being attracted to at this moment.

“Most of the people who listen to our program don’t consider themselves Muslims. They are a mix of Hinduism, New Age and Islam.

“I’m not competing with Islam but with confusion. ‘Who’s right? Who’s wrong?’ That creates a freedom for me to talk to them as freely as I want to about the person of God in Christ.”

Another missionary says: “There’s a huge task ahead of us to feed this movement with solid teaching and balanced views. As we incarnate Christ into the Muslim world, they become very attracted to Christ. He’s everything they’re longing for and have never experienced in their religion.

“The love of God is a concept they don’t know; forgiveness they don’t know; assurance of salvation they don’t know. When they see up close that Christians have a personal relationship with God, it’s very attractive to them.”

Another underground missionary says street evangelism is highly effective. “We go to a city that has no believers. We prayer-walk the city for a couple of days, fast, then start witnessing to people [in parks and stores],” he says.

“Iranians have such a desire to get closer to God. They went through Islam and found that God isn’t at the end of the trail. [But] when you speak about Christ as a living God, people get saved right there.

“You just say ‘Jesus’ and eight out of 10 people will come to Christ. … Then we find a house and start a church. … We’re trying to catch up with what the Holy Spirit is doing inside the country. The ground is fertile. If you want to sow into a ministry that will give back a hundredfold, Iran is ready.”

Working Under Persecution

But there is already a new wave of persecution against Christians, according to the U.S. government and ministries such as Open Doors. Pastors and converts from Islam are regularly interrogated, beaten and imprisoned.

Police burst into church services to frighten congregations. Christians are routinely excluded from good jobs and schools. Although martyrdom is not common, the government is now considering making the death penalty mandatory for anyone who leaves Islam. And pastors still face dire threats. In 2005, a church leader was killed at his front door.

The government also tries intermittently to clamp down on the free flow of information. In the last few years it has jammed satellite signals during Christian programs, banned high-speed Internet service, closed Internet cafés, destroyed satellite dishes and censored blogs. Arab advertisers sometimes threaten to boycott stations that carry Christian programs.

Spies also have infiltrated online church meetings and gathered information on the people involved. Now underground church members use elaborate techniques to verify the identities of participants. They also disallow the sharing of information such as names and locations during online meetings.

Today the Hovsepian brothers and Open Doors are using A Cry From Iran to give American churches a glimpse into life in the persecuted church. The brothers travel around the U.S. to share their testimonies, show the documentary and answer questions about Iran. They are convinced that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

“You look at the numbers at the time [of our father’s death]: Assemblies of God churches had 1,000. The total number of Christians in Iran was 2,000,” Joseph says. “Now it’s 100,000. I think that is something even my dad didn’t expect to happen. … All of that speaks of the power of the blood of the martyrs.”

“One of the direct results of martyrdom in Iran has been the increasing zeal of Christians, especially Muslim-background Christians,” Andre says. “When they see an Armenian man, my dad, who gave his life for Iran and for his faith, that really increases their passion for God.

“They ask, ‘Why would someone give their life?’ And this journey starts within them. Then they go tell their friends, and this is how it multiplies.”

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Joel Kilpatrick is an author and award-winning reporter based in Los Angeles. To order A Cry From Iran, go to acryfromiran .com or hov . The documentary includes footage of Haik Hovsepian’s music, additional profiles of Iranian martyrs and other special features.

Church today is no longer just black and white. A wave of immigrants has created a vibrant kaleidoscope of ethnic variety.
Immigrant churches are no longer just small bands of people who meet in the sanctuary on Sunday afternoon for worship in their native tongue. Rather, they are a force to be reckoned with—a growing group who are networking and setting their sights on transforming America’s culture and reviving its Christianity. In the process they are providing a model for spiritual renewal and social action that puts them on the leading edge of church development.

City Blessing Church in Claremont, California, for example, fills up quickly on Sunday morning with young professionals and families pushing strollers. The parking lot sparkles with late-model cars. A bookstore in the foyer sells popular Christian books and music CDs. In the sanctuary a worship band warms up with well-known songs, and soon the people launch into a time of joyous worship—in Indonesian.

Based on outward appearances, a person could take it for any church in America. But it is the mother church of the City Blessing fellowship of churches led by Paul Tan, a businessman-turned-minister who is one of many immigrant pastors changing the face of American Christianity. “Even though we are immigrants, I believe we are to be a blessing to this country,” Tan says, echoing a sentiment voiced by more than a dozen immigrant pastors Charisma interviewed.

Immigrants make up more than 12 percent of the U.S. population, and that number is increasing. Most come to find opportunity or flee hardship.

Tan came to the U.S. as a university student in 1979, met Christ and was swept up in an Indonesian student revival that coalesced into the movement of churches now known as City Blessing (see ). The two dozen churches range in location from New York to Jakarta.

But 12 years ago, God radically changed Tan’s assignment and told him to start reaching all Americans, not just Indonesians.

“God has spoken the same thing to many people,” Tan says. “He is looking for people who have kingdom vision and want to accomplish kingdom work, not only for their local church or organization.”

Tan began partnering with “many churches and many marketplace leaders.”

“I see my role here now not only for the City Blessing Church and movement, but as a facilitator who sees transformation city after city, nation after nation,” he says. “That was different from what I’d done before in trying to reach Indonesians predominantly. When you want to see total transformation in a city, you can’t just do it within your own church organization. We have to work together.”

Through the years, the Claremont church has channeled $1 billion in food, medical supplies and more to the needy, mostly in Indonesia. City Blessing churches are also aggressively serving their local communities. Tan’s church gives away food weekly to 70 neighborhood families, most of them Hispanic and black.

The City Blessing Church in nearby San Bernardino is heading an effort to renovate a community park. And Tan has started an English-speaking service on Sunday morning, even though his church is still 80 percent Indonesia-born.

Many immigrant pastors across the country say their mission, too, has shifted in the last decade to encompass all ethnic groups and bring revival to America.

Called to Reach Others

“Up to now we reached Ethiopians only,” says Hanfere Aligaz, pastor of the nearly 3,000-member Ethiopian Evangelical Church in Washington, D.C., and president of the Ethiopian Pastors Fellowship Association. “[But] the Lord has called us to reach others, not only our community. God doesn’t care about color, only about souls.

“This is what is in my heart, and the time has come.”

The Ethiopian Embassy estimates there are 800,000 to 1 million Ethiopians in the U.S., mostly concentrated in Washington, D.C., home to a thriving Little Ethiopia. Recently Aligaz asked his Sunday morning congregation to partner with him to evangelize local immigrant Koreans and Hispanics, as well as all other Americans. Ninety percent of the people stood to say they would.

Though the church still heavily supports works in Ethiopia—giving $1 million to build an orphanage there, for example—it is also reaching out to English speakers with conferences that have drawn many ethnicities.

Humberto Solano-Costa, evangelism coordinator at the Brazilian Assembly of God Bethlehem Ministry in Lighthouse Point, Florida, says this church of 400 recently decided to start English services in many of its daughter congregations throughout the U.S., even though the churches are mostly Brazilian.

“We realized that if God placed us in the U.S., it is not just to reach Brazilian people but Americans,” Solano-Costa says. “There has been a great change in the mind-set of the people of the church. Everybody now is more interested in reaching everybody.

“Before it was: ‘Why should I worry about the Americans? I speak Portuguese.’ Now it’s completely different. We are a Brazilian church with a mission to reach Americans and every other culture.”

The church now has 40 daughter churches in the U.S. and missionary works in several European countries.

Todd Johnson of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary says one of the biggest untold stories in religion in the last decade is the immigration of millions of Christians to America. “A huge proportion of all immigrants, close to 80 percent, are Christian,” he says.

“Every two seconds an immigrant Christian comes to live permanently in the U.S. That’s a lot of people.”

The obvious result, he says, is that they are forming their own churches and worshiping in numerous languages. But beyond that, “many of these immigrant churches are actually planning to reach out to the surrounding urban and suburban white communities,” Johnson says. “From what I’ve heard, there are an increasing number of Caucasians showing up in Korean, Brazilian and Nigerian congregations.”

Tong Liu’s 2,000-member River of Life Christian Church in Santa Clara, California, is one of those churches that is working to become multiethnic. “We want to enlarge our ministry, make a great impact on the city and bring transformation to this area,” Liu says. “We are majority Chinese now, but we have a big slogan in the lobby that says, ‘Home for All Nations.'”

There are about 3 million Chinese immigrants in the U.S., making up America’s largest Asian group. They are concentrated heavily in the San Francisco Bay area and New York City.

Liu’s church now partners with non-ethnic churches and has cultivated a good relationship with city leaders. Like many immigrant churches, River of Life offers live English translation via headphones during its native-language services.

For many immigrant churches, broadening their approach is seen as critical to their survival. Second-generation believers almost universally prefer services in English and want a more American-style church culture.

“The second generation speaks English more than [Spanish], so we are doing the crossover,” says Guillermo Maldonado, pastor of the 8,000-member Ministerio International El Rey Jesús in Miami. He preaches bilingually and is about to start an all-English service. “We need to reach the next generation. We have no choice.”

Carriers of Revival

Many immigrant churches feel a special calling to spiritually rejuvenate America.
“We definitely feel we have a role in bringing revival and reformation,” says Aligaz of the Ethiopian church. “The Lord spoke to us that we would be one of the peoples to bring revival to America.”

Solano-Costa, the Brazilian pastor, says the people in his church “want to awaken the American church. America is the nation that sent more into missions in the entire world. We are the result of U.S. efforts. We are here to pay back the favor.”

Russian pastor Gennadiy Zavaliy of Evangelical House of Prayer in Brooklyn, a network of six churches with 1,000 members, says he is “surprised that American Christians are not as excited about” evangelizing their own country.

“They will spend a lot of money to send missionaries to India or Africa, but today America needs missionaries and evangelism here,” he says. “If we don’t open churches, someone will open mosques.”

Maldonado agrees and says he believes the recent political backlash against immigration is because “the enemy is trying to stop the revival coming to America”—an opinion he shared recently with members of Congress.

Demographic data may agree with that assessment. There are 42 million Hispanics in the U.S., fully 14 percent of the total U.S. population. A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center found that Hispanic immigrants, by far the largest immigrant group in America, are about 90 percent Christian and are twice as likely to be Pentecostal than are American Christians. In other words, the U.S. is importing Pentecostals and charismatics from Latin America.

This “could make some U.S. churches uneasy,” Johnson says. “There’s a lot of evangelicals who are pretty secularized. This influx of global Christianity is going to maybe teach a little lesson.”

But some immigrant pastors are cautious about having a crusade mentality toward the U.S.

“In a general sense we do believe the church in the U.S. should be more on fire for God, but I’m careful not to get into a way of thinking that becomes judgmental,” says Marco Barrientos, pastor of Centro Internacional Aliento church in Dallas. “We should work together as one body, not as bodies of certain color or language.

“We are endeavoring to respect and honor, which is something we learned from U.S. missionaries, to create bridges and ways of working together as opposed to bringing our own flavor of revival and saying, ‘You need to embrace what we have.’ I don’t think that way, and I don’t think it would be appreciated by American Christians.”

Indeed, some churches have struggled to draw from outside their own ethnic groups. The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), founded in Nigeria in the 1950s, has positioned itself in the U.S. as a church for all peoples. Services are in English and most elements of a Sunday service would fit into a typical American church service.

“It’s not called the Nigerian Christian Church of God, it’s called the Redeemed Christian Church of God,” insists James Fadele, chairman of the board of coordinators for RCCG North America.

But the process of integration has been slow. The vast majority of people in North American RCCG churches still are Africans, primarily Nigerians. Fadele concedes that “people tend to be cliquish. … We need to break out of that mode.”

Bayo Adewole, overseer and pastor of eight RCCG churches in Chicago, says, “Ideally we are supposed to reach everybody, but now we are 99.9 percent African. I don’t know why it has turned out this way.” But, he says, his churches hope to draw more non-Africans, and they have “prepared [themselves] to receive everybody.”

Holistic Ministry

Immigrant churches also believe in meeting practical, workaday needs as part of their spiritual mission, and many are becoming more sophisticated in how they deliver services to new immigrants. Many immigrant churches offer English classes and help finding jobs and a place to live.

Zavaliy, the Russian pastor in Brooklyn, says his church hosts doctors who give free medical help to immigrants lacking medical insurance. At Brazilian Assembly of God Bethlehem Ministry, businessmen identify talented workers and recruit from within the church.

For a majority of immigrants, the most pressing need is to gain permanent residence in the U.S. Maldonado says unscrupulous lawyers take advantage of recent immigrants, so his church has its own lawyers to help people get their immigration paperwork in order.

At Tan’s church, part of the weekly prayer meeting is devoted to praying for people who are trying to gain residency or asylum. People who have received asylum pray for those who haven’t, giving an “impartation of favor,” according to Tom Lay, Tan’s assistant pastor. He claims a 90 percent success rate for last year.

Many churches also provide career counseling, computer training and business courses. Ethiopian Evangelical Church offers a wide range of classes and services, “like an information center for everyone who wants it,” Aligaz says. “The holistic ministry has been very helpful.”

City Blessing has elevated entrepreneurial training to a high level of importance. Tan encourages people to start businesses and offers leadership development courses to adults and children as young as 10 years old.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, 15 preteen kids gathered in the Claremont sanctuary to learn the basic elements of an entrepreneurial mentality: confidence, leadership, organization and more. As a result, many in Tan’s church have gained the courage and skills to go into business. For Tan, it’s part of transforming cities and nations not just through prayer and the spiritual gifts, which operate widely in his services, but also through excellence in the public sphere.

Barrientos in Dallas says much of his work is simply helping people who fear being deported and are frustrated by their inability to communicate well. One man recently came to Barrientos distraught because he had received a jury summons in the mail and thought he was being sued. “When I explained to him [what it was], he had a big sigh of relief,” Barrientos says.

Another challenge for new immigrants is avoiding the traps of greed and immorality. Aligaz says many Ethiopians come to America and “get carried away with material things and become very cold. Most of our great Christians are not those who came as a Christian but those who have been saved right here in Washington.”

Barrientos agrees that the main challenge for people moving to the U.S. is materialism and sexuality. “People here are able to earn enough money to do things they would never do at home, like get cable TV or an Internet connection,” he says. “With that comes the corruption and perversion that comes through the media. Many immigrants are not well prepared to face that onslaught.”

He says many immigrants arrive when they are young adults and their character is “not completely formed yet, so the church becomes an agent of formation of character and the pastor becomes a father figure for them in a very practical way.”

The City Blessing Church in Temple City, California, holds its evening service in a rented Lutheran church. At least 250 Indonesian people pack into the traditional A-frame sanctuary with wooden pews and launch into some of the liveliest worship on the West Coast.

A worship team made up mostly of young women leads popular American worship songs translated into Indonesian. People flood forward to hop, sway and lift their hands. Even elderly people raise their hands and sing with gusto.

The 2000 U.S. census estimated there were 72,000 Indonesians in America, but it’s believed that many more are here illegally, having fled religious and ethnic persecution. Most of the people in City Blessing churches were converted from atheism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Islam after they came to the U.S., Tan says. Many were cultural Catholics who met Christ for the first time here.

“It’s definitely easier for them to convert here,” Tan said. “They are out of their comfort zone.”

Tan preaches in Indonesian with an open Bible and an open Apple iBook perched on his pulpit. After the sermon and a time of intense prayer, the people stream into the fellowship hall to share a meal together, as they do after every weekend service. This is their community, and they believe that together they can change the nation.

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Joel Kilpatrick is a journalist and the creator of , the world’s leading Christian satire site. His most recent book is A Field Guide to Evangelicals and Their Habitat. He lives in Southern California.

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Immigrant Voices

These immigrant church leaders are reshaping the way Americans do church. And you can learn from them.

Marco Barrientos

Marco Barrientos left a large, multinational concert and conference ministry in Latin America to minister full time in the U.S. “Every time I came to the U.S., I would end up in tears looking at the condition of immigrant people,” he says. “I felt they were like sheep without a shepherd.”

In 2004 he founded Centro Internacional Aliento church in Dallas (), which now draws 350 on Sundays.

“One of the most important trends I see is immigrants coming to the U.S. already saved and filled with the Holy Spirit and wanting to make a difference,” Barrientos says. “In many cases they have been part of churches in Latin America where they are soul winners, so when they come they bring their revival with them.”

Valson Abraham

Valson Abraham founded Indian Christian Assembly of Los Angeles (icalos ) in his home in 1982. Today he oversees cell churches for Indians throughout Southern California.

“My vision has always been to reach non-Christians,” says Abraham, who is the general secretary of the India Pentecostal Church, the largest Pentecostal movement in India, which now has 70 churches in the U.S.

There are 1.5 million Indians in the U.S., concentrated mainly in California, New England and Seattle. Many in Abraham’s church come from Hindu backgrounds, and they often attend church for months before accepting Christ.

“There is a very good sense of community,” Abraham says. “I emphasize expository teaching, yet we are seeker-sensitive.”

Sunday services include a time of prayer and the laying on of hands, and a question and answer time about the Bible. About a quarter of the people in the church have come to the Lord within the last 15 months.

“We have had a great response in the last seven years by people who have never heard the gospel,” Abraham says.

George Rafidi

George Rafidi, a Jerusalem-born Arab, and his wife, Jessica, started Arab Outreach Ministries in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1996. “It’s long-term ministry,” George says. “It’s loving people and letting them see Jesus in you.”

They visit homes and businesses daily to build relationships with refugees from Iraq, Sudan and elsewhere. The couple often helps them get attorneys, jobs and driver’s licenses, as well as filling out applications and translating for them at the immigration office. On Sunday night they hold an Arabic church service.

The 2000 census estimated there were 1.2 million Arabs in the U.S., though Rafidi believes the number is at least 5 million today. Most Arab immigrants live in California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey and New York.

Rafidi encourages people not to “look at the Arabs through the eyes of the media but through the eyes of Jesus, as people who need the Lord.” He is president of the Arabic Assembly of God Fellowship USA, which has 13 ministries in the U.S.

Gennadiy Zavaliy

Russian pastor Gennadiy Zavaliy and his wife, Helen, came to New York City after a wave of persecution forced them from Latvia in 1997. Their House of Prayer Church Ministry () has blossomed into six churches with more than 1,000 Russian immigrants, most of them new converts, including Russian Jews and Muslims.

“When many Russians came to America they thought everyone was waiting for them,” Zavaliy says. “They believed that houses, new cars were waiting. Many have more problems here than in Russia.”

Most of the people the Zavaliys are reaching are university educated. Many struggle with depression, loneliness, even suicide. There were 2.6 million Russians in America in 2000, according to the U.S. census.

“We are amazed at what God is doing,” Zavaliy says. “I believe that God can do even more. The purpose of our church is to be a blessing for the country which God moved us to.”

Hanfere Aligaz

Hanfere Aligaz was an airline pilot in communist Ethiopia when he met Christ through American missionaries, and he came to Washington, D.C., to start a church.

“I had no money, no green card, no place to meet,” he says. But his Ethiopian Evangelical Church () has grown from five people to nearly 3,000, making it the largest Ethiopian church outside Ethiopia, he says. All services are in Amharic, but the church is beginning to reach out deliberately to non-Ethiopians.

“We believe that revival is the only way to get people saved,” Aligaz says. “People need to see the hand of God, the healing power of God. … When they do, their hearts open to the gospel.”

Aligaz’s church offers “holistic ministry” such as job training and help with immigration status. “We have to be a blessing to America because America has been a blessing to us,” Aligaz says.

Guillermo Maldonado

Guillermo Maldonado started Ministerio International El Rey Jesús in Miami () 11 years ago with a dozen people in his living room. Today the church counts 8,000 members, most of them new converts and first-generation immigrants.

“I didn’t know we would reach this many nationalities,” Maldonado says. “I thought it would be mainly Latin American people. After I started I got people from Europe, Africa and Asia coming.”

A strong reliance on prayer, personal discipleship and demonstration of the supernatural have contributed to growth, he says.

“Every time we do a miracle service we see thousands of people come. They are hungry to see the supernatural,” he says. “I think there’s something in the Hispanic community which America needs. … Latin American people are bringing revival to America.”

Bayo Adewole

The Redeemed Christian Church of God in North America (RCCG) has grown from a living room fellowship 14 years ago to 275 churches in the U.S. and Canada. Bayo Adewole oversees eight RCCG churches with a combined membership of more than 1,000 in the Chicago area (see ). They have a strong “social reformation” ethic that drives them to serve the homeless and encourage people to get a higher education.

“It’s a joy to be in this great city in America and to see what God has done in the last 10 years,” Adewole says. “From a few friends gathered together we now have eight strong churches, and we are building strong families.”

The RCCG, based in Nigeria, is known for its emphasis on holiness, its high degree of organization and its expectation that every person be trained into ministry. Services are in English and the churches aggressively court non-Africans.

Tong Liu

Meteorologist-turned-minister Tong Liu founded River of Life Christian Church () in Santa Clara, California, in 1995. It is now the largest charismatic Chinese church in North America with around 2,000 people, many of them young families and Silicon Valley professionals.

“God has done much more than I expected,” Liu says. “I didn’t realize a church [like ours] could grow that big or do cross-cultural ministry.”

River of Life has planted 58 churches in the U.S., Africa and Mongolia. Though the church is still mostly Chinese, they increasingly partner with and reach out to non-Chinese.

“If ethnic churches don’t just focus on reaching out to our own people … we can truly bring a great impact to the whole American church,” Liu says.

Joel Costa

Assembly of God Bethlehem Ministry (), a Brazilian church of 400 in Lighthouse Point, Florida, pastored by Joel Costa, was planted as a missionary work by a church in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1995. Since then, the church has planted 40 churches of its own and is reaching Portuguese, Spanish and English speakers throughout Florida.

The church recently began holding large-scale community outreach events a dozen times a year throughout central Florida, giving away free hot dogs, haircuts and car washes and hosting a garage sale. People are invited to return that night for a service at the church.

The church also has launched a ministry to help new immigrants take their first steps toward getting settled, such as obtaining a driver’s license and renting a place to live.

It’s a gamble, but Hollywood is betting that Christians will flock to theaters to see this year’s most Bible-friendly film, The Nativity Story.
In December 2004, screenwriter Mike Rich was restless to break out of writing sports-related films. The author of The Rookie, Radio and Finding Forrester found inspiration on the covers of Time and Newsweek, which were trumpeting the “secrets” of the Nativity.

“It struck me that the Nativity had always been presented as an event-based story and was rarely looked at as a character story,” says Rich, a member of Southwest Bible Church in Beaverton, Oregon. “The timing was certainly right. The Passion of the Christ earlier that year had served as a trailblazer and opened doors for this kind of movie.”

But when he ran the idea by his pastor, “There was a bit of a raised eyebrow when I first told him I was going to pursue this particular story,” says Rich, laughing. “He said: ‘I’ll pray for you. Godspeed.’ There’s a natural inclination to wonder if you’ve bitten off more than you could chew.”

New Line Cinema was more enthusiastic, buying Rich’s Nativity Story script within weeks of its completion in early 2006 and rushing it into production for release in December 2006—an almost unheard-of schedule for a major motion picture.

“I’ve never had a project go this fast,” says Nativity producer Wyck Godfrey, whose producing credits include Daddy Day Care; I, Robot and Behind Enemy Lines. “When the studio read it in February and wanted to make it for December I said: ‘That won’t happen. It’s impossible. It’ll take forever.’

“But every time there was an obstacle it got cleared. … There is an element of it feeling like providence. This is happening for a reason. Maybe we’ll look back and say, ‘This is a miracle that this movie passed all thresholds to be made.'”
In the wake of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which pulled in $610 million in worldwide box office receipts, Hollywood is rushing to make Christian-friendly movies. But will Christians like what Hollywood is offering?

A Journey of Faith

The Nativity Story, scheduled to release December 1, stars Academy Award-nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider) as Mary and takes audiences inside Mary and Joseph’s journey of faith, culminating with the birth of Jesus. “All roads, from a storytelling standpoint, lead to that one moment on screen that shows what we put on our fireplace mantle every December,” Rich says.

The story also delves into the minds and motivations of the Magi and shepherds. “We’re going to see a side to a lot of these characters that maybe hasn’t been showcased much before,” Rich says. “We’re going to see a story that has a lot of layers and emotional depth [because] a lot of times when the Nativity story is played, the Magi and shepherds are looked at as bit parts.

“I wanted to show that there were no bit parts. They represented the poorest of the poor, and what a remarkable gift from God these individuals received on that day. This was an amazing grand design.”

The filmmakers hope The Nativity Story becomes the go-to movie for the holiday season. But they recognize that, as the still-uneasy relationship between evangelicals and Hollywood matures, Christian audiences may snub the film if they see it as a patronizing money-grab rather than a sincere effort to illuminate a beloved Bible story.

For that reason, New Line worked hard to gain evangelical street credibility. They hired Grace Hill Media, founded by Jonathan Bock, son of the late Christian composer and arranger Fred Bock, which helps studios woo Christian audiences. And New Line put the script into the hands of influential Christian and Jewish leaders and asked for their stamp of approval.

“It’s very good,” says Darrell Bock (no relation to Jonathan Bock), author of Breaking the Da Vinci Code and research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He read the Nativity script in spring 2006, just as filming commenced. “The story is terrific … and the genuine authenticity of the first century was handled very well,” Bock says. “They had certain details you would only know if you really had done some work in the first century background.”

New Line also secured Bible teacher Anne Graham Lotz’s blessing. “From what I have observed, The Nativity Story is biblically accurate, historically authentic and visually stunning,” she states. “Written with heart, directed with sensitivity, produced with excellence and performed with artistic grace, it is destined to become a beloved, cherished classic.”

Others listed in support of the film are Paul Cedar, CEO of the Mission America Coalition; songwriter Gloria Gaither; Catholic Archbishop John Foley; and The 700 Club Vice President Gordon Robertson.

But perhaps more surprising than the endorsements are the number of evangelical Christians involved in the film’s making. The Nativity Story, more than The Passion of the Christ, is an evangelical enterprise.

Writer Rich is an active member of his nondenominational church. Producer Godfrey grew up in a charismatic church in Tennessee and attends Bel Air Presbyterian with his wife and three children. His parents are still involved with Young Life campus ministry.

Director Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown, Thirteen, winner of the Director’s Award at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival) grew up Presbyterian in Texas. Her parents still sing in the choir and teach Sunday school, and two of her cousins are ministers.

If Christians give The Nativity Story a lukewarm reception, one irony will be that these same audiences embraced The Passion of the Christ almost unquestionably even though director Mel Gibson had starred in violent, R-rated movies for 25 years and belongs to a deeply traditionalist wing of the Roman Catholic Church.

By comparison, The Nativity Story makers seem like a Baptist youth group. Each says the Nativity film intersects with his own spiritual journey.

“You find yourself at times in your life being more connected to God and less connected,” Godfrey says. “I wasn’t going to church in my 20s. I was focused on career. It was probably the least happy I’ve ever been in my life. Marriage and children were the path that reconnected me to my faith, which also forces you to look inward and say, ‘What can I do to live a life that’s more pleasing to God?’

“He finds you when you open your heart. That’s what this movie was. God reaching out and saying, ‘Do this.’ Of course I feel happier now having taken on that challenge than I had before.”

More Than Friday Night Entertainment

In the past, Godfrey would flinch when his parents read scripts of films he was producing. “They weren’t particularly excited about When a Stranger Calls or Alien vs. Predator,” he says. But The Nativity Story is “a movie you can take to your grave. It’s important to your faith.”

It is also the first film Godfrey is producing after leaving a secure position as president of a major production company to partner with former super-agent Marty Bowen in their own production venture.

Both men wanted to make movies “that are underserved in the marketplace, that put positive values in the world and leave audiences thinking and feeling, as opposed to pure Friday night entertainment that you forget about the next day,” Godfrey says.

“We wanted to get away from [the] cynical, jaded, irreverent. … Having children makes you think, What kind of values do I want to be putting on screen? You enter in that phase of life where you want to raise your kids in a more Christian environment.”

But Godfrey recognizes that selling Christian films to Christian audiences can be tricky. He is concerned “about Hollywood cynically chasing success,” he says. “[People say]: ‘The Passion worked, so let’s do every biblical story on an epic scale. They did the death of Christ, why not do the birth of Christ?’

“People doing movies but not for the right reasons: I think we’ll have to deal with that. People [can] feel they’re being pandered to. Hollywood just trying to make a buck. I would hate for that to happen. It’s the opposite of what Marty and I want to do with our company.”

He predicts that for a while studios will cater to “conservative Christian audiences because of the success of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Passion of the Christ. That will continue until people feel the movies are less authentic or entertaining. At some point there will be that sense of, ‘We’ve seen a bunch of those.’ It’s cyclical.

“Because of the success of some of these films, Hollywood will follow, maybe not for spiritual reasons but because they’re businessmen. Then at some point bad movies will be made chasing that dollar, and the Christian audience will be turned off. Then Hollywood will quit.”

Hardwicke says no director would make a film such as The Nativity Story if they didn’t have faith. “You pour your heart and soul into it,” she says. “It’s too intense, too many hours, too stressful. I get dozens of scripts every month. Even if it’s a fun script, if I don’t feel it’s going to do something for the world, I won’t make it.”

Hardwicke’s mother believes The Nativity Story is an answer to a long-ago prayer. “My mother wanted to have a child but couldn’t carry a baby to term,” Hardwicke says. “[When she became pregnant with me] she prayed to God and said, ‘If you let me have this baby it will be in Your service.’ So she’s so excited.

“Of course, two members of my family stepped forward and said this was preordained for me. My cousin who’s a minister said he’s prayed for two years for me to have this kind of opportunity. … Myself and the actors have discussions about how it’s come to pass that we’re making this movie instead of someone else. What a gift and what an opportunity.”

But Rich says the script was written with a sense of awesome responsibility. “There were many moments of trepidation,” he says.

“You don’t want to be irresponsible. If you write a scene where the audience even subconsciously feels that you strayed from the tone and content of the Gospels, then you’ll have failed. You want the speculative scenes to feel seamless, not as if they were shoehorned in.”

His challenge was to create a 90-minute story based on a few lines of source material. Although the events surrounding Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection are reported in great detail in the Gospels, the Nativity is told in just a few lines in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.

“The virgin birth is like a bookend to the life of Jesus,” Darrell Bock says. “You’ve got the virgin birth on one end and the crucifixion on the other. [The Nativity] is a very important indication that this child is something unusual and special. It shows that God is about the business of doing something unusual for people through this child.

“But what’s interesting is that the Bible doesn’t make near as much of [the Nativity] as you think it might. It doesn’t put a lot of neon lights around it. It tells it in such a way and accepts it that it’s surprising, but doesn’t put near the stress on it as the Resurrection. That’s part of the curiosity that surrounds it.”

The Gospel According to Matthew and Luke

In the script, Rich sought to bring to life the political, social and spiritual tenor of the times, including the oppression from the Roman government, to set the foundation for why so many people were seeking the Messiah. “There are usually bumps in the road that emerge as you write a script, but I never really had that with this script,” he says. “I’ve never had a script that flowed to the page as easily as this one did.

“[My] church spends a lot of time in the Bible. I value that. My faith is based, my foundation is the written Word, so there’s a reverence I have for those two gospel accounts.

“It was never something I forgot when writing it. It was very much in the forefront. You look at the WWJD bracelets and a lot of times I would have had a bracelet that said, ‘What would Luke and Matthew write?'”

Bock notes that the script takes poetic license and compresses time so the Magi and shepherds appear in the same scene, which “likely did not happen,” he says. Bock also recommended that New Line not promote the film by saying it was “completely biblical.”

“That is too much,” he says. “Just say it’s in line with and parallels the biblical account very well. You have to be honest with people about what’s going on.”

In Bock’s opinion, movies about biblical events should try to capture “the authenticity of the first century scene and stay true to the [biblical] characterizations” Bock says. “The Nativity script reflects that. It’s about the best you can do, or you can’t do something like this.

“A person has to appreciate the nature of the genre. You only have five minutes at most of directly biblical material. The best you can do is try to fill in the gaps.”

To Rich’s relief, there were no major complaints from the experts. “When you get the word back from Frank Wright or Anne Graham Lotz that the script has passed the test of what they view as a responsible and inspiring account, as a writer that’s all you can ask for,” Rich says.

Frank Wright, president and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters, calls the film “a biblically faithful and artistically superb expression of the most momentous event in human history—when God became a man. For a generation of moviegoers unfamiliar with this truth and its implications for their lives, this magnificent film may well be transformational.”

Rich says he will be pleased if audiences “go back and take a closer look at what was actually written by Luke and Matthew.”

“Regardless of what happens, we’ll be proud of the movie,” Godfrey says. “Hopefully the box office will vote and open the door for other movies and keep the trend of people wanting to make movies for Christian audiences.”

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Joel Kilpatrick is a journalist and the creator of , the world¹s leading Christian satire site. His most recent book is A Field Guide to Evangelicals and Their Habitat. He lives in Southern California.

Screen Saviors

Hollywood hasn’t always portrayed Jesus accurately. Here’s how one film critic ranks the most popular films about Christ.

Which Hollywood films handle the Bible accurately, and which films botch it? Charisma asked Terry Lindvall, C.S. Lewis chair of communication and Christian thought at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, Virginia, and former president of Regent University, where he was distinguished chair of visual communication. His book Sanctuary Cinema, to release in 2007, traces the origins of the Christian film industry.

Lindvall says Cecil B. DeMille’s “spectacular and sentimental 1927 silent blockbuster, King of Kings,” in spite of controversy over its sex, violence and alleged anti-Semitism, “proved to be a model of visual piety, with the actor playing Jesus, H.B. Warner, being touted as the face of Jesus that people ‘saw’ when they prayed to God.”

The 1961 King of Kings, however, drew strong rebuke from even Time magazine, which called it “the corniest, phoniest, ickiest and most monstrously vulgar of all the big Bible stories Hollywood has told in its last decade.” Jesus was portrayed as the pawn between Judas and Barabbas, and the film constantly downplayed His divinity. (Because teen actor Jeffrey Hunter played Jesus, the film has been labeled “I Was a Teenage Jesus.”)

The 1946 neo-realist Italian film by atheist and communist director Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, surprised and gratified Christian audiences by literally conveying the words of Matthew’s Gospel “with a reverent intensity,” showing how Jesus chose suffering and death, called His disciples to be serious followers of His way and “spoke with a righteous anger against wealthy hypocrites and religious leaders,” Lindvall says.

George Stevens’ 1965 The Greatest Story Ever Told, on the other hand, featured silly Hollywood cameos including Pat Boone as an angel and John Wayne as the centurion at the cross drawling, “Surely this musta been the Son-a God.” The film was so long—originally 260 minutes—that it became known as “The Longest Story Ever Told.”

“Baptist film critic Billy Joe Bob once quipped that the film was so long that when Jesus says, ‘I am with you always even until the end of the world,’ it is a threat,” Lindvall says. Swedish actor Max von Sydow speaks in King James English though everyone else speaks colloquially.

Lindvall recommends Franco Zeffirelli’s television miniseries Jesus of Nazareth as “one of the most authentic, Jewish presentations of the gospel account.” And The Gospel According to Matthew, produced by the Visual Bible, offers a literal textual (NIV) version and “a laughing Jesus, [which] did much to make it enjoyable.”

He pans Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ for its “confused, neurotic and angst-ridden Messiah, struggling with His mission.” And he says Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ “strikes one as an American film of the end of the century, full of violence and excess, even while demonstrating a visceral and emotional connection of passion to faith.”

But “to paraphrase the apostle Paul, whether the story is told in pretense, for crass profit or from an honest humility, the story is told and gets out,” Lindvall concludes.
Joel Kilpatrick

Mangers, Magi and Swaddling Clothes

Much of what we believe about the Christmas story is shrouded in myth and legend. Here are the facts.

Through the years since Jesus’ birth, we have read and heard the Christmas story over and over again. We have seen it portrayed in paintings, books, Nativity sets, plays, movies and TV specials, and on cards of every description. Unfortunately, much of what we have seen, read and heard does not accurately reflect the factual account found in God’s Word. Let’s debunk some of the most popular myths.

Myth: Mary rode into Bethlehem on a donkey.

Fact: The Bible doesn’t specify how Mary got to Bethlehem. It says only that her husband, Joseph, went there to be registered with her, and that while they were there, she had her first child (see Luke 2:4-7).

Myth: Mary gave birth to Jesus the night she arrived in Bethlehem.

Fact: It is more likely that she and Joseph went well in advance of her delivery. The Bible simply says that “while they were there [in Bethlehem], the days were completed for her to be delivered” (v. 6, NKJV).

Myth: Jesus was born in a stable.

Fact: The Bible says, “And she [Mary] brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn” (v. 7). It doesn’t mention a stable.

The reference to a manger—a feeding trough for animals—has caused some people to assume that Mary and Joseph were staying in a free-standing barn. But in biblical times, mangers were also located inside houses because animals were often kept on the lower level of homes at night rather than in a separate building.

The Greek word translated “inn” in the verse quoted above is kataluma. Elsewhere in the New Testament it is translated “guest room” (see Mark 14:14; Luke 22:11).

When Joseph and Mary arrived in Bethlehem to register for the census, they would undoubtedly have gone to the home of one of Joseph’s relatives, not to a public lodging place. The upstairs living quarters of the home were probably already full of other relatives, so they stayed downstairs in a room that at times housed livestock (hence the manger).

Myth: Jesus was born on December 25.

Fact: The Bible does not tell us when Jesus was born. However, considering the description of the events surrounding His birth, this date seems improbable.

It would have been too cold at that time of year for shepherds to be “living out in the fields” and keeping watch over their flocks, especially at night (see Luke 2:8). It also would have been a hard time for Mary to travel (see ).

The date was chosen by the early church fathers to replace a pagan festival that celebrated the annual return of the sun—the time of year when the days began to grow longer—with a Christian holy day.

Myth: Angels sang on the night of Jesus’ birth.

Fact: There is no indication in the biblical account that the angels sang. One angel appeared to shepherds living out in the fields and announced Jesus’ birth, and then “a multitude of the heavenly host” joined the first angel “praising God and saying: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!'” (vv. 9-14). The Bible states that the angels were speaking, not singing.

Myth: Angels were in evidence at the site of Jesus’ birth.

Fact: Though there may have been angels present, the Bible does not mention that they were there or that they were visible.

Myth: Three kings on camels visited Jesus soon after He was born.

Fact: This is the impression we get from most Nativity sets. However, the Bible says only that “wise men from the East came to Jerusalem” asking for the King of the Jews (Matt. 2:1-2).

It doesn’t tell how many wise men there were, what mode of transportation they used or what their titles were. Some people have assumed there were three because they gave Jesus three gifts—gold, frankincense and myrrh. But there is no indication that each wise man gave only one gift (see v. 11).

There is also no reason to believe the wise men saw Jesus when He was still a newborn, as many greeting cards portray. In fact, by the time they arrived in Bethlehem, He was no longer a baby, but a young child—perhaps as old as 2—according to the Scriptures (see vv. 8-9,11,13-14,16).
Maureen D. Eha

Bethlehem on the Big Screen

The Nativity Story offers a refreshingly realistic look at the world’s most famous miracle.

When I first learned that Hollywood was producing a film version of Jesus’ birth, I feared the worst. I wondered if they would use computer-generated angel wings, Renaissance-era costumes, cheesy subplots and sappy dialogue spoken in King James English by blond-haired actors. But I didn’t cringe even once during an advance screening of New Line Cinema’s The Nativity Story. It is possibly the most tasteful treatment of a Bible story to ever grace the screen.

Don’t expect a romanticized, Christmas card version of the familiar story. This movie is not about cattle lowing while angels sing sweetly over a stable. It opens with a terrifying scene of Herod’s soldiers storming into Bethlehem to butcher Jewish baby boys—a grim reminder that the promised Messiah came to a world gripped by government-sponsored terrorism.

The film then takes us to the town of Nazareth, where we meet the young Mary (played by Oscar-nominated actress Keisha Castle-Hughes of Whale Rider) and her future husband Joseph (Oscar Isaac)—whom Mary’s father forces her to marry. The miraculous events that follow—the birth of John the Baptist, the appearance of an angel to Mary, and her unexplainable pregnancy—are set against the rugged backdrop of Palestine during the Roman occupation. Life was cruel, houses were tiny, food was scarce and Jews were the victims when Herod’s troops marched into town.

When soldiers abduct a young Jewish girl because her father could not pay his taxes, we feel the fear and oppression that hung over the residents of Nazareth—and we find our hearts aching with theirs for the coming of a Savior. When the maniacal Herod (Ciarán Hinds) pouts on his rooftop lair in Jerusalem, worrying that his own son or a phantom Messiah will overthrow him, we understand the demonic forces that drove him to commit his despicable attempt at genocide.

Screenwriter Mike Rich (Radio, Finding Forrester) did his homework on the historic details of this film, and sets and characters conform to the customs of Palestine at the time of Christ’s birth. Filmed on location in Israel, Morocco and southern Italy, the movie has a gritty quality that reflects the hardship of the times. We see the oppression of women (the men of Nazareth want to stone Mary when they learn she is pregnant), the pain of primitive childbirth (Elizabeth holds a rope during contractions) and the dangers of travel through Judea’s terrain (Mary and Joseph’s 100-mile journey to Bethlehem is almost fatal).

The stark realism of The Nativity Story will challenge those who think of the birth of Jesus as a fanciful fairy tale. Director Catherine Hardwicke made sure that the characters are believable (including the angels, who are understatedly human-looking).

Unlike Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which offered us a Catholic-style Mary on a decorative pedestal, this film gives us a frightened, teenage Mary who wonders why God chose someone like her to carry His Son and then tries to muster confidence after her family accuses her of immorality.

Though Mary’s relationship with Joseph is strained at the beginning (after all, this was an arranged marriage), she grows to love him after God shows him in a dream that the child in her womb was miraculously conceived. Eventually the young couple discovers they are on a divine mission, and Joseph emerges as a hero as he protects his bride from snakes, marketplace thieves and murderous soldiers.
The film is not preachy but the message is clear: When God sent His Son into the world, He chose the lowliest people to carry out His plan—and the most powerful man in Palestine could not stop Him. The baby Jesus (who is seen only in a few brief scenes) escapes Herod’s sword and finds a hiding place in Egypt.

Theologians may quibble over minor details of the movie, especially that the Magi who travel from Persia arrive on the night of Jesus’ birth instead of two years later. The film also suggests that the star that led the wise men to Bethlehem was actually an alignment of three heavenly bodies. That may not be how it really happened, but certainly some type of divine alignment occurred in Hollywood this year. The Nativity Story arrived in theaters just in time—when our terrorized world is desperate for some good news.
J. Lee Grady

Note to parents: The Nativity Story, though certainly not as violent as The Passion of the Christ, is rated PG because of Herod’s brutality.

No other church leader in America has inspired grass-roots evangelism like Tommy Barnett. But he’s too busy caring for lost people to keep track of his success.
The campus of Phoenix First Assembly of God nestles up against a cactus-dotted Arizona hillside, looking, as one person says, more like a resort than a church. On a Sunday morning, golf carts zip people up to the sanctuary past well-groomed desert landscaping. A brand-new child-care “village” teems with kids, and a new area for older youth looks like an Olympic-style plaza.

White buses, including several for wheelchair-users, bring hundreds of people from faraway neighborhoods to the large sanctuary. Inside, it rises two balconies high over a sprawling main floor, and heart-pounding praise music fills the room.

Then pastor Tommy Barnett takes the pulpit, as he does here nearly every Sunday morning. “Everybody who’s glad they’ve come to Phoenix First, say a good amen,” he says. With that he launches into a sermon on how to be a miracle, and his energy makes him seem decades younger than his 65 years.

It’s only mild exaggeration to say that the charismatic wing of the body of Christ is divided into the haves and the haven’ts–those who have experienced Tommy Barnett and those who haven’t; those who have attended his pastors school and those who haven’t; those who have been to the Dream Center in Los Angeles and those who haven’t; those who have found a new vision for their lives at one of these places and those who haven’t.

He’s a Dream-Weaver

For those who know only Barnett’s name, it may come as a surprise that he is arguably the most influential pastor in America today. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other pastors claim him as their own pastor. His ideas have radically changed how charismatic churches and ministers–from T.D. Jakes to Jim Bakker–carry out ministry.

Barnett and men he has trained lead three of the largest churches in the Assemblies of God (AG). He founded the Dream Center in Los Angeles–a massive inner-city social ministry and church housed in the former Queen of Angels Hospital–and inspired the opening of almost 200 other similar centers in the United States and Europe.

Bill Wilson of Metro Ministries in Brooklyn, New York–who started the nationally successful Sidewalk Sunday School ministry–learned from Barnett while working as a church-bus driver in Iowa. The AG’s Master’s Commission, born at Phoenix First, has become the leading ministry for young people wanting to give a year or two of their lives to radical missions training.

“I think Barnett is one of the most inspirational men I have ever known,” says Bishop T.D. Jakes, pastor of the 28,000-member Potter’s House church in Dallas. “He has–by his presence, his preaching and his persona–the ability to motivate others to reach for their dreams.”

“He’s the greatest man of God I’ve ever met,” says Larry Kerychuk, who was on staff at Phoenix First, co-founded Master’s Commission and led a Christian athletes conference for 18 years. “He makes everybody comfortable in his presence, from the inner-city kid to the millionaire. Usually when you hang around someone long enough you get used to them, but I’ve been with him for 23 years, and I’m more in awe of him now than I ever have been.”

That sentiment is common even among America’s highest-profile ministers. Many of them tapped into their lifelong purpose upon attending Barnett’s annual pastors school, which has become one of the most significant regularly held events in modern Christian history.

Barnett is, by his own acknowledgement, not a great scholar or theologian. There is no pomp about him. No handlers, bodyguards, silk suits, fancy cars. He flies economical Southwest Airlines. His office is decorated simply. Every Sunday he stands in the foyer of his 15,000-member church and shakes hands and hugs necks for an hour.

He’s of legal age to retire but has no plans to. He sold his dream property in Flagstaff, Arizona, and used the money to start the Los Angeles Dream Center. He gave up golf because he prefers spending time meditating on God. He still receives offers to pastor some of the largest churches in the country. (These invitations don’t attract him, although he has considered going to London, where, he says, “Someone could build the greatest church in the world.”)

He comes from strong ministry roots and admired his father as an innovator. As a boy, he rode the church bus into poor neighborhoods to fetch the “forgotten” children of Kansas City, Kansas, and bring them to church. At 16, fueled by a passion to do something great for God, he preached weekend revivals in several states.

At 17 he dropped out of Bible school, believing it was delaying his ministry calling. Soon he was preaching in the largest churches of the day. He got married, took a church in Davenport, Iowa, that was beset by infighting and turned it into one of the fastest-growing churches in America. Country music star Johnny Cash once headlined an outreach event at the church.

During this time his threefold calling became clear to him: to build a soul-winning church, to set a pattern of good works for others to follow and to inspire pastors to do great things for God. One year he convened a daylong pastors conference that was so successful it became an annual event.

The School of the Heart

Then, to his disbelief, God called him to Phoenix to a dimly lit church with shrinking attendance run by a discontented board. Barnett came reluctantly and began to build what would become, for a time, the largest church in America. He ran buses to poor neighborhoods, staged spectacular Easter and Christmas pageants, and performed illustrated sermons that rivaled the showmanship of Broadway. The pastors school, through word-of-mouth, became a bona fide phenomenon.

“The success of the pastors school has been a big surprise to me,” Barnett says. “I think it’s because we do stuff pastors can do. Not all pastors can be geniuses or great Bible scholars or orators, but they can all have character and do the work of the ministry.”

Indeed, the pastors school, which is now 25 years old and draws 14,000 people a year, is a dream-revving engine. First-timers expecting a stodgy series of cerebral sessions might think they instead have been roped by a circus clown.

The opening night’s parade of 200 ministries–a segment of the service when people march across the altar in a convoy that includes bikers on rumbling motorcycles, “holy rollers” in wheelchairs, and mentally retarded children who throw candy to the audience–is so shockingly different and moving that many pastors cry all the way through it. The atmosphere is pure fun–a zoo, as Barnett describes it.

When the parade ends–with the presence of a live elephant, swooping angels and a real caboose–the lights go down, and Barnett says: “You’re probably wondering how this all started. When I came here 23 years ago, I didn’t know what to do. But we started bringing kids on buses.”

Then, suddenly, 500 kids run down the aisles and fill the altar. Barnett interviews one or two and invites them to sing a song. They tell how they were saved from gang life and drugs.

The kids then clear the stage and Barnett says, “Then those kids grew up, and here’s what they became.” The curtain parts to reveal 300 Master’s Commission students singing: “I came to praise Him! I came to worship Him!”

By this time the atmosphere is electric. Barnett interviews mentally retarded children, athletes, bikers and people in wheelchairs who testify how their lives changed because of the extraordinary measures Phoenix First took in reaching out to them. For a finale, balloons fall from the ceiling, confetti cannons boom and streamers fly.

And it’s still just the first night.

“Every barrier gets broken down on opening night,” Barnett says of the school. “They expected to see a big ol’ sophisticated church, and what they see instead tears at their hearts.”

For the next few days Barnett, who personally teaches the sessions and has never turned the conference over to others, goes over the mechanics of holding big outreaches, pageants, turkey dinners for thousands of poor people, illustrated sermons and much more.

At one point he loads the attendees on buses and sends them out to bring people to church at night. When evening comes, video screens are set up outside to serve the overflow, everyone is served hot dogs and hot chocolate, and Barnett puts on an impressive illustrated sermon. It’s normal for 1,000 people to stream forward for salvation.

That kind of response so moved John Maxwell, the best-selling author of The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership–who was pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego when he first attended Barnett’s school–that he and his staff requested a room at the church where they could meet together after the service.

“We prayed there for a couple of hours, asking God to give us a passion for lost souls,” Maxwell says. “That night marked both the staff’s ministry and my ministry as we went back to San Diego with renewed passion.”

The school ends with pastors spending time alone on the mountainside, asking God to give them a dream, then writing it down and nailing it to the ground. Some people pray on the mountain all night.

One of the school’s biggest fans is Ted Haggard, pastor of 9,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“I go to megachurch pastors schools all the time–I’m a pastors school junkie,” Haggard says, “and Tommy Barnett’s is the only one I’ve ever been to–in all my life–where they talk about love. All the others talk about systems and programs and structures, but only Tommy’s school, exclusively, coaches people on how to love one another.”

At Haggard’s church the folding chairs they use to accommodate large crowds are nicknamed “Tommy Barnett chairs.” Haggard says it’s because Barnett’s name is synonymous with caring for people.

“He has the ability to stand in front of a large crowd and really care for each individual,” he says. “I’m in a world where religious charlatans use religious words, but behind the scenes they’re not genuine. Tommy is genuine. He’s the Mother Teresa of L.A. He helps people live a better life and causes them to be better on the inside.

“It’s Jesus in his heart that makes him act like that. People are confused about Christianity because there are not enough Tommy Barnetts around. If [Taliban fighter] John Walker Lindh had met him before he went overseas, he’d be a nice, Christian young man because that’s what he was looking for.”

Charles Nieman pastors the largest nondenominational church in El Paso, Texas–11,000-member Abundant Living Faith Center. Eight years ago he attended Barnett’s pastors school for the first time.

“It revolutionized my life,” Nieman says. “This is embarrassing, but my feeling was: I can’t learn anything over there. That’s AG. I’m Word of Faith. But my wife and I pulled onto the property, and it looked like a resort, not a church. We went in and almost couldn’t find a seat, it was so full.

“During the parade of ministries I broke down. It happens every time I go to pastors school. I lose it. Seeing all those people is like seeing the kingdom of God in action.”

Nieman says he learned more in a single session than in all the seminars he’d ever attended. And attendance at his church was already at 5,000 people. Today his congregation gives away literally tons of food and clothing, thousands of toys and blankets, and bus people to the sanctuary for services.

“Pastors school opened our eyes to things we never imagined doing,” he says. “We saw how Tommy opened doors for people to get involved. You know these things in your head, but it’s another thing to see it in manifestation, and it clicked in us. Tommy is my pastor. The impact he’s had on my life and church is immeasurable.”

Standing With the Fallen

Barnett inspires uncommon loyalty. Ten pastors on his staff have been with him 10 years or more.

At least four major ministries were born at Phoenix First: the National Association for Marriage Enrichment (a type of Promise Keepers for couples), Master’s Commission, Dream Center and a professional athletes conference. Each still operates from or has close ties with the church.

Barnett makes no effort to exert a strong hand over them. He has never copyrighted the names Master’s Commission or Dream Center.

“We have a philosophy,” Barnett says. “Whatever God gives us, we give it away because that makes us work harder to come up with something new. It keeps us on the cutting edge instead of sticking to the same old stuff.”

People urged him to take tighter control of the Los Angeles Dream Center, to make it an association with membership dues. Barnett did the opposite. He said anybody could use the name, and he waived registration fees to pastors school for other Dream Center staff around the country.

“Instead of them paying us to become a Dream Center, we bless them,” he says.

The Dream Center is perhaps the purest crystallization of Barnett’s ministry approach. At age 57 he wanted to start a church in Los Angeles but turned down invitations to begin one in affluent communities.

“I wanted to go where nobody else wanted to go,” he says.

He chose the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in Los Angeles and installed his son Matthew, then age 20, as co-pastor. This fit the elder Barnett’s belief in “downward mobility”–his commitment, as he describes it, to “gather all the hurting people that the world overlooked–the unwanted kids, the people who have failed.”

“I’ve learned there’s a blessing when you reach down to people nobody else wants,” he notes.

Within five years the Dream Center exploded in attendance and became a massive, full-service church reaching down-and-out people in every way imaginable–with tons of food a week, job training, an AIDS hospice, an elementary school and more ministries than can be named here.

“Tommy Barnett’s outreach to the inner city has been a model that we at The Potter’s House have used as a template to further our reach into inner-city evangelism,” Jakes says of his Dallas church.

The Dream Center, like Phoenix First, has become a vision incubator, breeding ministry entrepreneurs. Barnett calls it “loosing people,” and it often means putting ministry in the hands of people nobody else would touch. And, as his track record shows, it works.

Jack Wallace moved to Phoenix to learn ministry from Barnett in the 1980s. He was Tommy’s right-hand man for 10 years, but after extensive orthopedic surgeries Wallace struggled with an incipient addiction to prescription painkillers.

Personal conviction drove him to confess the dependency to Barnett and to the church. As a result, Wallace found himself persona non grata with some people in the church and the denomination.

“Some people ditched me because I’d fallen from grace,” Wallace says. “They stopped calling.”

But during his yearlong rehabilitation, Wallace says Barnett stuck close to him. When Wallace decided he was ready to pastor a church, Barnett championed him through several humiliating rejections.

Finally, Wallace took the helm of an almost dead church in Detroit, changed its name to Detroit World Outreach and in eight years has raised it from six attendees on Wednesday nights to more than 10,000 every weekend. It now is the largest food provider in Michigan, giving 5 million pounds of food a year (2,300 tractor-trailer loads). It buses 1,500 kids to church every Sunday–all part of the “find a need and fill it” approach that Wallace learned from Barnett.

“Working for Pastor Tommy was the greatest honor I’ve ever had,” Wallace says. “I value his friendship more than anything on the planet. You really have to be a mess before he’ll turn his back on you. You almost have to turn your back on him, and then he’ll still call you friend for a long time.”

Others have experienced Barnett’s loyalty. He and Billy Graham were the only two ministers to visit Jim Bakker during his first six months in prison, and Barnett and the Los Angeles Dream Center played a big part in Bakker’s after-prison restoration. Neither did he abandon his old friend Jimmy Swaggart after the Louisiana evangelist’s public fall.

“I love him to this day,” Barnett says.

There’s a good reason why Barnett would rather bank on uncertain people and stand with the disgraced than not.

“It’s worth it to trust people,” he says. “Some will make it, and some won’t, but you never know who unless you give them all a chance. A lot of the ministries at our church fail, but a lot of them rise up.”

For Barnett, that’s the stuff dreams–and reality–are made of.

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Tommy Barnett’s children say they respect the ministry today because their dad had right priorities.

Of all of Tommy Barnett’s accomplishments, he’s proudest of his three children–Kristie, Luke and Matthew–and his marriage to wife Marja. Interviews paint a portrait of a busy but devoted father.

“We always felt we were a huge priority,” says Kristie, who is married with children and sings on the worship team at Phoenix First Assembly of God where her dad is pastor. “Dad was very busy, but we had dinner as a family every night, and he took us to school every morning.”

All three children say their father came to every athletic game and practice when they were in school, even packing sermon notes to take to track meets and canceling preaching invitations to attend football games.

“That made us respect the ministry,” Kristie notes.

Luke, who pastors the thriving and progressive First Family Church in Whittier, California, admires his father’s passion for life, his integrity and his concern for people.

“I’ve watched his integrity in little things most people don’t know about,” Luke says. “He hand-writes a letter to everyone who writes him, and he’s never lost perspective that it’s about people. He knows people matter to God, so they matter to him. People tell me: ‘There’s something in his eyes. You can see the love of God oozing out of him.’

“My dad has an uncanny ability to let people know they’re the most important thing in his life right then. Sometimes this world beats people up so badly they don’t ever feel that way, but to look in your pastor’s eyes and know you’re the focus of his life–I’ve aspired to be like that.”

And Tommy Barnett’s passion for life, Luke says, is next to none. Recently when he and his dad were visiting together in Los Angeles, Tommy suggested they go for a jog–at midnight through Skid Row.

“He squeezes every ounce of energy out of life,” Luke says.

Matthew says the time spent with his dad as a boy helped him form his vision for the Dream Center. “We had a best-friend kind of relationship,” Matthew says. “Almost every night we’d go in the car to get ice cream or something.”

Both boys still call him every Monday morning to talk about how Sunday services went–the same thing Tommy did with his own father. During those conversations the lessons of ministry–dealing with various people and potential problems–get passed on.

“My dad’s a real peacemaker, which I learned from him,” Luke says. “He says that if you make an enemy, you’ll see him wherever you go, but you can’t make too many friends.”

Tommy never pressured his children to go into ministry.

“I never wanted to be anything but a mom, and he made me feel so good about that,” Kristie says. “He brags on me and tells me what a good job I do. Growing up I always wanted to raise my kids like he raised me.”

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Tommy Barnett’s philosophy of giving to meet needs has produced models of successful outreach.

In Detroit, New York, Los Angeles and Phoenix, Tommy Barnett and his protégés lead some of America’s largest churches.

Bill Wilson, senior pastor and founder of Metro Ministries, a Sunday school ministry in Brooklyn, New York, that reaches 20,000 children a week, ran Barnett’s bus ministry in Davenport, Iowa, from 1975-1980 and says it was the catalyst that launched him into ministry in the nation’s largest city.

“Pastor Barnett invests in young men at critical times when they need someone to believe in them,” Wilson says. “He has a unique gift of seeing something and believing in people to such an extent that they see something in themselves that they wouldn’t have seen. He saw me when I was slugging it out in ministry as a 19-year-old kid, and he believed I was investable when a lot of other people didn’t.”

The pastors Barnett inspires innovate on the basic Barnett model, but the underlying idea–turning a church’s energies outward to love and serve the community–is the same. In Detroit, Jack Wallace started Fashion Share, where women in the church buy new outfits and put on a fashion show and a “shopping” spree for poor women. A thousand needy women, bused to the church from local shelters, get a fun day out and free clothes.

In Los Angeles, the Dream Center’s mix of good works and evangelism on a massive scale has become a beacon for churches around the world who want to be more effective in ministry. And other Barnett-inspired churches, such as the new St. Louis Dream Center, may become urban powerhouses.

How does Barnett teach others to grow churches of such size and influence? By teaching principles anyone can put into practice, Wilson says.

“Most big ministry guys can’t duplicate what they do because you can’t duplicate a personality. But you can duplicate principles,” Wilson explains. “Barnett does it differently. It’s not the Tommy Barnett show–he teaches biblical principles of outreach and compassion. Then average people say, ‘I can do that.’

“And they can. You take the principles and run with them.”

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Tommy Barnett’s discipleship program, Master’s Commission, emphasizes servanthood as the foundation of true ministry.

One of the most far-reaching ministries born under Tommy Barnett’s leadership is Master’s Commission (MC), an intense, one- or two-year program that teaches radical servanthood and discipleship. The ministry began at Phoenix First Assembly of God in 1984 with 12 young people. Today there are about 150 groups and 2,400 students in the United States, with dozens of groups overseas.

The goal is to teach “a lifestyle of servant-ministry,” says Lloyd Zeigler, longtime director of the Phoenix and Los Angeles programs. Students don’t just lead worship and do outreach–they clean toilets, too.

“We believe in being a servant all the way through,” Zeigler adds.

Each local program is autonomous, though half are affiliated with the Phoenix-based network to maintain the “standards and heart” of the original program. In Illinois, Jeremy DeWeerdt started an MC at Rockford First Assembly in 1993. Today the program has about 180 students a year and works closely with the church’s 1,000-person youth ministry.

“Every MC is different,” DeWeerdt says. “There are core values, but the structure of the program should take on the personality of the church. For example, ours is geared toward training youth leaders.” The Rockford church even built on-campus apartments for its students to live in.

What separates an MC experience from a regular academic experience is the hands-on training, DeWeerdt says. In the morning, students spend time in prayer and worship. Then they go to a class for academics, and in the afternoon they put their training into practice on a street corner or at a public school. It adds up to “an incredible smorgasbord of experience and wisdom and teaching,” he says.

One student who attests to that is the reigning Mrs. America, Kristi Phillips, who became a Christian in her first year of college and joined the Rockford program.

“That first year with MC decided my walk with the Lord,” the on-fire graduate says. “It changed my life from the inside out. His Spirit grabbed hold of me.”

Kristi and husband Brian spent four years with MC programs and have been in full-time ministry since. Today, as Kristi serves out her Mrs. America term, she and Brian are praying about where God would send them–and hoping it will be to another MC program.

“Like most young girls, I went in very insecure, with low self-esteem, broken inside from immature mistakes I’d made,” Kristi says. “I grew so much in Master’s Commission. I had purpose in my life after that point, to live a Christian life and worship Him. I recommend it to any young person coming out of high school. God does amazing things in your life. You don’t even recognize yourself.”

The programs are set up to draw students by regions, but youths are sent to MC groups outside of their own regions to “get them out of their comfort zone,” DeWeerdt says. At the ministry’s annual conference in Phoenix, 6,000 students come together for a time of wild, glorious celebration and learning.

“You can’t have a ministry that grows without a pastor that believes in it,” Zeigler points out. “Master’s Commission was kind of pastor Barnett’s baby. It’s tied to his vision.”

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Joel Kilpatrick is a Los Angeles-based writer and a frequent contributor to Charisma.

Angelus Temple, founded in 1923 by Aimee Semple McPherson, lost its edge in recent years. But today the historic landmark is poised to reach a new generation for Christ.

You know you’re in Dream Center territory when on inner-city street corners you see groups of tough-looking men with push brooms and wheelbarrows beautifying their neighborhoods. It’s Sunday morning in Echo Park–the rough part of Los Angeles depicted and captured visually in the recent Oscar-winning film Training Day. But for now the bad guys are quiet, and hundreds of people–Bibles in hand, kids in tow–stream toward the grand, domed church at the park’s edge. Others arrive aboard the converted Greyhound buses plying the streets–buses now emblazoned with the BADD logo for “Born Again Delivered Disciples.”

A huge sign welcomes people to a “brand-new day in the beautifully renovated sanctuary,” and the inside bears this out. Ikea-style chandeliers and new carpet give the lobby flair. There’s a café and bookstore, and greeters are at every door. But the dazzling stuff is in the sanctuary with its two balconies, bright-red carpet, new theater seats, klieg lights, arena-style stage assembly and newly added air conditioning, all items that make this 80-year-old meeting place hospitable to the modern churchgoer.

Amazingly, the new touches, which cost $7 million, seem to elevate the cherished architectural features that make Angelus Temple a designated national- historic landmark: its eight stained-glass windows two stories tall; its blue, domed ceiling, now hung tastefully with sound baffles; the two balconies; and its mural of Jesus.

But what could have become merely a religious landmark is now the scene of remarkable revival, thanks to significant recent changes.

Today seats are filling up. Kneeling people pray on the steps of the platform. As 10 a.m. approaches, the buzz of anticipation grows louder, and the silky white scrim pulls aside to reveal a platform filled with musicians including 10 singers, a trumpeter and a guy scratching records at a built-in turntable. Behind them is a huge arcing video screen where images flash at rapid speed.

“Lift your praises up to the Lord!” the worship leader and crew sing, pumping their fists in the air. The 2,200 or so people in the theater follow suit, clapping, hopping and shouting. It’s a high-volume experience.

After the aerobic worship time, the pastor, a young blond man in a suit, takes the stage to say how much he’s anticipated giving this morning’s sermon. He prays, invites the band to crank through the last song again, and then the scrim draws closed, and he is alone with the audience.

The young man is Matthew Barnett, the 28-year-old visionary whose stewardship of the Dream Center just six blocks away so impressed leaders of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (ICFG) that they nominated him for the task of breathing new life into Angelus Temple, their founding church.

He now leads the Dream Center–one of the largest and most innovative churches in the Assemblies of God–and Angelus Temple, the most historically significant Foursquare church. This could be a turning point for the Temple, which went through a rough patch in recent years, and for Barnett, who is emerging as one of the most watched and emulated pastors in America.

On the platform at the Temple, Barnett welcomes visitors from Idaho, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan and Kentucky. Then he welcomes a distinguished guest, Nathaniel M. Van Cleave, former ICFG general supervisor, and asks him to greet the people.

“I heard so much about what was happening here, and I couldn’t wait to see it with my own eyes,” Van Cleave says, tears in his eyes. “I’ve seen it, I’ve felt it, and I praise God for what’s being done.”

The place erupts with applause, and Barnett hugs him before moving into his sermon.

Angelus Temple–the original megachurch–has operated continuously since it opened January 1, 1923, but it had faltered in recent years. A Hispanic congregation of 1,000 met in an adjacent auditorium on the property, but the main congregation dwindled and stopped meeting in the sanctuary altogether.

That was a far cry from the Temple’s personality in its heyday of the 1920s and throughout the Depression era when Aimee Semple McPherson was one of the most famous people in America. Her theater-style sermons (sometimes illustrated with live animals), daily radio program, healing ministry and the controversy she stirred put the Temple at the epicenter of a strange, wonderful world that had at its core the declaration of the gospel.

McPherson was unlike any evangelist the world had seen, combining the power of the Holy Spirit–in prophecy, the laying on of hands and speaking in other tongues–with Hollywood showmanship. Her life and occasional scandals made front-page news in the country’s major newspapers. And although she died in 1944 she remains one of the most important architects of the modern Pentecostal movement.

The church she built followed the trajectory of her popularity. The opening of Angelus Temple in 1923 drew a crowd of thousands, many arriving before sunrise, clogging the streets and trolley lines. Actor Charlie Chaplin later helped design part of the Temple’s sanctuary.

The church quickly became a magnet, drawing curiosity seekers from around the world, people desperate for healing or hope, the hungry, the poor and the high-class. But what set it apart was that McPherson didn’t just preach the gospel (to vast audiences by radio and in person), she demonstrated it.

She persuaded a dozen doctors and hundreds of nurses to give free services to children and the elderly. The Temple’s commissary evolved into what one biographer called “the greatest welfare agency in [Los Angeles] during the Depression, providing food, clothing and rent money for the needy, regardless of race or religion.” The church fed perhaps millions in that era.

The church also became the cornerstone of a new denomination, the ICFG, which today counts 3.6 million attendees in 123 countries and whose headquarters is a block away from the Temple.

And now the legacy of that founding church comes to rest on Barnett, who was born and raised in the Assemblies of God (AG) but whose ministry style was modeled after McPherson’s. (Barnett is now an officially ordained minister with the Foursquare Church.)

Barnett and his father, Tommy Barnett of the influential Phoenix (Arizona) First Assembly of God, have long performed illustrated sermons and served the poor and castaway with innovative outreach programs. Tommy Barnett even designed his 20,000-member Phoenix church to resemble Angelus Temple with its two balconies.

Whether behind the pulpit or behind his modest desk in an office overlooking the Dream Center campus, Matthew Barnett is relaxed, fun-loving and focused. He has earned the respect of the people in his neighborhood. (They hug him and call him “Pastor.”)

But it wasn’t always this way.

Eight years ago he came to Los Angeles to pastor the first AG church born of the Azusa Street revival of the early 1900s. The congregation had dwindled to two dozen elderly Filipinos. For a year Barnett, then 20, tried to start programs designed for suburban churches like those he’d seen succeed in Phoenix, but every effort failed.

The team of people who initially came to help him left in discouragement. Barnett didn’t speak Spanish and couldn’t communicate with people in the neighborhoods, and hard-edged city life was nothing like his upbringing in Arizona.

He slogged through one more Sunday night service with an attendance of two, then went home and buried his face in his pillow. He was too proud to throw in the towel and too confused to do anything but cry.

That night God reawakened a dream Barnett had had as a boy for a “24-hour church” serving the inner city. He says the Holy Spirit led him on a walk through Echo Park, where he saw gang members in handcuffs, homeless people and pregnant teens. That night he gave up the idea of building a megachurch and committed himself to building a church comprising people from the lowest social rung.

The new approach showed fruit almost immediately, and the congregation outgrew the building. That led to the purchase of the former Queen of Angels Hospital, a dilapidated 14-story building on a 9-acre campus that, through hard work and tireless fund raising, was transformed into a headquarters for more than 200 inner-city ministries.

The Dream Center has helped to revolutionize the Pentecostal movement by pairing a gospel of social action with Spirit-empowered solutions to the problems of drugs, crime and homelessness.

There are now 130 independent Dream Centers in America and dozens more overseas. The original Dream Center’s full impact is much greater, considering the numerous churches that have followed the example and added feeding programs, AIDS hospices, thrift stores, and legal and medical counseling.

“For years churches have fled the inner city,” Barnett says. “Now they’re going back and buying adult bookstores, dance clubs, and having tutoring and counseling, and all these programs.

“A great portion of the church is reshaping their thinking about being relevant to the culture. Even secular people don’t disagree that it’s right to give to someone in need.

“With that agenda in the church it’ll give us a voice to speak on a lot of other issues that before we weren’t capable of speaking to. Like Mother Teresa, you earn the right to be heard.”

Rolf McPherson, 89, Aimee McPherson’s son, is one of Barnett’s biggest boosters and says the mantle of ministry on his mother has been passed to Barnett (see related article on page 64).

“We love the way Matthew loves the neighborhood, how they visit people in their homes,” McPherson told Charisma when Barnett was named the new pastor. “It reminds me of my mother’s ministry because of her love for people. She didn’t care where they came from. If the city needed this when my mother was alive, it needs it 10 times as much now.”

McPherson has faithfully attended services, sitting on the front row, since Barnett came in November 2001. Longtime members of the Temple agree that their church is on the upturn. Neil McClaflin, 65, attended LIFE Bible college, as did his parents, and he has attended the Temple throughout his life.

“The wonderful thing to me is that Matthew’s vision is like the original vision of the Temple, to reach the community,” he says. “Sister McPherson went to bars, witnessed to prostitutes. Everyone I know is happy to have Matthew here. We feel this is going back to the roots. Matthew has a special anointing, a drive and a gifting to do the things Sister did.”

McClaflin says that age divisions have been erased as the Dream Center crowd blended with Angelus Temple folks.

“One person said to me, ‘How can you have a pastor who’s 28 years old?’ But age is not a factor to me,” McClaflin says. “It’s wonderful to see people in their 90s and teens enjoying a service.

“I told someone that if I had hair I’d wear it spiked and purple. But the really exciting thing is watching the altar calls, which are so spectacular. People respond to the message and the need to repent.”

Paul Risser, president of the ICFG, says the emphasis on compassionate service has been “contagious.”

“Through the ministry of Matthew Barnett, Angelus Temple will continue to be a center of a worldwide movement until the return of Jesus Christ,” Risser says. “In the days ahead, [Barnett’s] philosophy of ministry will be a model which can be reproduced or adapted throughout the Foursquare Church around the world.”

On Sunday morning at the Temple, Barnett’s sermon, which has kept the place roaring with laughter for the last 25 minutes, draws to a close and with a final prayer a hundred or more people stream to the altar, most of them to experience salvation. Some wear baggy pants, some Dockers, some miniskirts, some dirty overalls. Some wear high heels, tennis shoes or $2 sandals. The band plays “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus,” and men and women weep openly.

For those who’ve been here from the start–like Rolf McPherson, praying earnestly on the front row–and to those visiting for the first time, it’s a dream come true: the rebirth of a life-giving oasis in a spiritually dry place.

Joel Kilpatrick is a Los Angeles-based writer and a frequent contributor to Charisma.