“Because the church has lost Holy Ghost fire, men go to hell-fire!” – Leonard Ravenhill

Read the beginning of the series HERE

We were very sad to leave our teenagers in Roswell, NM but we were also excited about what God had for us. My sister, Melanie, who had moved to Roswell to live with Lisa and I when she was 15 went off to Bible college and we moved back home. I had always felt that God was calling me to be an evangelist/revivalist and so I believed that this might be the time when God would bring that to pass. So in the spring of 1987 we moved back to Albuquerque, rented a broken down little house with my younger brother, Mark, who was preparing to go to Bible college, in a neighborhood known as “the war zone” because of the crime, drugs, and gangs that lived and operated there. Five people were murdered within a block of us the year we lived there but it was what we could afford. Our neighbors were pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and immigrants.There was some kind of war going on around us every day.

In our youth ministry in Roswell I had become extremely close to one young man, Rusty, who didn’t have a family. Rusty was my right hand man. He led the Bible study at Goddard high school and generally spent every minute he could at our house. It killed him and us to have to leave him there. Shortly after we moved back to Albuquerque he was able to come and live with us and became like a son. We joined a church in the city and I began to work and pray to establish an evangelistic ministry. I got a few opportunities to preach here and there but things were slow and we literally lived meal to meal but Rusty, Mark, Lisa and I grew ever closer to the Lord and we were enjoying our baby, Luke and it wasn’t long before our second son, Levi was born. We were so blessed to have a family!

I was reading everything I could get my hands on about revival and I concluded that I needed to go have a prayer retreat so Rusty and I hiked up to the top of a mountain near my parents home. We built a lean to with tree limbs and we camped out and spent many hours with the Lord. From one side of the peak I could see Interstate 40 snaking its way east to Texas and beyond and I prayed many a prayer during the days we were up on the mountain that God would give me invitations to travel that road to preach across America. I named our ministry Save America Ministries and printed business cards and a brochure with lots of quotes from the great evangelists of the past. I even got to meet with my hero, Jerry Johnston, and share with him about what I intended to do. It wasn’t long before we were packing our car and heading east on I-40 to points unknown preaching through the midwest at youth camps, Christian school graduations, church revivals or wherever God opened a door but always returning to our little house in the war zone. I was so excited and scared and excited.

Many sweet little providences continued to reveal to me that God’s hand was upon our lives and he was moving us to His rhythm. Many souls trusted Christ or had a spiritual awakening in their life. Some thought we were crazy and there were plenty of people telling me that I was not being responsible and getting and education and getting a good job and settling down now that I had a baby and one on the way but I just couldn’t see any fruit in their lives that would make me want to listen to them. Soon our second little boy was born and we were so thrilled.

Every time I came back home to the war zone I would get convicted that my own neighborhood and city needed Christ and I began to pray and to witness to people in our neighborhood. Ever since I had come to Christ I had made a habit of sometimes praying late at night on a mountain, in the woods, or in a city park. One night I went to pray at Trumbull Park in the war zone. Trumbull Park was where everything bad happened in the war zone. Drug deals, gang wars, etc. In fact we called it Rumble Park when I was a teenager. So I am walking and praying in the park at about 2 a.m. and this huge guy comes up to me with a huge knife and tells me he is going to gut me. I looked him straight in the eye and I said, “If God wants you to do that you can, but if He doesn’t want you to, I am invincible until God is through with me.” I was as serious as sin and he could tell. His eyes got big and he said, “You mean you are not afraid of me?” He waved that big blade in my face and slashed like he was going to cut me. I said, “No, I know that I’m invincible until God is through with me and if He is through with me on this earth and He allows you to kill me then you are just going to send me straight into the arms of my Lord and to my reward. What is there to be afraid of?” He just stared at me for a minute and then he put that big knife away and he said, “You’ve got to come to my house and talk to my mom about this.” I said, “Are you sure?” “It’s 2 a.m.” “I wouldn’t want to wake her up.” He shook his head, “No, she will want to be awakened to hear this. She loves this kind of stuff. She is always trying to push God on me and telling me to clean up my life.” So off to his house we went and woke up his mom and it turned out she was a Jehovah’s Witness but she was so impressed that her son had listened to me and brought me home they both asked me to tell them about Jesus and we had a revival meeting in their living room until the sun came up. God began to break my heart for the war zone. I fell in love with the place and the people.

One Sunday my pastor came to me at church and said that a church in Tucumcari, New Mexico was without a pastor and they needed an interim pastor until a permanent one could be found. I was thrilled. The next Sunday we loaded up our little car and headed to east on I-40 to Tucumcari 3 hours away to preach. It was the sweetest little church and amazingly enough the man, who had given us the $20 dollars a few years before when we ran out of gas in Tucumcari, went to church there. I ended up preaching there every Sunday for several months. It was a blessed time. One Sunday on the way home our car broke down in the middle of the desert an hour and a half from any size town. We were heart sick. We had a baby with us and it was blazing hot outside and this was before the days of cell phones. We were really in trouble. We said a quick and desperate prayer and I stepped out of the car to see what I could do but I knew the engine was blown. I no more than stepped out and closed the door and a big silver cadillac pulled up with a white haired couple in it and asked us if we were ok and needed any help. I explained our situation and they said they were going right by our house in Albuquerque and they would be glad to take us. Lisa and I looked at each other in amazement and climbed into their air conditioned car with leather seats. We took off and we began to tell them about ourselves. “Turns out” that they were very familiar with the college that Lisa and I had met at and even knew many of our friends there. The grandmotherly woman held our baby and we talked about the Lord all the way home. The hour and a half seemed like 10 minutes and when they dropped us off at our house and we said goodbye Lisa and I turned and looked at each other and at the same time we both said, “Angels, uh huh.” out loud. We shook our heads and said it again, “Angels, uh huh.” Then we went in the house praising God.

I was still preaching wherever God opened the door and souls were coming to Christ everywhere we went. We were still living meal to meal but we never went hungry. My brother went to Bible college and Rusty followed him not long after and for a little while it was just our little family. Rusty and Mark are still in the ministry today.

About this time the youth pastor at the church we were attending took a pastorate in another city and the pastor asked me if I would take over the youth group. We prayed about it and felt that this was an invitation from God. The next Sunday we met our 19 young people that we were to shepherd. We began to put our heart and soul into these young people and God began to move. We named the youth group, yes you guessed it, Teens Unlimited and I had some business cards printed with these words across the bottom “Albuquerque’s Fastest Growing Youth Outreach”. And the ministry began to grow like crazy. Lisa and I and our babies would be out all week winning young people to Christ on the streets and then bringing them in on Sunday. My burden for the war zone continued to grow and I was constantly praying.

One evening Lisa and I were driving down the street to our house and I saw a group of punk rockers on the corner. I had never seen anything like these teenagers before. They were all dressed in black leather with punk rock band patches all over them. One of the boys had a mohawk that stood at least 9″ straight up from his head and the rest of his head was shaved. One of the other boys had his haired glued in spikes like the statue of Liberty and the rest of his head was shaved.  The girls all had heavy black eyeliner and black lipstick. I looked at them and laughed out loud and made a comment like, “look at those freaks” as I drove on by. Immediately I was devastatingly convicted in my spirit and I felt the Lord say to me, “Don’t laugh at them. I love them. You have been praying to me for the war zone, well, they are the war zone. They only look like that because they are lost and they are trying to find what only I can give them.” Rarely in my life have I felt such a clear impression from the Holy Spirit. I drove around the block and came back around to where they were standing. I pulled up and rolled down my window and asked them if they would come to Teens Unlimited with us on Friday night (We had a Friday night youth revival service  and fun activity every week). To my utter amazement they said, “Sure, that sounds cool.” I found out that the two boys names were Count and Adam. I gave them all one of my cards and we agreed to pick them up on that same spot on Friday night. As we drove away I was humbled, scared, and elated all at the same time. I doubted they would be there on Friday night but I was glad that I had obeyed the still small voice of the Spirit. To my utter amazement when I pulled up there on Friday night there they stood with 6 more of their friends all dressed the same way they were. We packed them into our car and headed off to the church. Miraculously, no one else showed up that night. (which was highly unusual because we normally had 30-40 youths back then on a Friday night).

I’ll never forget one of the punk girls named Janice.  She was Count’s girlfriend and had a spider web painted across one side of her face with eyeliner. She had spiked jet black hair and a black miniskirt and she was scary. Janice was perhaps the hardest hearted 15 year old girl I had ever met. She was venomous in her hatred of God and His men. She told me so in language that would make a sailor blush. She stared a hole through me as I preached the gospel that night until it made me very uncomfortable. She was not happy about being there that night but the rest of the teens listened intently and when I urged them to trust Christ, one of the girls had tears in her eyes. We had a great evening and on the way home I invited them to come with me on Sunday and they all said, “Cool.” Sure enough the next Sunday they were there waiting and ready to go and you can only imagine the looks that I got from the church when I walked in with those 7 or 8 teens in tow. Oh my. But I was as happy as I could be because I knew that God was doing it and not me. On the way home that day I learned that Count and Adam’s father was in prison and their mom worked two jobs and so they were on their own. I also found out that they hadn’t eaten in a couple of days (no wonder they were so skinny and deathly white) and that they were planning to go dumpster diving (which I had never heard of) behind the McDonald’s on the corner after church. I invited them to come home and have lunch with us and they hungrily accepted. My sweet wife cooked everything that we had in the house (that was supposed to last us the next week) and they ate every bit of it. I had never seen a truly hungry person eat and it was eye opening. We realized that day that we could talk about Jesus all we wanted if we loved them and fed them because they were absolutely starving for both and so we did. It was amazing how they would show up at our house every night around dinner time with some theological question for me to answer 🙂 and of course we always invited them to eat with us. They had some pretty crazy theological questions for me too. Like one day Adam is at our house and he says, “Brother Matt (that’s what everyone called me back then) I want you to tell me if you think this is a sin. You see the guys and I go up to the gay bar on the corner and all the guys hide around behind the bar and they send me in cause I’m the best looking and I get friendly with some old gay guy and pretend like he can take me home and then when we walk out to the parking lot the guys and I roll him for his wallet and run off. Now that’s not a sin right Brother Matt because God hates gays too, right? Wow, talk about discipleship. These boys and girls stretched me to the limit sometimes.

I was out praying on my porch one night and I saw Adam walking down the street picking up cigarette butts, lighting them, taking a few puffs, and lighting the next one because they had no money for cigarettes. I was appalled. Nothing in my experience to that point had prepared me to fathom that kind of desperation so I went to the store and bought a pack of cigarettes and I gave them to Adam. I just knew I was going to hell for contributing to his demise but it hurt me to see him smoking those nasty butts off the street. He was so excited about that pack of cigarettes. He would smoke three or four puffs from one and then put it out and put it back in the pack to save it for later and make them last as long as he could. He asked me to hang on to them because everyone else would steal them. So every night he would come down and have a smoke on my porch and I would talk to him about Jesus and that’s how I won him to Christ. Eventually he got saved, his little sister, Laura, got saved and started winning her friends to Christ.

Those church teens got excited too and started winning their friends to Christ and bringing them and before long we had gone from 19 teens to 200.

About this time Count came to me and told me that his girlfriend, Janice, the scary 15 year old hard hearted girl was pregnant and that her parents had kicked her out on the street and could she stay with us. Lisa and I said of course but inside we were scared. We had a “hide a couch” with a bed in our tiny living room and we made it up for Janice. I’ll never forget as long as I live the fact that she stayed with us for over a week and she never spoke a word to us. Not one. The first night I asked her if it would be ok if we went ahead and had our normal family worship and would she sit in. She never looked at me just moved to the side of the bed and sat through our family worship. We were begging God to save Janice. One night I couldn’t take it anymore and Lisa and I sat up half the night literally preaching the gospel to Janice and pleading with her to come to Christ. She sat there the whole time looking at the floor and never said a word. The next day she was gone. She and Count had stolen a car and ran away to California. We never saw Count again. I was heart broken and I remember complaining to the Lord that I really really wanted to save Janice and I wasn’t happy that I had failed. Three years later Lisa and I had been through some major disappointments with churches and ministry. We were walking out of Walmart and this beautiful young woman with long brown hair in a nice dress came running up shouting, “Brother Matt, Brother Matt and threw her arms around me.” I was stunned. I didn’t know who she was. I was looking at Lisa with a shrug like, “I don’t know what’s going on here.” After a huge hug she pulled away and said, “Don’t you remember me?” “It’s Janice.” “I stayed on your couch and you told me about Jesus.” Lisa and I were shocked. We both grabbed her and hugged her and then she began to tell us that she had given her life to Christ and that she was living back at home and had reconciled with her parents and she was soon to be married to a young man in her church. We were overjoyed! She had started a craft business and was in front of Walmart selling her wares. She ran over and picked up a clock that she had made that looked like a woman’s summer straw hat. She brought it back and handed it to us and said some of the sweetest words that I will probably ever hear in this life. She said, “I hope that every time you look at this clock you will be reminded that what you are doing is making a difference in people’s lives. You may not think they are listening but they are. You may not think that your love is touching them but it is. Please never quit.” We hugged again and walked away with tears streaming down our faces. Janice is still serving the Lord today.

One day I was walking down our street and I recognized two captains from the gang “South Side Locos”, Anthony and John. My brother had witnessed to Anthony years before and Anthony had even stayed with Mark for awhile. I could tell that they had been on the street for awhile. I stopped and invited them to come home with me and have something to eat and clean up. They happily agreed and they moved in and became part of our family. Eventually other gang members came to live with us too. So we traded a house full of punk rockers for a house full of Latin gang members. My dear sweet wife always welcomed in every soul that I brought home and somehow we never went hungry. We did add water to the milk sometimes and the lights and gas got shut off pretty regularly but we always found a way to get them turned back on. God was teaching us so much and we were just walking through the doors that He opened in front of us. Anthony eventually became my right hand man at Teens Unlimited and stayed with us for a couple of years.

Yes, another Teens Unlimited 🙂

Soon I was asked by the pastor to go on staff full time as youth pastor along with my brother Mark as co-youth pastor. We set out to build the city’s biggest youth ministry and change the world. But very shortly Mark and his wife returned to Illinois to plant a church. Lisa and I had a baby daughter named Rebekah (which means enchanting beauty) and no man was ever more excited to be the daddy of a daughter than I. Her first night home from the hospital she slept through the night on my chest and she has owned my heart ever since. The ministry continued to grow dramatically. We started Bible clubs in several high schools. We revived the red satin jackets, went street preaching, had youth rallies, went on inner city mission ventures, I got physically carried off by Bon Jovi’s bodyguards because I was preaching and handing out tracts with some of my young preacher boys in front of one of their concerts. Hundreds of teens gave their life to Christ. I would baptize 5 to 10 young people ever Friday night at our youth revival service. Many of them are some form of ministry today.

The stories are endless but I will share three of my favorites. First, I still had the bug to do old fashioned itinerant revival ministry and so I loaded up our little family, Luke was 3, Levi was, 2 and Bekah was 6 months and several of our teens in a church bus and we spent two weeks going throughout Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma preaching in churches and singing and challenging the young and the old alike to live for God. It was the most wonderful trip ever. The second story was when an inner-city ministry that had a youth camp in the mountains invited us to bring all of our inner-city teens free for a week long summer camp with lots of activities and preaching every night. Lisa and I and our team put the word out on the street in the war zone and all over town about this free camp. On the day we were to leave we drove through the war zone with our big old church bus and I was so delighted to see our teens and lots of faces I had never seen stream out of those shacks and projects with a few clothes and maybe a blanket to go to summer camp. It was surreal seeing these gangsters and hoods excited about going to camp. It was a wild week as they rode horses, played capture the flag, ate and ate, and listened to a fiery evangelist each night preach the gospel. One of those young men is a pastor today. Praise God.

My third story is one of the highlights of my life. I wanted to have a real live city-wide youth evangelistic meeting like Jerry Johnston had in Albuquerque back when I was in high school but I wanted to preach at this one. So we planned it all out. We got a loan at the bank to buy the hundreds of free pizzas for the event. We printed tickets and flyers and bumper stickers. We got free TV and radio spots and we got a really good deal on billboards all over town. We contracted with Dominoes Pizza to make as many large pizzas that night as we needed and have them arrive right after the altar call. But most importantly we prayed. For weeks leading up to the event I would walk to the park and pray for hours, sometimes all night begging God to touch my city like I had been asking Him since I was 16 years old. A few days before the event the pastor of the church asked me how many people I thought might be coming. I said that our goal was 500. He informed me that the largest attendance ever at the church was 600 and that was for a nationally known preacher so not to set my hopes too high. After he walked away my dear wife turned to me and she said, “Matthew, the Lord has shown me this week that we are going to have 1000 teens here.” Like any good husband, I smiled, patted her, and said, “That’s great honey but after what the preacher said we should probably plan for 400.” She meekly said, “Do you mind if I go ahead and have the team set up for 1000 just in case?” I said, “Sure. That can’t hurt.”

The night of the event, October 21, 1989, I couldn’t bear to look until the last minute so I stayed upstairs in the youth room with the lights out praying until they came and got me that it was time to start. I had told everyone that I didn’t want to know how it was going until I walked out on the platform to preach because I wanted to stay focused on my message. When they came to get me the people that were walking me to the auditorium were white as ghosts and uncharacteristically quiet and I thought, “Oh, this is going to be bad.” I’ll never forget stepping through the door and onto the platform and seeing 1200 teenagers crammed into that auditorium. As I am typing this my heart is in my throat, I can feel the butterflies, and tears are filling my eyes. I stepped to the podium and told my story of how lost and alone I was and how Jesus pursued me and how he changed my life 7 years before and how wonderful it was to serve Him. (Original audio below)

It didn’t feel like I was doing well but it was all I had to give. I invited those who wanted to give their life to Christ to come forward and the aisles flooded with hundreds of young people. Teenagers were all over the altar and up onto the platform at my feet praying to receive Christ. I had to back up to the choir loft. Hundreds confessed Christ that night and we baptized scores of them the next Sunday morning. After the service the teens went out into our gymnasium and consumed over 300 large pizzas. Lisa had called the 4 pizza places earlier that day that we had contracted with to shut down their stores that night to make pizza just for our event and told them to have enough pizza for 1000 teenagers and we did. I went back upstairs to that dark youth room and danced for hours and threw my shoes up in the air and praised God for answered prayer. It was one of the greatest days of my life. At our Friday night youth revival the next week I baptized kids from the pizza blast until my arms ached.

But there is always a spiritual battle going on behind the scenes in any successful ministry and shortly after the Pizza Blast I was called in by the senior pastor and told that my vision didn’t match his vision. He told me that he didn’t want to be Punk Rock Baptist Church. That my vision for the street kids was more fitting for a para-church ministry or something. He told me that his vision was to have 50 cream of the crop teens and that he felt that “the Holy Spirit was leading me elsewhere” and I was fired and I was not to share with anyone why I was leaving and especially I wasn’t to tell the parents and teenagers. I was to leave quietly. I felt like all the blood had drained out of my body as I walked out of his office. I was 24 years old and I was devastated. The next Sunday when I tried to go to the youth room and tell the teens goodbye I found the pastor had stationed men there with instructions not to allow me to speak to the teens. When they realized that I was ready to throw down if they didn’t let me pass they stepped aside and I was able to say goodbye to my teenagers and try to explain a little but it was pretty ugly. The saddest thing was that we had a separate service on Sunday afternoons for our inner-city teens from the war zone that ran about 80 teens per week and that afternoon my phone started ringing and the teens from the war zone were telling me that the service has been cancelled permanently and that the church had left the 80 teens standing on the street corner with their Bibles and they were told to go home.

My wife and I had never felt pain like that before. We were shell shocked. Our life stopped. Our income stopped. And our hearts nearly stopped. My brother had started a church in Pekin, Illinois and we put our stuff in storage and headed out for Illinois to try and help them with their church but we were dead inside. We were living in my sister in law’s grandmothers basement and my brother and his wife were living upstairs with Grandma. We were working three jobs. Lisa and I would work at the church all day (we were remodeling an old building my brother’s church had purchased) then we would catch a few hours sleep then leave our sleeping children in the basement (my sister in law would check on them periodically) and go load up our van with newspapers at 1 a.m. and deliver them to the paperboys in all the little towns around Peoria, Illinois until 6 a.m. Then we would drive 75 miles to Bloomington, Illinois where we had a job cleaning a Pharmore Store (similar to a Walmart) just trying to make ends meet. We would finish that by 9 a.m. then drive 75 miles back and work on the church. It only took a few weeks of that and our broken hearts for us to completely melt down. One night we came in and my brother had left a letter on our bed informing us that he thought we should go back home and get some financial integrity and that we were no longer welcome to stay in the basement. I tore the letter up in little pieces, we packed up our 3 children and I drove straight from Peoria, Illinois to Albuquerque, New Mexico 32 hours without stopping except for gas. We lived on my mother’s living room floor in her apartment for 3 months until we could get an apartment. I went to work laying railroad ties for $5.00 per hour during the day and vacuumed offices at night for $3.80 an hour and I felt like Samson grinding in the mill but I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong. I knew God didn’t fail me, and I knew my brother was a good man, and I had loved and looked up to my pastor so it must have been something wrong with me. It was about this time that we found out we were expecting our fourth, Beverly. I was so happy. I started to think about all the pastors (including the one who had just fired me) and missionaries I knew whose children were living for the Devil and I decided that God had given me a wife and 4 little children to disciple and to provide for and I was going to pour myself into being a provider, a godly husband, and a great dad and I was going to tuck all those dreams of saving the world away and hope that one of my kids would fulfill that in my place someday. I decided I was going to build a godly family… Aflame For God 12 – Warriors For Christ