Church Founder Hilst Remembered as Man Who Turned Lives Around

The Rev. Fred H. Hilst, a recovered alcoholic who transformed a street-corner ministry into a Venice-based church with shelters serving hundreds of hungry and homeless people, was buried last week, but his life’s work will continue.

An overflow crowd of about 500 people packed the small Bible Tabernacle on Washington Way to honor the church’s founder, who many credited with helping to turn their lives around with a simple promise of a clean bed and a warm, hearty meal.

“I met him at a time when my self-esteem was real low,” said Cleveland Riley, who came to the church a few years ago suffering from drug and alcohol abuse. “He gave me a place to stay when all I wanted was three hots and a cot, just a place to lay my head. He helped me to change and now I feel I can help others.” Riley works as a cook in the church’s homeless shelter.

Hilst, 73, died Nov. 26 at Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital shortly after suffering a massive heart attack in a Marina del Rey restaurant. He was buried Thursday at Inglewood Park Cemetery.

The Hilst family plans to continue the work of the Bible Tabernacle, which began in the late 1950s when Hilst and his wife, Patricia, preached sermons and sang gospel songs while he played his guitar on Ocean Park Boulevard.

Today, the church provides shelter for about 200 men, women and children at two facilities on Washington Way and operates a job training and drug rehabilitation program for another 200 men on an 11-acre ranch in Canyon Country. On Thanksgiving Day the church handed out more than 4,000 turkey dinners to needy people at Venice Pavilion. The church plans to feed another 5,000 people at a Christmas Day celebration.

“I grew up in a house where everyone did what they could to help the poor and homeless,” said the Rev. Peter Hilst, a 32-year-old minister who is taking over his father’s responsibility behind the pulpit. “My brother and I even shared our bedroom with kids who had nowhere else to go. That’s the kind of life we lived, that’s what my father believed.”

Born on a 160-acre farm in Manito, Ill., Hilst was the youngest of 16 children, six of whom died at birth. Chronic illness forced him to quit school in the seventh grade.

During the 1930s in Illinois, Hilst began playing guitar and singing country music in nightclubs and on radio stations. He moved to California and worked as a welder for the movie studios while continuing to push his music career, which began to experience some success.

But the pressure was too great, Hilst said in a 1980 article in the Los Angeles Times. “I was hooked on the glamour of the night life. I would start out my day drinking and taking drugs (pills) and end up fighting. . . . The church was the furthest thing from my mind.”

Despite his problems with alcohol and drugs, he said he was invited to do a live television broadcast in the early 1950s. “It was the chance to make the big time,” he said. “When I finished, the director called me over and said he would make sure that I would never appear before a camera again. . . . I guess the liquid courage I was living on at the time didn’t pull me through.”

At that point, he said, his life hit rock bottom. Relief came when a friend encouraged him to visit a small church in East Los Angeles. “It was like a ton of bricks were lifted off my back,” he told The Times in 1980. “I put my life in God’s hands. Hilst began Bible study classes and, in time, was ordained a minister.

It was his early bouts with drugs and alcohol that gave him a special calling to help others in need, the family said.

“He was like the father I never had,” said Kim Hartman, 20, who first came to Hilst’s shelter as a troubled 16-year-old runaway from Wyoming. “I’ve learned a lot about myself here and I think I can make it now.”

The Hilsts started providing shelter for the homeless in the early 1960s when the only shelter they could share was their own.

“He would always bring someone home who needed a place to stay,” said Patricia Hilst. Eventually, the Hilsts moved out of their home and into a one-room apartment they built in their garage. They purchased two four-unit apartment complexes and the ranch in Canyon Country. People sleep on cots in their church when space is tight. “We wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said.

In addition to his wife and son, Hilst is survived by another son, Mark, who works as director of Venice operation; two daughters, Lori Lanthier and Ruth Hilst, and eight grandchildren.