A Way Out : Some Churches Try to Counteract Gang Influences with Fellowship, Support

For Ruben Rodriguez, getting religion meant kicking a four-year heroin addiction. For Tony Williams it meant giving away his .357 magnum. For Ricardo Sanchez it meant finding a factory job and later becoming a pastor.

All three young men traded lives of gang violence and drugs for lives of praying and preaching.

Bonds of Fellowship

The catalyst: a Catholic church and two nondenominational churches in the northeast San Fernando Valley that are trying to replace the bonds of youth gang affiliation with the support of fellowship.

Not all northeast Valley churches are reaching out to gang members, but many churches in the rougher areas have begun to notice a growing gang influence on neighborhood children and on the offspring of congregation members. A look at the experiences of Rodriguez, Williams and Sanchez offers insight into the range of approaches the churches are using to counteract that influence.

Of the three, Victory Outreach Church embraces the most aggressive tactics, recruiting hard-core drug addicts to the Sepulveda church and Sun Valley rehabilitation home by taking mini-revivals into the northeast Valley’s housing projects. Luz de Cristo, “Light of Christ,” tries to spark gang members’ interest through its youth centers in Pacoima and Van Nuys. Guardian Angel Catholic Church in Pacoima uses the most passive method, offering youth ministry and three-day spiritual retreats.

“We don’t go out recruiting anyone because we don’t have to,” said Stella Garcia, Guardian Angel’s religious education director. “It’s usually the parent who comes to the priest as a last resort.”

Most gang specialists doubt that such a drastic change--from hoodlum to holy man--can catch on enough to make a dent in the gang problem. But some say similarities between the all-encompassing natures of gangs and religion make faith an effective weapon in the war against gangs.

‘Horrible Disease’

Loren M. Naiman, assistant head deputy for the Hardcore Gang Unit of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, gives high marks to anything that draws even a few youths away from gangs.

“Is it the solution? No. But is it a solution? Yes,” Naiman said. “Gangs are a lot like AIDS. We’re talking about a horrible disease that’s killing our community. So if it works, use it.”

It is impossible to quantify how well the churches’ techniques work, and church leaders are the first to acknowledge that they lose more than they save. Sanchez said Luz de Cristo has “saved” 45 souls since November, when it opened a youth center in Pacoima. The Rev. David Martinez at Victory Outreach said at least a third of his congregation of about 200 once were gang members.

But Manuel Velasquez, who monitors gang activity through Community Youth Gang Services, a government-financed agency that sends counselors into neighborhoods, was skeptical about the validity of any figures.

“I know gang members who have been reborn 150 times; they make a mock of these people who try to come in and save them,” Velasquez said.

Velasquez and church leaders do agree about the reasons some youths give up gangs for religion: They tire of the demands and brutality of street life.

“They’re out partying, having a good time, but they come to the realization it doesn’t last,” Martinez said. “They see that there’s jail that goes along with it, there’s fighting that goes along with it, there’s pain and misery.”

The reformed gang members said that after a while the excitement of brawling and imbibing gave way to loneliness. They said it must have been because of a lack of direction and affection in their lives.

“I was to the bottom,” Ruben Rodriguez, 22, said. “People wanted to kill me. . . . There was no love in my life.”

Martinez was a drug user and gang member who first found religion in prison 22 years ago. He calls Victory Outreach a “street ministry.” On summer evenings he takes his message to the public housing projects with a covey of converts, microphones, live music, leaflets and movies on the dangers of gangs that are projected onto graffiti-marred exterior apartment walls.

One of those informal revivals popped up in Rodriguez’s Sepulveda neighborhood nearly two years ago.

Deep Into Gang Life

At that point, Rodriguez said, he was in bad shape. Nothing had seemed to shake his heroin habit and his association with the San Fer gang--not finding his brother dead from a heroin overdose or spending years in California Youth Authority facilities on assault and drug charges.

A few months after the revival, as his mother was about to kick him out of the house, he came across the Victory Outreach pamphlet among his belongings. He asked his mother to drive him to the church’s Sun Valley rehabilitation home.

These days, Rodriguez’s grisly stories of drug dealing, theft and assault contradict his clean-cut, healthy appearance. Only the gang tattoos that show at the neck and cuffs of his pastel shirt hint of another man in another time.

Of the three men, only Tony Williams, 25, admitted to missing aspects of gang affiliation.

“I’m not saying I don’t enjoy walking with the Lord, but this life I’m learning is for a married dude,” he said. “Everyone I know is in a gang, or they’re married with kids.”

Some Slip

Williams also was the only one who said he had slipped back into his old life style--and drug usage--several times since he accepted religion. It was not so much because the gang “homeboys” tried to woo him back, he said, but because he missed getting high with them.

Former gang members such as Williams are involved with Guardian Angel chiefly because of the church’s location in the heart of the San Fernando Gardens. Williams was riding his bicycle past the church on his way to score drugs, he said, the day he ran into Father Peter Irving. Irving told Williams about an organizing meeting for a spiritual retreat.

Williams went because he thought it sounded like fun. He now attends meetings twice a week to help arrange retreats for other young people. On a third night he is a youth ministry leader.

At a recent youth ministry meeting, Francisco Escoto, a former member of the Pacoima Trese gang with Williams, told a 12-year-old girl that, for him, joining the church was like joining “the biggest gang of all.”

Similarities Downplayed

Religious leaders downplay any similarities between faith and gangs, but a few ex-gang members and specialists say those likenesses may be partially at the root of the churches’ successes.

“In the gang they have a sense of family, a sense of unity, a sense of belonging,” Velasquez said. “When something like Victory Outreach comes into their lives, it offers that same sense of family.”

Believers Already

Velasquez said many gang members think of themselves as believers anyway.

“Basically they’re asking the Virgin Mary for protection from the other guy who wants to kill them, but then they’re out killing someone else too,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Help me, God, get through this drive-by shooting.’ ”

Sometimes religion is seen as a “cooler way out” for weary homeboys, Velasquez said. “In a gang . . . they say, ‘He’s into the Lord, leave him alone.’ ”

Spared Beatings

Williams, Rodriguez and Ricardo Sanchez, for example, were spared the “jumping out” beatings that many face when they leave gangs for less acceptable reasons.

Now all three hold full-time jobs. Rodriguez works for a construction firm, and Luz de Cristo members helped Sanchez find a job on a factory assembly line. Last year Sanchez, 25, quit that job to take over as pastor of the church’s youth centers.

Naiman, the deputy district attorney, said the barrier to long-lasting piety is that churches cannot replace the money that gang members earn by participating in drug dealing.

Yet the three men said they found they were better off financially without the gangs, because any money made through gang associations was quickly consumed by drug use and group partying.

Williams said his friends make as much as $1,000 a day selling crack, or rock cocaine. But he said he still prefers the $210 a week he clears working at a print shop.

Steady Paycheck

“The difference now is I got a steady paycheck,” he said. “When you’re dealing, there are days when you don’t get no money.”

Lewis Yablonsky, who studies gangs as a sociology professor at Cal State Northridge, praises churches that try to address the social causes of gang membership--poverty, poor family relationships and substance abuse--by getting gang members and their families into group therapy.

“The ones which are quick, sudden born-again cures, my observation has been that they work for drug addicts and gang kids for a very brief period of time because they don’t really modify the basic social issues which project them into gangs and drugs,” he said.

Of the three churches, Luz de Cristo is the only one that routinely contacts the families of reformed gang members. But it offers them spiritual support, not counseling.

Luz de Cristo’s work begins in its centers--open evenings Thursday through Sunday--where neighborhood youths can lift weights, play board games and sometimes eat dinner. There, a long list of house rules posted on the wall includes the warnings, “No wearing of gang colors” and “No gang talk.”

Family Visits

On nights when the youth center is closed, peer counselors and pastors such as Sanchez visit families of the center’s regular visitors. If parents agree to pray with their children at home, they can receive free groceries once a month from the church.

Sanchez tells families that he got acquainted with the Barrio Van Nuys gang after he emigrated from El Salvador six years ago. Standing at Maria Estrada’s front door in a sport jacket decorated with the church logo, Sanchez asked what he asks everyone whom he hopes to convert. He calls it “the big question.”

“If you died right now,” he said in Spanish, “would you go to heaven or hell?”

For every success story, there are many failures.

Pastors have had countless apartment doors closed in their faces, and the messages of reformed gang members bring snickers from former friends. The Victory Outreach revivals draw mostly children who come to gawk and mimic the zealous, arm-flinging choir, while most grown-ups close their windows and doors to the din.

Broken Windows

Gangs broke all the windows of the storefront Luz de Cristo center within days of its opening in November, Sanchez said. Esther Maggio, a youth ministry leader at Guardian Angel Catholic Church, said she has lost three of her youths--two to prison and one to the drug PCP.

Sanchez proudly introduced a 14-year-old who he said was among the 45 souls saved since the Pacoima Youth Center opened. But Sergio Gutierrez, wearing the all-black outfit common to the Project Boyz gang, was sullen and leery of eye contact.

Asked why he went to the center, Gutierrez said, “to pray,” but when asked why he prayed, he said he didn’t know. When asked if his life had changed since he became a “born-again” Christian, he said, simply, “No.”

Sanchez shrugged his shoulders and said: “People stay at the center one or two hours, then they say they have business. We know that business is selling drugs . . . but you know, we just say ‘little by little.’ ”