c. 1998 Religion News Service
CLEVELAND _ Darrell Scott was mixing PCP for sale and smoking crack the night his girlfriend found God and his life changed forever.
Early that evening in 1981, the couple had run out of rum and he sent Belinda for the 151-proof alcohol that would be used to pour on cotton stuck to the end of a coat hanger _ an improvised torch to keep the crack pipe lit.
Already high, she ran into a devout neighbor on the way to the liquor store. “To shut him up,” she agreed to go to his church, and ended up giving her life to God.
When she came back after midnight speaking in tongues, Scott at first thought his girlfriend had found her own party. But two weeks later, “to have her shut up,” he found himself in the same church and ended up running home to flush $3,000 worth of drugs down the toilet. He was baptized that same night, and within a month, he and Belinda were married in the pastor’s study.
“We went to McDonald’s, and then I went back to work,” said Scott, lost in a thoughtful smile standing outside the old, red-brick Christ Temple Apostolic Church in Cleveland where he was married. “I let her buy anything she wanted.”
From those humble beginnings in 1981 evolved a spiritual odyssey that has led to one of the most successful new church starts in Greater Cleveland. With only four other people meeting for Thursday night Bible study, the Scotts opened up their own nondenominational church in Cleveland Heights in 1994. Today, the New Spirit Revival Center has more than 1,800 members packing a sanctuary that cost nearly $500,000 to refurbish.
They have succeeded with a sense of entrepreneurial business acumen _ advertising, sponsoring community picnics, flying in big-name preachers and singers _ and a nontraditional ministry where a woman shares the preaching and alcoholics and drug addicts can find a spiritual home.
The Scotts’ unconventional approach, along with their outspokenness on issues from homosexuality to the wealth of some inner-city pastors, has earned them few friends in the church establishment. And even some death threats from people who believe a woman should stand by her man _ just not in the pulpit.
But looking back at their own lives and the phenomenal growth of the church, Darrell, 39, and Belinda, 41, believe God has big plans for a city that they say is lacking a nondenominational megachurch.
“We’re going to take this city for the glory of the Lord,” Scott shouted in a recent sermon. “We’re taking it all. We’re taking it all. We ain’t sharing with nobody. We’re taking it all.”
The Scotts were saved in 1981, but it took them 13 years to go out on their own as pastors.
Staying off drugs and making themselves scarce at their old haunts was enough to begin with. “At first, you just try to stay saved,” Darrell Scott explained.
He grew up in a working class neighborhood and started drinking when he was 13. By the time he was in the ninth grade, he said he was getting drunk every day. He met his wife while they both worked at The Mad Hatter, now a boarded-up warehouse but once the leading disco in the city. Drug dealers, hustlers, pimps and gangsters could be found inside, Scott said, while others lined up around the block to gain entrance.
The couple eventually lived together. The night she was “saved,” Belinda Scott remembers thinking to herself, “I’m in a church and I’m high.”
Before she knew it, she said, “They were praying for me and leading me to the Lord …. From then to now, the Lord brought me from one place to another, somehow.”
It was the last time she touched drugs, and it did not take long for her to set her future husband on the same path. “She very strongly encouraged me,” Scott remembers, smiling. “Get saved or get out. She didn’t play, man.”
For 13 years, the Scotts worked in other churches doing everything from driving the church van to visiting the sick and distributing food to the poor. They also led Bible study groups in their home, and slowly felt an inner call to enter the ministry themselves.
It was a call Belinda Scott said she heard at an early age. As an 8-year-old, she preached her first sermon, a funeral service for a squirrel that fell out of a tree. And it was the first time her father, a Baptist preacher who did not believe women should preach, “told me not to do that.”
Neither Scott wanted to rush into the pastorate.
“We waited because we wanted to be sure it was the Lord,” Belinda Scott said. “It truly was a step of faith because we didn’t have anything to start out with. We just had our faith in the Lord.”
They began with just four other people meeting in a room for Bible study. A month later they held their first service for 15 people. Then, as today, the congregation would hold hands and pray in four directions _ north, south, east and west _ for new members.
And people would come, many directly from the street where the Scotts would invite people in, some still “stinky, dirty and stinky.”
After their first prayers were answered, and alcoholics and drug addicts began to find salvation in the church, it was time for another prayer: Bring us some people who could care for the addicts and help pay the bills.
Those prayers, too, were granted.
After one year, they had 150 members. By March 1996, they had 300 members, and by March 1997, the membership rolls expanded to 700. Today, they have 1,800 members. and they have prayed since the early days to become a megachurch: “There’s nothing small about God,” Scott said.
But their church was not built on prayers alone. From the beginning, the Scotts took some chances. They spent money on advertising, and invested thousands to bring in major Gospel singers such as Vicki Winans and popular preachers such as Creflo Dollar. Along with the traditional Gospel choir was a contemporary Christian band.
And instead of a thronelike chair for the male pastor to preside over his flock, at the heart of the worship experience was the dynamic preaching of a husband and wife who stand next to each other in the pulpit.
That this former drug dealer and his wife understand what life is like on the other side of the street from the church resonates with church members.”I’ve been in the places that they say they’ve been. I’m going through that now,” said India Jefferson, 22. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or who you are. If you’re willing to surrender all to God, God can use you.”
Lynette Simmons, 39, said the church not only prays for people who cannot pay their rent or utility bills or who have lost their jobs, but helps them out. “The compassion is just overwhelming,” she said.
Scott said people do not expect too much of pastors, just leaders who will be honest, give a decent sermon and practice what they preach.
“My wife and I, we just try to be real with people,” Scott said. “We just try to treat people the way we want to be treated.”
Like a pastoral tag team, Darrell and Belinda Scott stood together in the pulpit on a recent Sunday, inveighing against churches other than their own for what they see as the sorry spiritual state of the city.
“When we were on drugs, she’d start the pipe, I’d finish it,” Scott said. As preachers, they take turns pleading, exhorting and instructing the congregation, one a jumble of pointing arms and rising and falling oratory while the other listens intently by his or her side.
“I truly believe that over the last couple of, maybe say 10 to 15 years, that the preaching over the pulpit has produced a weak, disobedient, uncommitted, spoiled, rebellious, easy, lazy, unthankful, wait a minute now, unbiblical, wait a minute, undisciplined, unrighteous, not studious at all, church members,” Belinda Scott says in an almost breathless commentary that runs through the shouted acclamations of amen from the congregation.
“They hold back the truth of the Word for the sake of not offending a few people. But I’m here to let you know this ain’t that kind of party, I ain’t this kind of girl, and it ain’t that kind of day,” says the energetic woman, dressed in a black jacket with white trim and a white skirt.
As she steps aside, her husband, dressed in black with a white collar, brings the congregation to its feet with his condemnations of preachers sleeping with “spiritual daughters” in their churches and the open acceptance of homosexuality in other churches.
“The presence of the Lord is in this place. He’s in your life. That’s why you can’t come over here and get away with that mess you used to get away with,” Scott says. “He’ll either convict you and get you to stop, or he’ll send his judgment upon you to get you to stop. But either way, baby, when you get to this ministry, the mess is definitely going to stop.”
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But some clergy say the Scotts’ language is inflammatory and unfair.
“The gospel can be preached without criticizing others because none of us is the pastor of the perfect church,” said the Rev. Dennis Norris, executive minister of the Cleveland Baptist Association.
Norris said it is true homosexuals are in almost every church, but that is where they should be to receive ministry. Using negative terms to refer to homosexuals “is inappropriate coming from a Christian pulpit,” he said.
The Scotts, however, believe people should be expected to change. Drug addicts should give up drugs, alcoholics alcohol, and homosexuals and others having unmarried sex their sexual practices.
They are living proof such change is possible with God’s help. And they know they are not popular preachers.
“We’ve been blacklisted, blackballed. They’ve called us a cult,” Scott said. But he said their response is to point to the hundreds of people who have answered altar calls and left lives consumed by drugs and alcohol to serve the church.
“God said for New Spirit Revival Center to light a light in this city until this whole city is consumed by the fire,” Darrell Scott says at the end of a fiery sermon. “The only way this city is going to find God is through Jesus Christ, and the only way this city is going to find Jesus Christ
is through you and me.”
DEA END BRIGGS
