From drugs and near death to planting new life
By Jerilyn Osborn
At 23 years old, Brian Bolt was a desperate heroin addict. Finally, after a botched theft attempt, Bolt found himself riding in the back of an ambulance with a life-threatening gunshot wound. “I was worthless . . . . I was so happy I was going to die,” recalls Bolt.
Then the EMT said something Bolt never expected. “(He) said, ‘Son, you’re gonna die. Do you know Jesus?’” Bolt says. “And something just tugged at my heart, so I said a prayer.”
But when he was released from the hospital 75 days later, Bolt went straight back to drugs.
“A year later, I was in San Diego and these men came up to me and said God had a plan for my life,” Bolt says. “They took me off the street and put me in a recovery home. They loved me, discipled me and showed me I could be a pastor. I caught a vision and God put a hunger in me.”
Bolt enrolled in Master’s Commission in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was there that he became credentialed, met his future wife and felt God put Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on their hearts.
In August of 2006, Bolt and his wife opened a men’s recovery home and planted Pittsburgh City Outreach Church. “In the inner city, drugs . . . are an epidemic,” Bolt says. “We come into the community to see lives changed through the [recovery] home partnered with the church. When these guys come through the home, this is their family. It’s a self-sustaining model that can be reproduced all over the country. It allows us to dig in and see lives changed and souls saved.”
During the first year, Bolt and his staff saw close to 40 people get saved and baptized in water. Since then, hundreds more have been impacted.
The recovery home reaches many drug addicts in the area. Bolt tells of one drug addict who came to the church, accepted Christ and then shared that he had Hepatitis C and only a few months to live. Bolt took him to the doctor – the Hepatitis C was gone. “We’ve seen miracle after miracle,” Bolt says. “We’re taking guys off the street, discipling them and pouring into them. Those guys became our core team [when we planted our church].”
Next, there was a need to see women discipled, so they started a women’s recovery home and opened it up to prostitutes. Bolt shares the story of one woman who completed the recovery program, got a job and an apartment, and the state gave her son back. She now works in the church’s nursery and is going to community college.
Looking for options to expand their ministry, Brian discovered a church in the city that had opened up. “It seats about 350 people, and just a few months ago they gave it to us for free,” says Bolt. “Now we’re in the process of planting one church every other year in the inner city.”
Despite the success of their church and recovery homes, Bolt is not content to simply maintain their current ministry locations. “Our heart when we planted our church was to always plant a movement of churches. That . . . has always been our vision.”
In January of 2010, Pittsburgh City Outreach Church will be opening another men’s recovery home as well as another church in September of 2010. “That experience [of nearly dying] shaped who I am, and the model I got saved under became my burden,” says Bolt. “I want to reproduce this. I believe it’s the most effective way in the inner city. It gives people hope.”
For information about the AG’s Church Multiplication Network, see CMN.ag.org.