The testimony of C.J. Blair
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In December 1997, about two weeks before Christmas, I had just finished doing a drug deal. I had about $50,000 worth of cocaine in my car. And I was on the 495 freeway outside Washington, D.C., listening to a rap CD.
I remember one of the rappers saying something about the Antichrist, and I said to myself, They are going to hell. As soon as I said that, the spirit of God came up in my car so powerfully that my hands flew off the steering wheel and up into the air. I just started saying “Hallelujah!” with my hands in the air on a five-lane highway. Mind you, I didn’t go to church, and except for two or three Easters when I was a kid, I had never been to church. I thought I had to be trippin’. But then God audibly said my name, “C.J.,” and I said, “Yes, Lord!”
Growing up, I’d always thought Jesus was a joke because the churches in my inner-city D.C. neighborhood never came out and told us who He was. My mother was a prostitute, and the only father figure I ever knew was her pimp. I grew up looking at mink coats and pistols and diamond chains and Cadillacs and all that the street could provide you, and I took to it like a fish to water. I did everything from selling weed to stealing hubcaps and selling them. I was a criminal. I was about 12 years old when crack cocaine came to my neighborhood. I jumped in it and began to make money, up to $7,000 a night!
I went to jail for the first time when I was 13 because a crack head had tried to rob me, and I got a gun and shot him. For the next 14 years, I was in and out of jail. In 1991, I caught my longest period of jail time — close to six years straight. But the mentality of the hood is like jail, murder, death … all of that is just part of the game. So when I was released in January 1997, I went right back to my old life. Until that night in the car. I went straight home and told my mother and grandmother, “I talked to God!” There was no church, nobody witnessed to me, I didn’t have an altar call — I just knew I was saved. I called my aunt, who was a pastor, and I went to her church and gave my testimony. Four months later, they invited me to preach my first sermon. Word spread through the whole city about what had happened to me.
I went to Bible school, and I continued preaching at churches, and one week as I was preaching in Memphis, I looked out at the crowd — it was a whole bunch of old people in nice dresses and hats. I didn’t see anybody from the streets. And I felt God saying, “Come out from among them.” So I went back to the hood, and I started doing after-school services at the school where I used to sell crack. I bought Wal-Mart swimming pools and started baptizing young’ns on the basketball courts in the projects. Then I would take church to the neighborhoods and set up stages, microphones and speakers and just bring in rappers and DJs and have service right there. From there, C.O.F.A.T. (Come Out From Among Them) ministries evolved into a full urban ministry. Churches started bringing me in to speak because they couldn’t engage their communities — they just weren’t relevant. We come in and teach churches how to bring about change, deliverance and healing to a world that really needs it. God sends me and my staff of 15 to a city that we crusade for six weeks, going into the roughest neighborhoods, and then we do three-night revivals. We also do outreach in schools and run a hip-hop record label that helps kids use their talents for the glorification of God.
When I speak, people know I’ve been there, done that. They know I represent hope for the individual in the streets who thinks he has no options. So that is my mission — to help churches that want to make the Gospel relevant. I run to shed light in those dark places.
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C.J. Blair is pastor of the Remnant Church of C.O.F.A.T. Ministries, which he founded in 2005. C.O.F.A.T. Ministries is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with three branches nationwide and four overseas. For more information, visit COFATMinistries.com.