NEW SEWICKLEY TWP, Beaver Co. — The gut-wrenching spiritual experience of a young pastor more than 25 years ago has resulted in functioning, stable homes for more than 2,500 area households.

The Rev. Donn Ed, founder and executive director of Hosanna Industries, which is a construction ministry that builds or refurbishes homes for the needy that sits six miles west of Cranberry Township, recalled being an idealistic young minister on Christmas Eve 1987. He was tasked to deliver a turkey, small amount of cash, and bag of groceries to the last of the 20 needy families on his list.

He jumped in his car to make the delivery between Christmas Eve services at Bakerstown United Presbyterian Church, where he worked as an associate pastor.

After making his way down a long lane, he approached a small, sagging building he realized was meant to be a garage. Ed got out of his car and walked up a sidewalk made of wooden pallets. He entered a block building where flattened cardboard boxes covering the floor served as a makeshift barrier between the frozen concrete and the tiny feet of four children and their mother living in the squalid conditions.

A sprig of spruce tied with ribbons served as the family's Christmas tree, and a few sticks in a wood-burning stove kept the family from freezing.

“The kids were in rags,” Ed recalled. “It was almost Dickensian.”

He was all but embarrassed to offer the gift he had brought amid such deep poverty.

“I knew in my heart that it wasn't going to change things,” Ed said.

After taking the mother's hands and assuring her she would be in his prayers, Ed could feel a metamorphosis taking place in his soul.

“Something happened to me that night,” Ed said. “Something was about to radically change inside of me, and the result of that could be the beginning of something we had never heard of before.”

Ed spent the next two years wrestling with the feeling that he was not meant for pastorship in even the most conscientious affluent church.

“I knew I wanted to do something to help those who are helplessly poor,” Ed said.

He initially thought about going to medical school with the goal of becoming a medical missionary, but his wife saw through the idea.

“Amy said 'OK, but what about the poor in our own back yard?'” Ed recalled. “I was running away from the problem. The way Amy phrased it, it embedded itself in my heart.”

Two years later, his mentor and boss at Bakerstown U.P., The Rev. Richard Morledge, suggested the frustrated young Ed take a few days off with his wife to relax and reflect.

He and Amy traveled to eastern Pennsylvania, where Ed found himself reading the Biblical story of Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Inside the story, he came upon the word “Hosanna” over and over.

“There was a little nudge inside,” Ed said, “like, 'you need to find out what that word means.'”

When he got home, he found his Hebrew dictionary and looked up the meaning of the word. He discovered it translates to “rescue me now, Lord.”

“I had a miniature personal revolution that happened in a flash, based on that word, Hosanna,” Ed said. “We all need to be rescued, and Jesus went to the cross to answer that cry.”

He spent that entire night writing in a tablet, and when the sun came up, he discovered he had written a detailed business plan for the organization that would become Hosanna Industries.

Morledge explained to his young protégé the strange night of scribbling, which included details on the tools and equipment to be used and the green paint on the Hosanna Industries trucks.

“He said 'Donn, you've had a genuine vision,'” Ed said.

On Palm Sunday 1990, four young men from the Bakerstown congregation became Hosanna Industries' first volunteers.

“We just kept walking forward,” Ed said of Hosanna's growth from a 20-by-20-foot room at Bakerstown U.P. to 13-building spread in New Sewickley Township, Beaver County, that boasts 14 staff.

Little has changed over the years regarding Hosanna Industries' mission to help those in the depths of poverty attain a safe and usable, if not fancy, living space.

The move to the New Sewickley campus in 1999 was also strangely miraculous, Ed said.

He found out about the property through his friend, Vern Borchert, who is the retired executive director of the Lighthouse Foundation in Middlesex Township.

Borchert heard about the New Tribes Missionary Institute at the dinner table when his son, Dan, said the church where he served as an intern decided against buying the property.

Borchert showed Ed drawings of the property, which contained a farmhouse but no farm, and several trailers.

“To me it was kind of creepy,” Ed said.

Soon after, Ed and the president of Hosanna Industries took a ride out Rochester Road in Cranberry Township and into Beaver County, where the campus sits just a few miles away.

“The president said, 'Donn, this could be Hosanna's future right here,'” Ed said.

They found an old missionary cutting the grass, and asked him who they would talk to regarding the campus. Ed called the president of New Tribes in Florida to offer him $240,000 for the large property.

With the seemingly low offer accepted, Ed went out on another limb and asked the New Tribes president if Hosanna Industries could forward the $30,000 it had saved up as a down payment and rely on New Tribes to finance the sale, interest free, over the next year.

“I guaranteed him the debt would be paid in 12 months or less.” Ed said.

Stunningly, New Tribes accepted the offer.

“This is over an old bag phone to a total stranger,” Ed said. “I have never met these people yet, but they trusted us. Within nine months, Hosanna Industries completed the payment of the remaining $210,000.”

Today, through the hard work of those committed to the cause and the generosity of hundreds of donors, the Hosanna Industries campus boasts a large, functional campus.

A two-story volunteer dormitory that can sleep 57 workers.

Amanda Becker, a volunteer construction worker and staff member at Hosanna Industries, said groups of volunteers come to the campus to spend a few days or a week serving on the construction crews that improve the homes of the needy. The volunteers sleep in spartan rooms and eat communally in the dormitories' dining rooms.

She said each volunteer group brings its own cook, which often provides a venue for a volunteer without construction skills.

Dormitory residents sign a T-shirt containing their church or group's logo, and a wooden slat engraved with each volunteer group's city and the mileage they racked up during their visit is nailed onto a tall tree in the front of the property.

The Trade Skill Learning Center contains a frame of a room, where students learn wallboard and door hanging, electrical, plumbing, flooring, and other construction skills. Volunteers, staff and church mission groups planning to perform construction in disaster areas are trained at the center.

Becker said a volunteer group from a church in Cranberry learned how to install a ceramic-tile floor there before heading off on a trip west to help rebuild homes demolished in a tornado.

A full wood shop in the Trade Skill Learning Center is fully stocked with hand and power tools, all of which have been donated. Cabinets and trim are made there for homes Hosanna crews are working on, and a recent class saw home-schooled 8- to 12-year-olds make a garden tray.

The wood shop ceiling was milled from a tree on the property by a man who owns a portable sawmill.

“We have a lot of generous people who support us and believe in the work that we do,” Becker said.

Surveyor's Point is a small building that was formerly a lawn shed. It contains a 6-foot plumb bob plastered with the drawings from homes worked on by Hosanna volunteers. A life-size Jesus on the cross and benches for quiet reflection are nearby.

The campus' Community Center is a former gym, where volunteers each Christmas package up gifts and frozen meat to fill the freezers of families in need. Thanksgiving dinners for the needy are also held there, Becker said.

The chapel on the campus sports a bell tower that contains the old work boots of volunteers. About 115 pairs of boots hang on the bricks inside the working bell tower.

“When your work boots wear out, you're supposed to hang them in there,” Becker said.

The chapel's interior, which has been remodeled twice in 15 years, boasts about a dozen stained glass windows and a rustic sanctuary. Gracing the altar is a seven-foot concrete cross inlaid with stained glass. A library in the basement helps ministers who attend the many preaching clinics held in the building.

“We also gather volunteers here before we go to a job site,” Becker said.

The Hosanna campus' best evidence of the hard work performed by the volunteer construction crews is the warehouse.

The 6,000 square-foot building sits in stark contrast to the tiny workshop and storehouse used at Bakerstown when Hosanna first started up. Tools and supplies donated and purchased in bulk as closeout or discontinued items await their charitable fate on huge shelving units, and a huge framing table holds the sawdust from the 20-person teams who build walls to take to job sites.

Becker said the pre-made walls are taken to the site of a new-home build and placed on the foundation on a Monday, and 300 volunteers work all week to complete the modest home for its grateful new owners.

“By Friday noon, we have a house that is built and ready to move into,” Becker said.

She said Hosanna Industries volunteers have built 150 homes in 15 years through the generosity of donors and the energy of volunteers.

“It takes a lot of planning, a lot of details, and a lot of prayer,” said Becker, who is one of about a dozen women construction volunteers at Hosanna.

The warehouse also contains supplies that Hosanna volunteers take to the sites of a disaster. Teams in March 2012 traveled to Joplin, Mo., to work at five job sites where tornadoes decimated the landscape.

Becker said Hosanna workers led teams that built two houses and completed 15 projects in five days in Joplin.

Outside the warehouse are two bee houses and a small garden that is worked in the summer. Becker said donors at the end of summer bring fruits and vegetables to the campus, which are canned by volunteers. The canned produce is given to donors for Christmas as an expression of gratitude.

“It's a very inexpensive, but delicious way to say thanks,” Becker said.

Recently, Becker said Hosanna crews were performing construction work in Pittsburgh's Hill District and in nearby Rochester, Beaver County.

She said she never tires of swinging a hammer or running a power saw to help society's most impoverished.

“Pretty much every day, it's a different job.”

Hosanna Industries is a faith-rooted, nonprofit organization six miles outside Cranberry Township in New Sewickley Township, Beaver County.Its mission programs include new construction and repair/rehabilitation services for low-income homeowners; leading volunteers in disaster recovery; and training young people in the trade skills for future employment.The typical single-client household helped by Hosanna Industries in 2012 had an annual income of less than $13,000.Since its founding in 1990, Hosanna Industries has provided nearly $50 million in charitable work to the community for less than $14 million, most of it locally. Hosanna Industries is totally funded by donations of funds and material.To volunteer or donate, long on to hosannaindustries.org.