Matt Matulia answers his phone from his porch overlooking Lake Joanna. Built in 1967, the house originally belonged to his wife Lindsey’s grandparents. Many years and memories have passed on this lakefront, including two years of prayer meetings which led up to the launch of Lakeside Covenant PCA in February 2024.
“This lake and this house are a part of our church planting story,” Matulia says.
Born and Bred in Baseball
Raised in Eustis, Florida, where the lake house sits, Matulia has always found a safe haven in Central Florida. Florida, and baseball.
Matulia’s dad was a baseball coach in the National Junior College Athletic Association, and Matulia grew up both sitting in the bleachers and hitting the ball with his dad and brother.
“All of my memories were baseball,” he says.
Growing up, Matulia only saw two options for his future: play baseball or coach baseball. Like his dad, he played baseball at The Citadel; he was drafted by the Chicago Cubs’ farm system right after graduation in 2006.
As a minor league player, Matulia bounced from one Cubs affiliate team to another all across the U.S.—including stays in Mesa, Arizona; Boise, Idaho; Daytona Beach, Florida; and Knoxville, Tennessee. He always returned to Eustis in the offseason. He married Lindsey, his high school sweetheart, in 2007.
A Year of Breaking
As he continued to move from team to team, city to city, Matulia always had an underlying anxiety about his future as a player.
“When you’re in the minor leagues, they kind of own you. The fear is that they will call you in and release you,” he says.
After a lackluster performance during the 2008 season, Matulia entered 2009 spring training with a feeling he would be released. He was, but not without getting an offer to join the Cubs as a coach.
“Because my dad was a coach and that’s all I knew, all I wanted to do was play or coach,” he says. “As hard as it was to hear they didn’t want me as a player anymore, I was very excited they wanted me as a coach.”
At age 25, as Matulia was settling into his new role as a coach, still traveling all over the country, another uneasiness began to stir within him. For the first time in his life, he felt overwhelmed by the weight of his sin. Having grown up in a Roman Catholic family and tradition, Matulia says he saw himself, on the whole, as a pretty good person.
But in 2009, he broke.
“I realized for the first time that I wasn’t good, and I couldn’t be good enough. On the inside, I was in a very, very dark place,” he says. “Part of the baseball life is really dark—alcohol, girls. I was wrapped up in all of that. The Lord was really showing me all of that.”
He remembers dragging his suitcase through an airport on the way from one baseball commitment to another, crying out to the Lord, when he got a phone call from his brother, John, who wanted to send him a book. The book, “One Heartbeat Away,” arrived at Matulia’s hotel room, and it laid out the gospel.
“The Lord just came to me in that moment,” he says. “I read that book in a hotel in Iowa, and it was the first time in my life when I really heard the gospel clearly: You are a sinner, and God has sent his Son to save you.”
The Last Two Mites
Matulia returned home to Lindsey and shared how he had encountered God in that hotel room.
He began reading his Bible and soon realized that part of being a Christian was learning to be a good husband and father. He realized that life on the road was not conducive to family life. Lindsey was soon to have their first child, Emma, and he decided to find a coaching job closer to home. He started making phone calls, leaving voicemails for head coaches at Division 1 colleges in the South.
One of the coaches who called him back was Mike Martin of Florida State University. Martin was on his way to becoming the “winningest coach in college baseball history.” He was also a committed believer. Martin offered Matulia a position as a volunteer coach for the 2011 season.
“Mike Martin was the first Christian coach I’d ever been around. The way the program operated was with Christian principles. The guys, for the most part, did not use bad language. [Martin] was the model of that … He wasn’t over the top with his faith; he just lived it. It was just good for me to be around him,” Matulia says.
Around this time, Lindsey’s faith came to life as well.
“I grew up in church and can remember a VBS when I was younger asking Jesus into my heart, but I didn’t fully grasp the gospel and my need for a savior until we were in Tallahassee,” she says. “God clearly spoke his gospel to me while I was there. I started attending Bible study for the first time and really dug deep into God’s Word.”
For the Matulias, growing in their faith meant growing in their understanding of a healthy, godly marriage and the sacrifices it involves. As a husband, Matulia had sinful habits that he needed to confess and turn from.
During a baseball chapel service in 2012, the speaker shared about the widow in Mark 12 who gave all that she had. Matulia was cut to the heart. He prayed, ”I understand, Jesus. You want all of me.”
He admitted his failings to Lindsey and his pastor.
“I felt like my world was shattered yet at the same time I felt completely cared for and held by God,” explains Lindsey. “It was definitely a supernatural feeling that can only be explained by the comfort of the Holy Spirit. It was like Jesus was saying, ‘I’ve got you, and I am enough.’”
With guidance from their pastor, he and Lindsey had a chance to start over, with the Lord now truly at the heart of their marriage. Matulia began trying to understand how to apply Paul’s exhortation for husbands to “love their wives like Christ loved the church” (Ephesians 5:25).
“For us and for her—what she wanted was a husband who went to work regular hours and didn’t travel. I knew God was calling me out of baseball. It was hard, but I knew it,” Matulia says.
Lindsey adds her perspective: “Once Matt played for a while and we realized he wasn’t going to make it in the big leagues, there were times when I was ready for him to be home and for us to be a normal family together but I would not ever tell him to quit. I was nervous that he would regret it, and I wanted it to be his decision.”
Matulia finally decided it was time to be home more often. So, for the first time since he began playing ball as a kid, Matulia set aside his bat, and went to work full-time off the diamond. He took a job managing one of the Ace Hardware stores owned by Lindsey’s father.
A surprise gift at the end of his baseball career was that Florida State made it to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska.
“I felt like it was a gift from God in allowing me to experience that before moving into a completely new and different season of life,” he says.
Reforming
Back in Lake County at Ace Hardware, Matulia was on fire for God. He had to tell everyone what Jesus had done for him, in removing his condemnation and setting him free from his sin. He started a Bible study called 5:25 Men, based on Ephesians 5:25. The group met weekly at 5:25 a.m., and discussed how to be godly men.
He started teaching the high school and college-aged students at his church and volunteering at the local high school with Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Eventually, he left Ace and came on staff with FCA full time.
“During that time, the Lord was bringing me to Reformed convictions in my spiritual journey,” Matulia says, thanks to insights from his brother John and through teaching from Ligonier Ministries. He decided he needed a mentor who would help him better understand Reformed theology.
He began meeting with David Kelly, the associate pastor at New Hope PCA in Eustis, who had just graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando, to discuss theology and to bat around all the questions Matulia was entertaining.
“In many ways, he helped me understand grace,” he says.
Over the course of their two years of meeting every week, Matulia became convinced that he wanted to enter full-time pastoral ministry. Meanwhile, he learned that the leadership at New Hope wanted to plant a PCA church in one of the nearby communities. They asked Matulia if he would be willing to attend RTS and come on staff at New Hope as a church planting intern. Matulia was thrilled and enrolled in RTS in the fall of 2019.
A Different Kind of Ballgame
On a Sunday after church in the summer of 2022, a few families gathered to pray in the Matulias’ backyard on Lake Joanna. After that first gathering, the group slowly grew and continued to gather every Sunday to pray about the possibility of planting a church.
Over time, the Lord answered those prayers by guiding them to find a future location in the Mt. Dora and Sorrento communities, just east of Eustis. Those towns were beginning to experience new growth as development from Orlando crept into their communities.
“Our kids go to school that way. One of our core families lives there. Everything we did in life was happening out there,” Matulia explains.
It made sense to begin looking there for a potential church location.
On February 4, 2024, Lakeside Covenant PCA launched its first public worship service in the gym of Round Lake Charter School. A year later, the church plant averages around 90 regular attendees.
“The biggest joy has been seeing the growth in some of the guys, and ladies, that I have been discipling,” says Matulia. “It has been a joy to watch them deepen in their faith and step up into leadership roles within our young church.”
While baseball seems much like a thing of Matulia’s past (two of his three daughters play volleyball), he still sees himself as a coach.
“I believe the Lord wired me that way and has allowed me to coach in a different way than I imagined … I sometimes make the analogy of the church being my team. God has called me to lead this team in following his will and fulfilling his kingdom mission.”
Zoe S. Erler is a byFaith contributing writer.