Leadership Journal

Behind him is the Los Angeles skyline, before him the Hollywood Hills with its iconic sign, and beneath him 15 stories of opportunity set among 125 city blocks of despair. Matthew Barnett stands atop the old Queen of Angels Hospital building, now called the Dream Center, home to 214 outreach ministries—and counting. For this neighborhood, it's a city set on a hill, a sign of hope—and help.

Matthew Barnett says he loves this neighborhood, but it took a while. At age 20, the son of Phoenix pastor Tommy Barnett was called to pastor Bethel Temple, one of the last English-speaking Assemblies of God congregations in inner city L.A. From this fragment, the first church founded out of the Azusa Street Revival of 1906, Barnett had high hopes of a bustling megachurch like his dad's. Soon, however, even the remnant had left. He was alone.

That's when he began exploring the community. This suburban neophyte fell in love with his drug-and gang-infested neighborhood. He began dreaming up ways to help those who had no choice but to call this blight home. And the church began to grow.

Within three years Barnett was looking for a larger facility when he stumbled upon the abandoned hospital. With relentless fundraising and divine intervention, the father-son team acquired the property for one-fourth the original asking price, and the Dream Center was born.

It's a really big dream.

Today the center offers a fully staffed mobile medical unit, job skills and computer training programs, sidewalk and bus ministries for at-risk kids in government housing, after-school tutoring and recreation, residential recovery and discipleship programs for ex-drug addicts, housing and schooling for teens from troubled families, and outreach to runaways and the homeless.

There's an artistic element here too, with acting classes, a recording studio, and TV production facilities. In some ways, this place has the vibe of an ambitious suburban mega-church. But it's in an old hospital in inner city L.A., and half the people here were hooked on something a short while back. Now they're hooked on Jesus, big dreams, and saving this city. Apparently it's working. The local police precinct gives much credit for a measurable drop in crime to the Dream Center's efforts.

Down the hill and just around the bend from Dodger Stadium is the newest piece in this ministry matrix—the famed Angelus Temple. Seeing the impact of the Dream Center, leaders of the Foursquare Gospel denomination asked Matthew to rescue the dying church, once packed-out by founder Aimee Semple McPherson but recently a near-empty shell. Now it's thriving again, another impossible dream come true.

Barnett, now 30, will quickly tell you the innovation here is not his alone. People catch the dream and start dreaming, and ministries multiply. But how?

This is not the dream you first dreamed, is it?

At first I had the dream of preaching like my dad to tens of thousands of people. I had success manuals on my shelves and sayings ...