John McReynolds: Pastor’s Youth Focus : Pastor of Second Baptist Church in Santa Ana. : Educator and advocate of youth.

The Rev. John McReynolds, 37, is preaching more than the Gospel these days.

The pastor, head of one of the largest black congregations in Orange County, said a loss of family values and the decline of education are threatening the black community.

“I’m concerned that only 5.5% of African-American students that graduate from high school are eligible to go to college,” he said. “I’m also concerned that between the ages of 15 and 19, a lot of our black boys are involved in the criminal justice system. . . . I’m concerned that many of our black kids can’t read.”

McReynolds is trying to turn that around, in part by working with Santa Ana schools to get truants and dropouts back in school. That means getting financial help for a family so a youth can quit a job and return to school. It also means counseling students whose gang involvement is keeping them out of the classroom.

The pastor did not start out to be a religious leader. He said in college his “ultimate goal was to be a professional musician.” He paid his way through Chapman College by performing in choirs and operas and also by working as a cook.

But during a choir trip to Europe in the fall of 1976, he said, “I was called to the ministry after a great deal of soul-searching.”

Still, he enjoys attending operas, especially “La Boheme,” although his ministry leaves him little time to go.

McReynolds, who lives in Santa Ana with his wife of 10 years, Evangeline, and their two children, also is a doctoral candidate at Trinity Theological Seminary.

Education, he said, and sound values are the only means for blacks to survive.

“Something has happened to our value system when our black boys know more about the basketball playbook than the science schoolbook,” McReynolds said. “We need young African-American kids to have a sense of self-worth, integrity, dignity and respect for life.”

The pastor is not impressed with the character Bart Simpson or the message he conveys: “Here, you have a child who talks back and sasses his mama, doesn’t go to school. . . . Kids identify with certain role models that make them feel like they can do the same thing.”

Reared in Chattanooga, Tenn., McReynolds said families there depended on one another for everything from meals to watching the children.

That society, he said, contrasts sharply with the one he sees today.

“That kind of stuff is gone now,” he said. “We don’t even know who our neighbor is.”

Forcing children and young adults to examine their own values is only part of what McReynolds sees as his charge as a pastor.

“Anything that affects the flock involves me,” said McReynolds, who has been at Second Baptist since 1984.

“We have some white folks who say, ‘Blacks have to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.’ I say I meet people who don’t have any. It ought to be our responsibility, as a church, to give them bootstraps--if not the whole boot.”