God Was Already Here — H1927LLC Intellectual Property Library cover featuring Duke DeAndre Richardson with leadership of The Kingdom Church in Emporia, Virginia

God Was Already Here

Presence, Family, and Welcome at The Kingdom Church in Emporia, Virginia

By Duke DeAndre Richardson
H1927LLC Intellectual Property Library
October 2026

There are moments when you enter a room expecting to observe, only to discover that you have been invited into something much more personal. That was my experience on Sunday, October 4, 2026, when I traveled with Beverly R. Perry, Esq. to The Kingdom Church in Emporia, Virginia. I had already been researching the church and knew something of its leadership and language, but research from a distance and experience from inside a sanctuary are two very different things. By the time I left Emporia the following morning, I had been welcomed as an honored guest, seated on the stage, introduced to generations of families connected to the ministry, invited to dinner, seen off personally by Dr. T. André Mason Sr., and invited to return. Somewhere inside all of that hospitality was the very message I heard preached from the pulpit: God had not gone anywhere. What changes is our awareness of presence.

The Kingdom Church sits at 925 South Main Street in Emporia. Its public language immediately gives a clue to its theology. The church says its purpose is to awaken the "God-consciousness" in every individual and grounds that purpose in Luke 17:20-21, with its declaration that the Kingdom of God is within. The church also describes its focus as the teachings of Christ concerning the indwelling Kingdom and its manifestation. Those are not small theological phrases. They suggest that the Divine is not simply somewhere above us, waiting to be summoned into the room, but is already present and capable of being manifested through human life.

Beverly's connection to this community is deeply personal. Long before my visit, she had publicly described Dr. Tracy A. Mason Sr. as her spiritual father, someone who guides, counsels, encourages, and helps her remain grounded. She has also spoken publicly about finding a faith community at The Kingdom Church where she could be herself and continue her individual spiritual path. Traveling there with Beverly therefore did not feel like arriving at a random church selected from a map. I was entering a spiritual community that had already become part of the life of someone I know well.

The welcome was formal from the beginning. During the service I was presented as an honored guest, HH Prince DeAndre, Duke of Hanumanteshwar, Knight of the Fourth Order of Cheverly. During the visit I received a card identifying Tonya Harvey as "Director of Apostolic Guests and Hospitality." At dinner, my place was marked with a card bearing my name, "Duke DeAndre Richardson," and "Duke of Hanumanteshwar." Those details may sound ceremonial, but protocol communicates something important. It tells a guest that somebody thought about their arrival before they entered the room. I was not merely another person who happened to walk through the door that Sunday. I had been received.

But the welcome carried a history I did not fully understand until it was spoken aloud in Emporia. Dr. T. André Mason Sr. told me that he had seen and followed the story of my husband, HRH Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil. Manvendra and I married in 2013, and Sr. recalled that around 2015 he had expressed a desire to meet us. Nearly eleven years later, there I was, sitting beside him in Emporia. Manvendra was not physically with me that Sunday, but the story Sr. had followed from a distance was no longer distant. A desire spoken years earlier had taken physical form in an encounter. In the language surrounding this ministry, something had begun to manifest.

I was seated on the stage near Dr. T. André Mason Sr. During the service, the sanctuary was the physical center of worship, but the congregation was not limited to the people inside the building. The service also had Zoom access for those participating from other areas and countries. That combination interested me. The gathering was intensely local, rooted in a small Virginia city, yet its reach was not confined to Virginia. As someone whose own life, marriage, family, and advocacy have stretched between the United States and India for years, I recognized something familiar in that ability to belong to a place without being limited by geography.

Then came the message.

Dr. Mason challenged the familiar religious impulse to plead with God to come closer. Why, he asked in substance, are people continually beckoning for God to arrive if there is nowhere we can go where God is not already present? He went back to the story of Adam. After Adam sinned, it was not God who hid. Adam hid. Shame made him hide. Fear made him hide. Guilt made him hide. Yet God's presence had not disappeared.

Then came the line that stayed with me: "What was missing? Awareness, not presence."

That distinction opened the sermon. Losing awareness of something does not mean that the thing itself has ceased to exist. Dr. Mason used the image of clouds passing in front of the sun. Clouds can obscure the sun, but they cannot eradicate it. The sun remains present even when it cannot be seen. In the same way, circumstances can become so heavy that God feels hidden. Pain, shame, fear, loneliness, disappointment, illness, rejection, and uncertainty can create their own weather. Yet the cloud is not proof that the sun is gone.

The sermon moved through Acts 17:28, "For in him we live, and move, and have our being," and 1 Corinthians 3:16, with its description of human beings as the temple of God and the Spirit dwelling within. Dr. Mason described this as divine inhabitation. The point was not that struggle disappears because God is present. The point was that struggle does not possess the power to evict the Divine. "God has never left me," he had the congregation declare. "God is here right now."

I have spent much of my adult life navigating institutions, cultures, religions, countries, royal traditions, LGBTQIA+ advocacy, illness, disability, marriage, and the complicated human question of belonging. I know something about what it means to walk into a room and assess it before the room assesses you. As an openly gay man who married HRH Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil in 2013, my presence in religious spaces is never entirely abstract. There are histories attached to bodies like mine. There are churches in which LGBTQIA+ people have learned to brace themselves before they have learned to breathe.

That is why I am careful about the language I use here. I am not assigning The Kingdom Church an institutional label that it has not publicly assigned to itself. I am not writing that every theological question has been answered or that one Sunday can tell me everything about a congregation. I am writing about what happened to me. I was welcomed publicly and personally. I sat on the stage as an honored guest. I met spouses, parents, children, and church leaders. I broke bread with them. The welcome continued when the service was over.

There is a difference between being received and being read. I have entered religious and spiritual spaces where people seem to study you before they greet you, searching for the part of you they have already been taught to judge, fear, correct, or contain. I have also been around people who understand themselves as seers, people who believe they perceive more than what is being said aloud. I respect spiritual discernment, but I know the difference between being spiritually seen and being spiritually inspected. What moved me in Emporia was the feeling of being seen by the light I carry. I did not feel that I had entered the room as a problem somebody needed to solve. I was allowed to arrive as a whole human being.

That distinction matters because my husband's work often enters a room before I do. Over the years I have been invited into many organizations that first came to know me through the work and public story of HRH Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil of Rajpipla. Yet I have also learned that many institutions, including religious and spiritual ones, do not have a developed protocol for same-sex spouses. An organization may know how to receive a prince, a bishop, a donor, a speaker, or an honored guest, but become uncertain around the simplest relational truth when two men are husbands. Protocol is not only about titles and seating. At its best, protocol is a language of recognition. It answers a basic question before a guest ever has to ask it: Do you understand who I am, and do you understand who this person is to me?

I have encountered another contradiction as well. There are religious and spiritual communities in which gay, lesbian, and bisexual people are present in leadership and service, but their sexuality is easier for the institution to accommodate when it remains abstract, private, publicly single, or joined to an expectation of celibacy. There is nothing wrong with a freely chosen celibate life. The problem begins when celibacy, silence, or the disappearance of one's spouse becomes the price of spiritual belonging. My own life has taught me that LGBTQIA+ people do not have to surrender their sexual knowing in order to know the Divine. Many are already deeply in touch with the Divine. I have come to understand that, too, as part of the Spirit having a human experience.

The most complicated spaces are often those in which there is one public-facing order and another private reality. I have had experiences in which I was told privately that a leader was lesbian, or that two men publicly understood one way were, in fact, partners or spouses. I will not identify people whose private lives are not mine to disclose. What I can speak about is what that division can do to an institution. When a community has no honest public language for relationships it privately knows exist, it can become uncertain about how to receive an openly married same-sex couple. People have every right to choose privacy for themselves, but a system built around concealment can leave those who live openly carrying the discomfort that the system itself has never resolved.

That is part of why this visit stayed with me. No one handed me a policy statement, and I did not ask for one. What I experienced was the absence of erasure. My husband's story was part of the history that preceded my arrival. Dr. Mason Sr. spoke openly to me about having followed Manvendra's story and about the desire he had carried for years to meet us. My own name and title were spoken when I was received. I was not asked to step away from my marriage, reduce my husband to a safer word, or make myself smaller so that somebody else's theology could remain comfortable. For me, that was not a minor detail of hospitality. It was part of what it meant to be seen.

The family relationships surrounding the church became clearer to me as the day unfolded. Dr. T. André Mason Sr. serves as the senior leader, while his son, Bishop/Dr. T. André Mason Jr., also serves in church leadership. A 2023 public profile of Mason Jr. described him as married with three children, and during my visit I met his wife and all three children. I also met Isaiah Mason, the Apostolic Rafique.

Isaiah's family was woven into the day as well. I met his father, Bishop Antonio Walker, who serves as Bishop of Protocol at the church. Later, at dinner, Isaiah's mother told me that her youngest son had been the young man playing the drums on the stage during the service. It was one of those small pieces of information that changes the way you remember an earlier scene. A musician I had seen during worship was no longer simply a drummer on a stage. He was somebody's son and somebody's brother. The institution was becoming a family in front of me.

There was another generational story operating underneath all of this. Dr. Mason Sr. spoke of coming from a Pentecostal church background and told me of his mother establishing a church in Philadelphia that grew, as he remembered it, into a megachurch. I have not independently documented the name and history of that Philadelphia congregation, so I record it here for what it is: something Dr. Mason shared from his own family and spiritual history. It helps explain an important dimension of what I encountered in Emporia. The worship carried the energy of Pentecostal and Apostolic traditions, while the teaching pushed toward an interior theology of the indwelling Kingdom. In other words, the room could be expressive without requiring God to be distant.

We did not go directly from the church to dinner. There was another gathering in between, and it has become important to me not to lose that movement in the telling. We left the church and traveled to another city, where we were received at the home of Bishop Antonio Walker, the church's Bishop of Protocol, and Becky Walker. Among those gathered were Beverly, Dr. T. André Mason Sr., Isaiah Mason, Alton Powell, and me. The setting had changed from sanctuary to home, but the spiritual current had not disappeared.

The conversation flowed naturally among us. It did not feel like a program, a panel, or a continuation of the service. We were simply people sharing, listening, responding, and allowing one thought to open into another. There are conversations in which everyone seems to be waiting for a turn to speak, and there are other conversations in which something larger seems to move through the room. This felt like the latter. We were sharing in what I experienced as a divine energy of light and love, each person bringing something into the exchange and each person receiving something from it. The house became a bridge between the sanctuary and the table that would come next. The sermon had spoken about Divine presence already being here, and in that home I was beginning to understand how presence could move with us from one space into another.

From there we went to dinner. That mattered too. A worship service can remain formal. Dinner rarely does. Around a table, titles loosen and people begin to tell you who belongs to whom, who was playing the drums, how families came together, and what the life of a community looks like after the microphones are turned off. We talked. We laughed. We took photographs. I sat among people I had only recently met and listened as relationships that had seemed complicated from the outside became human and ordinary around a meal.

What stayed with me most at that dinner was the ease of truth. Family spoke of love, connection, and the people in their lives without shame, awkwardness, or the nervous pause that can sometimes tell you more than words ever could. There was no need to turn anyone's truth into a billboard. Not every truth needs an announcement, and love does not require a public declaration to make it real. Some truths are most powerful when people are simply allowed to live them. Sitting at that table, love and light did not have to be performed because they were already being lived. How refreshing it was simply to shine and to be seen as light while seeing that same light in the people around me. There is something deeply divine in being received without first being edited. We are not waiting to become worthy of God's presence by becoming less of ourselves. We are already carrying the light. God is already here.

The dinner also allowed me to see why Beverly's relationship to this community cannot be understood simply by reading a church directory. Her connection is relational, spiritual, and lived. Years earlier she publicly described this congregation as a place that allowed her to be herself and encouraged people to follow their individual paths. Sitting there with her, those words no longer existed only in an interview. I could see the community around the statement.

The next morning gave the experience its ending.

The service was over. The dinner plates had been cleared. There was no stage left and no public program requiring anyone to perform hospitality. Before Beverly and I departed, Dr. T. André Mason Sr. came to see us off. I had also been invited to come again.

That quiet act returned me to the sermon from the day before. Presence does not always announce itself dramatically. Sometimes it is a person making sure you have a place on the stage. Sometimes it is a handwritten hospitality card or a name waiting at a dinner table. Sometimes it is a mother telling you about her son playing the drums. Sometimes it is sitting with a family after church and discovering who they are outside their titles. Sometimes it is someone showing up the next morning simply to say goodbye.

The theological argument I heard in Emporia was that God's presence does not depend upon my ability to feel it. Clouds can obscure the sun without destroying it. Shame can make a person hide without making God disappear. Circumstances can overwhelm awareness without eliminating presence.

That message also helped me understand a more recent experience with another global spiritual community I had come to know through earlier work. I had spent time with members of that community and believed a relationship had developed. More recently, I was invited to be part of a large spiritual gathering. I agreed because I genuinely wanted to participate, and I made my cross-country travel plans with that gathering very much in mind. Yet as the event approached and the names of participants began to be presented, I no longer felt that the value conveyed in the original invitation was being reflected in how I was being held within the program. I cannot assign a motive to another person's decision, and I do not need to. I can speak to my own experience: I had moved across the country with intention, and I came to feel like an afterthought.

I sat with that feeling instead of allowing it to define me. I wrote from it. On the day of the gathering, I ultimately experienced the event from a private room with friends rather than stepping into the official space. There was an irony in that moment. The same global spiritual network has received my husband with extraordinary high-touch attention, and I do not begrudge Manvendra one bit of that recognition. His work has earned respect around the world. But proximity to my husband's public story is not the same as seeing the work I am doing, the life I am living, or the light I carry in my own right. Being married to an internationally known LGBTQIA+ activist should not make my own contribution easier to overlook.

That experience returned me to something I have come to believe through my own life. Light does not become brighter through repression. When a human being is required to divide a public self from a private truth, energy that could be used to love, create, serve, and illuminate can instead be consumed by hiding. I cannot know or judge what another person carries privately, and I will not turn somebody else's private life into my evidence. What I can say is that I know what it has meant for me to live openly. I know the freedom that comes when I no longer spend spiritual energy apologizing for the truth of who I am. For LGBTQIA+ people, living openly within that truth is not a failure of spirituality. It can itself become an act of spiritual alignment.

So when I hear, "God has never left me. God is here right now," I hear something larger than reassurance in a difficult moment. I hear a declaration to the LGBTQIA+ person who has been taught that the Divine will arrive only after some essential part of the self has been hidden, silenced, disciplined out of view, or made acceptable to somebody else's institution. If God is already here, then you do not have to summon the Divine by disappearing. You do not have to dim your light to prove that you carry light. You are not an error waiting for God to correct before God can dwell within you. Let your light shine brightly. The presence you have been taught to search for may already be alive within you.

I arrived at The Kingdom Church prepared to observe a congregation. I left thinking about presence, and about the strange patience of manifestation. Around 2015, Sr. had spoken of wanting to meet us after following Manvendra's story and learning of our marriage. In 2026, the story had traveled all the way into the room. I was sitting beside him. What had once been an intention had become an encounter.

Maybe that is what I will remember most about that Sunday. Not that I was told I belonged. Not that somebody handed me an institutional definition of inclusion. It was something quieter and, for me, more convincing. I was given a place. I was introduced to people. I was invited to the table. Someone came to see me off. The door was left open for my return.

God, the sermon insisted, was already there.

By the time I left Emporia, I understood that the people had been there too. Sometimes the spiritual work is not learning how to summon the light. Sometimes it is finally refusing to dim the light that was already there.

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