Pomona Pastor Battles for Christianity’s Turf

The shooting happened just after dusk on a Thursday night. About 100 people had gathered outside a garage in the cul-de-sac of Sumner Street, at the edge of Pomona’s Harrison Park, to see a film the Victory Outreach Mission was going to show on the garage door. The movie was about drugs, gangs and spiritual rebirth.

Pomona has a painful familiarity with drugs and gangs. The local mission is attempting to make spiritual rebirth as common.

Mission Pastor Mark Uribe, who is no stranger to gunfire, saw the muzzle flashes as the quick reports scattered the crowd of 100 and four wounded people fell to the ground. Police arrested a 16-year-old suspected gang member and believe he opened fire on the crowd to assert his gang’s territorial claim to the park.

Not surprisingly, a gang shooting at a church rally to oppose gang activity attracted a flurry of media attention. However, the incident three weeks ago soon faded in the blur of ongoing coverage of street gang mayhem in Southern California.

The interesting thing about the shooting in Pomona was not that it took place, but that a group was out that night spreading the good word in a neighborhood where drug deals and gunfire are part of the community experience.

For seven years Pastor Mark has waged that battle. A dropout from a Los Angeles street gang, he once took some parishioners into the city and showed them his signature, MARK LOBO WHITE FENCE 1971, etched into a sidewalk near Leeward Avenue and Hoover Street. Lobo, Spanish for wolf, was his gang name, and he belonged to the infamous White Fence gang. He and his gang friends (known as home boys) burglarized residences, broke into cars, sold marijuana, shook down homosexuals and fought other gangs for turf.

“I was willing to die for that gang,” he recalls. “I got shot at a lot. I could feel the bullets whizzing by my head. But I shot back. I carried a loaded rifle in the car.”

Mark had been what he calls a “regular kid” until the age of 10. “I was getting jumped then because I wasn’t in a gang. I became aware of the need for protection. I wanted to ignore them, but you can’t do that when you’re getting beaten up. I joined the White Fence gang for protection, but I soon began to feel the prestige.”

His parents, alarmed by the gang activity, moved out of Boyle Heights. But Mark, already showing organizational skills, colonized a branch of the White Fence in the new neighborhood.

When he was 18, a shooter from the C14 gang put a bullet in his leg. To add to the indignity, another gang, the Playboys, stole the low rider he was using that night. Realizing the futility and danger of gang life, Mark backed away from the gang. He went to a junior college, got a job in electronics and through the Victory Outreach Mission in Los Angeles found his faith.

“I felt the presence of God there,” he recalls. “I went up to the altar and committed my life, the life I had almost lost.”

One day the founder of the church took Mark and two friends into his office and told them to go out and found new missions. Mark had heard there were drugs and gangs in Pomona, so he went there. He walked the streets of Pomona, talking to the people. It was soon apparent he was in the right place.

Seven years later, at the age of 31, he runs the mission he founded. It is housed in a storefront on Mission Boulevard, between a storefront church called God’s House of Refuge and a small Mexican restaurant with an American flag over the entrance.

A tall and physically imposing man, Pastor Mark conducts himself with a quiet humility. He can talk in the vernacular of the street gang and speak with authority about the mechanics of the drug trade. But he never strays more than a few sentences from the lessons of his faith. There are many references to God and Jesus, but never with the familial presumptuousness of the video evangelists.

He views himself as their servant, and the storefront mission and its work as a direct and logical response to their wishes.

“We may be on the front lines working with gangs and people with drug problems,” he says, “but what we have created here is a family church. We have a church where people feel comfortable as couples or with their children. But they understand we must all help the street people. There’s a lot of pain out there on the streets.”

On Sunday morning, about 70 people were in the long, narrow room, lined with plywood paneling and illuminated by four rows of fluorescent tubes. In another section of the building were about 40 children, whose laughter, playing and occasional crying could sometimes be heard in the main room.

The music was vibrant and cheerful and a light projector flashed the lyrics on a wall.

We are standing on holy ground.

There are angels all around.

W e are standing in his presence on holy ground.

In the congregation were 14 men with drug or personal problems who live in a rehabilitation home operated in Pomona by the mission. Two of them, a tall black man in an immaculate white sweater, and a young white man with blond, curly hair, had their arms locked together, sustaining one another as they sang and prayed that they could elude the demon that has taken them to the edge of the abyss.

At one point in the service, a man who had taken refuge in the home responded to an altar call, in which those with special needs or prayers come to the front of the church. He prostrated himself in prayer, and with his arms outstretched above his head, one could see the scabs and bandages on his wrists, where he had recently slashed himself in a suicide attempt. Several of the church members came forward and prayed over him.

Later in the service, Pastor Mark extended a welcome to a man sitting near the rear of the congregation.

“We have with us a victim of the shooting in the park. Brother Art, it’s good to see you in the house of the Lord this morning.”

Some in the congregation know that Art is trying to leave behind a drug problem. He is on that cusp where one either slides back into slavery or makes it over the top and is set free.

Pastor Mark’s sermon was a celebration of ordinary people. It was, in the context of a church, a populist declaration. He praised what the congregation had achieved and warned that the burdens upon the ordinary people will always be great. “He who has no cross will have no crown.”

After the service, Pastor Mark drove through Pomona, pointing out some street pushers, but also identifying the homes of people who were fighting back against the gangs and drugs.

He and his wife live in a small house that is usually an extension of the church. Diversions are few, though they will soon have a brief vacation at Lake Tahoe and he occasionally goes bowling (“I have my own ball and the shoes”) and keeps two small aquariums.

“I get tired. And I get discouraged when I don’t see all the results I want to see. . . .Jesus said it would not be easy and he said few would respond. It is the few I am looking for.”

There are a lot of Samaritans out there, trying to save the few who add up to the many. Their work is generally obscured by the violence of the streets. But they are there, like the people at the mission, showing their movies on garage doors, welcoming the tragic to their altar, finding holy ground in a Pomona storefront.