An Army Is Their Salvation : Religion: Despite low pay and a rigorous lifestyle, ‘soldiers’ are joining the ‘corps’ to find joy and satisfaction.

Salvation probably is not on most drivers’ minds as they climb Hawthorne Boulevard on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Then the road crests like a roller-coaster ride, starts downhill and--for one exhilarating moment--you seem suspended between sea and sky. It’s a perfect spiritual prelude to the Salvation Army’s western regional headquarters--40 acres on a high bluff that appears to face infinity.

It is not the sort of spot one imagines for an organization that runs soup kitchens, thrift shops, rehab shelters for addicts and youth centers for runaways or latchkey kids.

But many people forget--if they ever knew--that the Salvation Army is an evangelical Christian church as much as it is a charity. It is its own denomination: Salvationist. The Palos Verdes Peninsula school is one of four in the United States where Salvationist ministers are trained.

The decision to become a Salvation Army minister is no small matter for children of the ‘90s. It means they must devote the rest of their working lives to God by helping those who are down and out.

They must dispense with dreams of material things. Their savings accounts will not flourish on a salary of $128.25 a week, which is what each minister receives, regardless of seniority.

Married couples earn $213.75 a week, with an allowance for each child. (All ministers receive free housing, health insurance and a pension if they retire at 65. They also have access to a car or van.)

What’s more, the Army has been run like a military corps since it was founded 125 years ago by Methodist minister William Booth in the London slums.

The church community is called “the corps,” regular parishioners are “soldiers,” and those who want to make the Army their career must pass rigorous psychological and intelligence tests before they enter a two-year school like the one in Rancho Palos Verdes.

At graduation they are “commissioned” as officers and ordained as ministers. Then, they go wherever the Army sends them, always in uniform when on duty.

They perform marriages, funerals, offer Sunday sermons and care for the congregation at their assigned churches, while also overseeing outreach programs.

Salvation Army ministers are shipped to new posts on an average of once every four or five years. They never know where they’ll be living next, or what kind of congregation they’ll be ministering to.

It could be a skid row parish with an addict rehabilitation center, or a suburban facility with programs for young people and senior citizens.

None of this seems daunting to the 106 students at the Rancho Palos Verdes training center.

Nathan Newell, minister-in-training, is handsome and clean-cut, with the posture of a West Point cadet.

His soft voice and slight drawl are courtesy of Little Rock, Ark., where he was born and lived until he dropped out of school in ninth grade. He joined the U.S. Army at 17, says he was “booted out” at 19 for drug abuse, and then went “from job to job and from heroin to barbiturates to hallucinogenics to anything I could find.”

He finally found a job he liked in Little Rock, earned good money, settled into an apartment and bought a truck. Still, he wasn’t satisfied. He married and divorced, then moved to Los Angeles on a quest for . . . he didn’t know what.

Newell wound up on the streets and on drugs once again, then sought help at the Salvation Army adult rehabilitation center in Canoga Park. After nine months of hard work, good food, shelter and spiritual guidance from the minister there, Newell says, he was a different man. He wanted to become a minister himself.

Now 36, Newell says the Salvation Army is “like one gigantic family.” When he graduates, he assumes he will be asked to help others who are down and out.

“I don’t want anything but the opportunity to serve God,” he says.

Terry Perry, 40, is slim, attractive, and athletic looking with precision-cut bobbed hair. She looks exactly like the type who might sell yachts and/or expensive real estate--both of which she used to do in the Bay Area. She says she also used to drink a lot. But after she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and later, the Salvationist church, she turned her life around.

As a Salvation Army soldier in Oakland, Perry volunteered to help with a youth group, a homeless shelter and an adult rehab program. “Then we had the earthquake, a year ago in October. I worked on the Salvation Army phone bank, helping people trace their relatives. Then they sent me out to the front lines” at a freeway collapse.

“I’d been on duty 36 hours at the canteen set up for rescue workers, and one of them asked me to pray with him. We walked and prayed, walked and prayed. I came back and I knew I couldn’t just be a soldier any more. I had to be a minister. Now I’m here and I know it’s right.”

Ted Horwood, 29, grew up in Rancho Palos Verdes, where his father was a TRW executive and his mother was a homemaker. After finishing Rolling Hills High School, he was graduated from San Diego State University--a good student who says he never got in trouble.

He was “too busy reading everything he could get his hands on” and attending the Salvation Army church to which his parents belonged. Horwood and his wife, Deborah, both in the minister’s training school, have two small children who attend a day-care center on campus.

“I think this country--in fact the whole world--is at a turning point right now. And I think the Christian church is also at a pivotal time,” Horwood says. He and his wife want to “take what we’ve learned here and hopefully transmit it to others, to help bring about easier times in their lives.”

Army officials say interest in the ministry appears to be increasing.

“A few years ago we had only 15 (ministry) students here; this year we have 106,” says Maj. Ernest Clevett, a fourth-generation Salvationist and the Army’s community relations officer for the western region. He says half the students are children of Salvation Army parents, some going back five generations.

Clevett acknowledges that Army life isn’t for everyone.

“Sometimes our students leave school before they finish,” he says. “Nothing wrong but they just don’t fit in. It’s a very demanding life being a minister.”

In Southern California, “We used to lose about 18% to 25% of our new ministers within the first five years,” he says. However, the dropout rate has diminished.

“If you resign, you lose your ordination. But nobody gets upset. You really don’t know (what it’s like to be a minister) until you go through school and spend some time in the field.”

Lt. Michael Beauchamp, 24, recently ordained, says he just returned from a weekend Salvation Army conference at which more than 600 young people expressed interest in exploring the ministry as a career.

“There’s been too much emphasis on young people to go out and earn a lot of money,” says Beauchamp. “That’s not a bad concept, but it’s not the only way to lead a satisfying life. Many of us are more concerned about (having) a good relationship with Christ and about helping solve people’s problems.

“We’ve heard enough older people say they’ve missed the mark in life. They strived for years at work they didn’t like, thinking some day they’d be happy. Then they finally earned a lot of money or got a big job and were shocked to find they still weren’t happy or satisfied. That won’t happen to us. We already feel joy and satisfaction in our lives.”

The Salvation Army frequently appears on lists of America’s best-run charities. In a 1987 Fortune magazine report, experts praised the Salvation Army’s social welfare programs and financial management; the magazine listed it in the top four of the country’s 15 largest social welfare and health charities and reported that at least 86 cents of every dollar donated goes the needy.

The organization is not without controversy. It rejects homosexuality on religious grounds, although its services are open to everyone. And the Army has been sued because it does not pay minimum wage to people in its adult rehabilitation centers, which provide food, shelter and counseling and mandates that residents work. The Army contends the plaintiffs are not employees, but rather, participants in a rehab program who sought help in curing their addictions to drugs and alcohol.

Salvationists like Beauchamp and his wife, Renee, believe that the Army’s greatest triumphs will be in the future.

Beauchamp, who is assistant youth director for the 13 western states, says he and his wife met at Azusa Pacific College, a Christian school, from which they both graduated.

Renee Beauchamp, 27, also a minister, says she knew nothing about the Salvationist church until she met her husband. “I was skeptical; I expected it to be located in a thrift shop or something,” she laughs. Then he took her to his Pasadena church and she found “it was a regular church setting, just like any other. We were married there.”

She studied to become an officer because it is a “hands-on” kind of ministry and because there is “equal opportunity for women in this church.”

Actually, neither Beauchamp could have become a minister if the other hadn’t wanted to do so. It is an Army rule that husbands and wives must both graduate from the two-year officer-training course for the ministry, or neither partner is accepted.

Do the Beauchamps worry about the future?

“Not a bit. Wherever the Army sends us is where we’ll work,” Renee says. “We just want to make a difference in the world, to let people know someone cares, to change lives one by one.”