CARLOS J. ORTIZ/Courier-Post William Brown of Cherry Hill joins other worshippers as they pray and celebrate on Sunday at the Living Faith Christian Center at the South Jersey Expo Center in Pennsauken.

By KIM MULFORD
Courier-Post Columnist

Under the low black ceiling of the South Jersey Expo Center in Pennsauken last Sunday morning, thousands of people jumped, shouted and sang for joy.

God was in the house, said the Rev. Lamont McLean, pastor of the Living Faith Christian Center, a 4,000-member nondenominational church.

The expo center is its new temporary home. The church used to squeeze congregants into four weekend services at a former synagogue on Park Boulevard in Cherry Hill. That building will house the church's offices and kindergarten-to-grade-8 Christian academy.

"The house has been moved," declared McLean, 48.

Church leaders say they have already outgrown the 102,000-square-foot center in Pennsauken. They expect church membership to more than double in the next 10 years.

Plans are under way to build a church campus, but not on the site of the Expo Center. Camden County officials wants to tear that down to make room for a proposed $65-million civic and convention center. Congregants hope to have their new church built before having to leave the center.

But McLean and his congregants are used to change. There's been so much of it in the last 18 years.

Just days before the move, the pastor sat behind a neat desk in his Cherry Hill church office and talked about his faith and his church.

When he is not pacing behind a pulpit, McLean is soft spoken. There is little hint in his voice of the severe stuttering problem that plagued him throughout his life until he began preaching nearly 20 years ago.

When he was a kid growing up in Paulsboro, McLean said, he never would have guessed he'd one day stand in front of thousands and talk for an hour. He chose a career in computer programming so he wouldn't have to talk to people.

At age 27, he was struck with Bell's Palsy, a condition that paralyzed half his face. After a month, a doctor told him most people don't recover.

That's when he promised God he would go to church if he was cured. That night, he said, he felt a twitch. It was the beginning of his recovery. He and his wife, Constance, went to a small Pentecostal church the next Sunday. They sat in the back pew.

He intended to sneak out early to watch football. Instead, the service turned him into a Christian.

About a year later, he found a scripture that changed his life. The second half of Isaiah 32:4 seemed to speak to him: "And the tongue of the stammerer should be made to speak plainly." In Hebrew, he said, the passage reads "preach eloquently."

"From that moment on, I realized what my calling was going to be," said McLean. He began by leading a Bible study in the basement of his church.

Bernadene Flake of Deptford was there. If he stammered that day, she doesn't recall it. It's what he said that struck her.

"I was very captivated by Lamont's teaching," said Flake, 54. "He taught the word of God with an authority that I was, up to that point, very unfamiliar with . . . In that Bible study, I was learning things that were causing my heart to be changed."

McLean left his church in 1985 to start Living Faith Christian Center with 10 people in his home in Erial. The growing church then moved its services to a Woodbury school, to a converted house and eventually a local Seventh Day Adventist church.

Then, it moved to a corporate office center in Voorhees, growing to 400 members. The church bought a former synagogue in Cherry Hill in 1995 and and hit the 1,000-member mark in 1997. Flake, an elder in the church, has followed the congregation during each of its moves.

Last Sunday, Darnell Sheppard of Pemberton Borough worshiped in his church's new home. It was a relief to be there. Parking was a serious problem at the other building, he said.

"You had to wait out there until somebody emptied a spot for you," the 32-year-old said.

Sheppard joined his mother's church a little more than two years ago. Since then, his two brothers have joined, too. The church estimates about 45 percent of its members are male.

Sheppard and his 27-year-old brother, Maurice, said the pastor's sermons have changed their lives.

"I get tangible tools I can use in my everyday life, and it's all coming from the word of God," said Maurice Sheppard, a Philadelphia resident who is about to start medical school. "It's not just a Sunday morning outing."

If you go
Living Faith Christian Center holds services at 8 and 11 a.m. Sundays at the South Jersey Expo Center, 2323 Route 73, Pennsauken.
The church hosts a television program called `Faith Speaks' at 6 p.m. Sundays on TBN, 10:30 p.m. Sundays on WGTW-TV 48 and 6:30 a.m. Thursdays on WB17.
Call (856) 661-8110 or visit www.faithspeaks.org.