BOYNTON BEACH — from www.palmbeachpost.com – The church that moved into a closed strip club soon will be open for business after receiving a surprise donation of $12,000.

“Oh, Lord. I cannot explain it,” Pierre Dumont [pictured], pastor of Eglise Assemblee Evangelique de Christ, said Thursday night. “For us, we consider this as a miracle.”

The donor’s a familiar one: Christ Fellowship.

In December, the Palm Beach Gardens megachurch, believed to be Palm Beach County’s largest congregation, revealed plans to buy a closed 126,000-square-foot Dillard’s department store in the stressed Boynton Beach Mall and set up a satellite worship center that would host thousands every week.

In May, Eglise Assemblee, a largely Haitian-American congregation of about 250, paid $600,000 to buy the former Platinum Showgirls site at 1115 N. Federal Highway. Police had raided the club early Halloween morning in 2009 amid allegations dancers engaged in sex and sold drugs.

Eglise Assemblee had been renting space at a Delray Beach church. But the $2,000-a-month rent was costly. So Christmas Day was its last service; it’s been dormant as work is done on the new site.

Volunteers have painted over black walls, removed dancing poles and torn up carpeting still smelling of stale alcohol. It took all the money the congregation could collect to buy the site and do the remodeling. But there still was more to do before the city would declare it ready.

After a story on the church and its financial struggles appeared Dec. 31 in The Palm Beach Post, Leo Abdella, a pastor and director of community relations for Christ Fellowship, came to the site.

“He didn’t know our church. When he came in, he said, ‘God is going to use this place to a good cause,'” Dumont recalled.

“We immediately knew we had to help them out,” Christ Fellowship lead pastor Todd Mullins said Friday .

Before the $12,000, Dumont said, the largest check he’d received was $250 from a local soft-drink distributor. The pastor said he hopes to hold his first services in a few weeks.

Christ Fellowship’s plan for the Dillard’s site is set to return to the city commission Feb. 7. Mullins said the donation had nothing to do with influencing deliberations, but rather was because of “our desire to help and bless that community.”

He also said this is not the first church his group has helped and what made it stand out was not its location but rather what it had been and what it was now becoming.

“We thought that was definitely worth cheering on,” he said.