From the Pulpit to the Airwaves
by Jonathan Beasley
It is possible that Jerry Lewis—the American comedian and entertainer—does not know what has become of his old six-screen cinema on Crescent Avenue in Brockton, Massachusetts.
For nearly six years now, the weathered building—tucked near the outer edge of a busy, nondescript shopping plaza—has served as the sanctuary for Kingdom Church of God in Christ, pastored by the Rev. Alexander Hurt, MTS '96.
Hurt and I spoke in his office the day after he returned from Washington, D.C., to witness the inauguration of the first African American president of the United States. The office was narrow and cold. A space heater churned out heat as it buzzed in the corner.
"This office used to be a hallway, and you could access the theater that was right behind that door," he explained, pointing to the wall on the opposite side of his desk.
Hurt has been involved in ministry for nearly two decades, and Kingdom Church is his first senior pastorate. The church started in the ballroom of the Brockton Holiday Inn, one month before the events of September 11, 2001.
Since moving into the old theater on Crescent, attendance has blossomed from 200 to nearly 1,000 members. Today, Kingdom is nearing completion of a new 1,100-seat sanctuary only minutes away from its current location.
The church has also purchased a local radio station, and Hurt has high hopes that Kingdom's ministerial outreach can be broadened through a commitment to playing Christian music.
"It's been an incredible ride," he said. "The Lord has been gracious since we've been here. We've experienced an incredible rate of growth, and we're expecting great things to happen."
To reach this point, however, Hurt has endured a string of rejection, criticism, and uncertainty. When he applied for a loan to build the new church building, he was turned down by seven different banks.
"We were completely dejected, and I felt like I'd sold my people down the river," he said. "I had promised them we were going to be able to build this new building, but the loan had been denied, and we were done. I was actually thinking about resigning, because it was such a big deal for us."
At a time when the hope of a new sanctuary seemed bleak, Hurt received a call from Robert Knowles, founder and CEO of ARKS, a church-based lender. Knowles's own nephew, who happened to work for one of the banks that originally rejected the loan application, had told Knowles about Hurt's ministry.
Shortly thereafter, Knowles reached out to the young minister and the two men soon met in Raleigh, North Carolina, to close a deal on the building loan. Construction on the new building began in June 2008 and is scheduled for completion sometime in spring 2009.
We left Hurt's office and drove a few minutes to the site of the new church and parked at the rear of the building. We entered through a side door made of plywood, and he began to show me around the interior of the building. Most of the rooms were beginning to take shape.
As we walked, our shoes scraped against the floor, which was covered with a light film of dust. We passed a group of laborers, and Hurt expressed his thanks to them for their work. I asked about the exterior of the building, which does not feature a steeple or a cross.
"We didn't want to build a steepled church," Hurt explained. "Instead, we are constructing a building that is a very flexible space. From the outside, it looks like a commercial building. That way, the resell value will be good. This was a very important thing that I learned at Harvard Business School."
Hurt credits HDS for allowing its students the freedom to take courses at other Harvard Schools, such as HBS.
"Without the flexibility to have done that, I would be completely and totally lost, because I wouldn't be able to navigate the very complex terrain of what urban ministry is today."
According to Hurt, urban ministry requires that one have, in addition to traditional ministerial training, a high level of business acumen. Part community activist and part preacher, Hurt has the drive of a successful entrepreneur and the coolness of a savvy politician.
"I enjoy what I do primarily because it allows me to bring in all of the pieces of me. Urban ministry pulls it all out. It is not a task for the faint of heart, because you can lose your courage very quickly here."
When the Brockton mayor received funds from the federal government to take over foreclosures, Hurt and Kingdom took over some of the bad mortgages. They are putting people who have lost their jobs back to work rehabbing houses. They are then selling the houses back to people who have lost their homes due to foreclosure.
"There's nothing like seeing a family who have lost their home, because it's more than an economic impact; it's what it does to the family structure."
A husband and father of three boys and two girls, Hurt wakes up most mornings before sunrise and goes to bed at 10 pm. He is affable and sincere, both in his devotion to his calling and his desire to be doing more, whatever that more might be.
Everything he faces ties into one central theme: "I've devoted my life to helping change others, and that's what my life is about."
Yet, as he describes it, he has faced brutal criticism from men who stand behind many of Brockton's pulpits.
"I wasn't prepared for that. It's extremely personal when people question my faith and my biblical accuracy. The last couple years have been tough in that regard, but the blessing has been that I'm surrounded by people who care deeply about me and who know my heart and know what I'm trying to do."
One of the things he has done is extend Kingdom's ministry to radio. In the loan application materials Hurt submitted for a new building, one bank noticed that Hurt had a radio program on the Christian talk radio station WEZE in Quincy, Massachusetts.
The president of the bank asked him if he had ever thought about buying a radio station. Though he was skeptical at first, Hurt wound up negotiating a price of $500,000 for the station and its six acres of land. According to Hurt, the price is about a tenth of what the station and the land it occupies are worth. The catch? He was given only 12 days to raise the necessary funds to make the purchase.
"We did everything we could to raise the money," said Hurt. "My people were really excited about it. To just get the building built is a real act of faith, but to do that and to try to buy a radio station by raising a half-million dollars—that is faith that moves mountains."
Kingdom raised the money for the station in 10 days. Hurt says he wept daily during that time. A member of his congregation, Walter Randolph, a motorcycle aficionado, sold one of his bikes and donated the money he received to the church.
"Our theme song is 'Great Is Thy Faithfulness.' We've become the largest church in the city in seven years. That is a gigantic happening. It certainly is not my smarts, not my stunning good looks; it's the faithfulness of God. It makes me so excited to do this work."
Once the new sanctuary opens, there will be a Thursday night music concert, which will be streamed over the web and broadcast on the radio. Hurt will lead off daily programming, Monday though Saturday, 6 to 8 am. In addition to different forms of Christian music, WPWR will also feature news, weather, and sports.
I was hoping to see the radio station, so we drove to the west side of Brockton. As we approached the snow-covered country road where the 60-year-old radio station is located, a plow had not been through yet, but with blinker flashing, Hurt turned, ready to accelerate through the mound of packed snow and ice. We didn't get far.
Stuck, we couldn't move forward, but we were clear to back up. With a rev of the engine, the tires broke free, and we were again on clear asphalt. With the road to the station behind us, I turned and looked back to get one last glimpse. In a few years, this plot of land could look very different from the way it does now.
"The best use of the land is for it to be residential," Hurt explained. "So we're going to move the radio towers to a more industrial area in Canton, Massachusetts."
According to Hurt, it is cheaper to take down the towers and move them, because then the value of the land can be exploited. Once the transmission site is changed, WPWR-AM (1410) will increase its power from 3,700 to 5,000 watts. The station is currently capable of reaching 1.4 million listeners, and Hurt has set his aim high. At the end of fiscal year 2009, he hopes to reach half a million people in the greater Boston area.
As we made our way back to Kingdom, the local schools had begun to let out for the day. The streets were filling up with excited children making their way home.
I asked Hurt about his experience at the Divinity School during the mid-1990s. He described the culture as electric. Cornel West was here, and so were Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Harvey Cox—a "hero" of his—who is still at HDS.
Though he arrived at HDS sure of who he was and what he came to get, he soon realized that he'd been living an insular life, and that he had not been very open.
"I don't think I'd ever been in a friendship with someone who was not a conservative evangelical believer, but HDS forces you to be intimate with those you have almost nothing in common with, except the school experience."
That school experience, he said, forged deep, sacred relationships.
"They are holy, because really, our encounter with the divine is really an encounter with the other, and that helped me because it deepened my faith."
He left Harvard looking to be satisfied, looking to make money. Halfway down the road, he decided this wasn't what he wanted; he wanted to be fulfilled. "I want my life to mean something, not just to me, but to others. And that's what this work is about, and it's been awesome."
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