In 2015, Seph took me and two friends to explore an abandoned church and mall in Cleveland while we were in town. I had found him online and, to my surprise, he had responded to my messages. We met him at a gas station, and I remember waiting in the car and not knowing what to expect, feeling nervous, cracking jokes about how he was sure to murder us. Next thing I know, we’re crawling through a hole in the wall of a church that looks like a destroyed wedding cake. There are three things I remember from the inside of that church. One was a high-ceilinged auditorium room with a carpet of green moss. All the chairs were gone, and the overgrowth looked exactly like a real, bright green carpet, and in the slanted light sneaking through the blackened windows it was one of the most beautiful rooms I had ever seen. The second was a barely rotted piano, sloping downwards but still functional, still framed perfectly against the wall on the stage where the preachers would’ve once given sermons. And then finally, scrawled in tall, thin black spray paint across the horizontal half-dome on the back of the stage were the words “God is Not Dead.” And it was true. God was still in the church, at least as much as he ever had been. And somehow Seph knew that, and we could all feel it.
—Isaac Simpson (LA Weekly Journalist)
