Living Testimony Ministry held its first Bible studies in 2005 in a building that was also a working funeral home, and Ena Gardner has co-pastored it ever since. “We were having Bible study with caskets in one room and the people in another room,” her husband and the ministry’s co-founder, Rev. Judge Gardner, said of those years.
The couple went into the funeral industry in 1995 and bought their own funeral home in 2004. The ministry started the next year. In 2009, the congregation bought a former Kingdom Hall in Woodlawn, Maryland, and in July 2025 the Gardners sold the funeral home. Sunday attendance runs from about twenty or thirty people up to around seventy-five.
What has not changed is the direction of the traffic. “We go to their house since they don’t want to come to ours,” Gardner said. In the early years, the ministry handed $5 to anybody who said they were hungry. People “need some food and they need to be warm,” she said. “They need to be safe.”
The thing she keeps returning to is children and reading. “I am so, so concerned about our young people and their inability to read,” she said. Before the pandemic, volunteers sat down with children every Thursday.
Twenty-one years in, she does not reach for the building. “If you’re not serving, then you’re not doing anything,” she said. “We’re still standing; we still believe in God. And we’re still looking up.”
