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The thrift store and the men's home function symbiotically: the residents of the latter are often employed at the former. Proceeds from the shop, added to profits from Main Place's small bookstore and elementary school, cover the cost of feeding and housing a dozen men at a time.

Inside Out sits on two adjacent parcels in a residential area of Santa Ana. Officially, it's a "loving care" facility—a city term, Mathisrud says. Residents pay nothing to live there, but like Will, they may work at the thrift store.

Mathisrud says it costs $7,500 a year to support each resident, depending on medical and dental coverage and potential court fees. The men in the program commit to one year of residency. By the time they graduate, they will have saved at least $1,000 and are ready to go out on their own. But many who complete the program stay on at the thrift store and help new residents.

One Inside Out graduate bought a carpet-cleaning business from the church and now pastors Main Place's church plant in Garden Grove. Mike Ferrin, earning $200,000 a year at Color Tech Carpet Restoration, leads the small congregation in the same high-crime, low-income area where he used to score drugs. He wants to move into full-time ministry.

Three years ago, Main Place caught the acting bug and bought the formerly named Elizabeth Howard Curtain Call Dinner Theater, now known as Curtain Call. Founder Elizabeth Howard had turned the theater into a Tustin institution before she retired. Mathisrud good-naturedly pestered Howard for years to let him hold a Sunday brunch at the theater, and she steadfastly refused. But when she retired, Howard finally sold Mathisrud the theater.

Having a church run the city's beloved theater worried some patrons. When the theater changed hands in 2005, Curtain Call continued its standard dinner fare, but no longer served beer and wine.

"As a church, we felt we couldn't serve alcohol when the reason we're doing plays is to help men addicted to it," Mathisrud says.

Adele Hirschfield and her husband, Lewis, often attended plays prior to Main Place taking the reins. Since then, the Hirschfields went twice—and enjoyed it. "The show was just as good as ever and the meal was excellent," she says. "The service was fine."

Recently Main Place leased a second venue in nearby Orange. The Village Theater may become the new meeting place for Pastor Rich's congregation. It will also produce plays—"Everything Biblical to Broadway," as a banner over the theater's sign proclaims. Main Place is renovating the new site and has a 10-year lease. The building's neighbors are excited about the new owners—especially a restaurant eager to discuss how it can work with the church.

On the wall behind the registers at the thrift store hangs a large wooden cross, four or five feet tall. It's large and sturdy enough to hold the sins of those who write their confessions on pieces of paper and nail them to the wooden beams. Write your sins on the paper, nail them to the cross, and walk away.

"It's for anybody who comes in," says Doug Hellman, a store employee. "It's loud, too. You get one person nailing, and pretty soon you've got a line of people."

Hellman says the thrift store is an "ideal spot" for outreach because of the motel that surrounds it—a hotbed of drug dealing and prostitution. "This place needs a police substation," he says. "It can be bad. We see it all the time." Hellman himself stayed in the motel the week before he came to Christ and started living at the men's home.

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March 2008, Vol. 52, No. 3