Pentecostal Lighthouse Feeds Needy

In 2005 when Pastor Raymond Hawkins became spiritual leader of the Pentecostal Lighthouse of Dunedin, he brought some big ideas to the small church and began implementing them right away, the Associated Press reports. Mainly, he said, he wanted to show love to those in need.

“Brother Hawkins is a people-person and the answer to our prayers,” Shirley Scott, who was married to the late Paul Laughlin, the first pastor, who founded the church on his own land in 1981, told the Associated Press. “This church has changed under Brother Hawkins.”

Those changes began with what Hawkins calls ministries.

“The ministry is a way of connecting to people so they don’t feel abandoned or go into depression,” he told the Associated Press. “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”