Virginia Pastor Saves Souls Above an Auto Body Shop

Every Sunday morning,in his make shift church above an automobile body shop, pastor Cameron Simmons knocks out the dents and heals the scrapes from the spiritual fender-benders of life.

Members of the Rhema Faith Center Church, a small congregation of charismatic Christians, have been worshiping upstairs at an Oldsmobile dealer’s cinder-block body shop in this Washington suburb for 10 years. They have no intention of moving.

“The Lord led us to this place,” Simmons says.

It doesn’t matter to the pastor and his flock that their church lacks a steeple and stained-glass windows, or that the parking lot outside is filled with smashed fenders and crumpled hoods.

Worshipers sit on metal folding chairs in a large, windowless room decorated with a “Jesus is Lord” banner, a pulpit and a bandstand for musicians and choir. A company boardroom next door is reserved for nursing mothers who listen to the service on loudspeakers.

Downstairs, along a hallway adjacent to the body shop, are church offices, Sunday school classrooms and playrooms for toddlers and infants.

“Whenever God tells you to be in a place, it doesn’t matter whether it seems right or not, it’s just right,” says Jackie Catterton, who drives 120 miles from Richmond, Va., with her two children every Sunday.

The Sunday morning service attracts a biracial mix of 180 to 200 professionals--a university professor, doctors, government bureaucrats, military officers--and blue-collar workers.

Several are employees of the auto dealership in this sprawling commercial complex west of the nation’s capital.

Simmons, 61, is a former composing room machinist at the Washington Post who became a “born-again” Christian in 1976 while he attended a worship service led by now-defrocked TV evangelist Jim Bakker in Charlotte, N.C.

He says the Lord called him to start a church.

He began with Bible study groups in his living room, then moved into a Tysons Corner hotel. Simmons says a miracle happened when he met auto dealer Wilfred Templeton at a meeting of Christian businessmen.

Templeton offered the church some vacant space above his body shop. The rent was cheap. Simmons took the offer as a divine sign.

“The building means nothing,” Simmons says. “The people are the temple of the Holy Ghost.”