Blessed Are the Comforters : Tiny Church Diverts Latinos From Despair That Engenders Crime

The young man was walking out of his house to make a delivery of cocaine last year when he met Jose Montoya, who was driving a neighbor to church.

The man rejected Montoya’s invitation to go along, but several days later Montoya returned and persuaded him.

It was during that first prayer service at Mision Cristiana Fuente De Vida, the man said last week, that “I felt something powerful I have never felt before in my life.”

He ultimately gave up his lucrative but illegal dealings to become a humble landscape worker. And although his hands are now callused, there is a broad smile on his face.

The reformed dealer is just one of many Latinos in San Juan Capistrano who say their lives have been changed by the outreach ministry of the tiny nondenominational Christian mission. The church has a congregation of about 85 mostly poor Latinos who do not speak English and try to help their community materially as well as spiritually.

The church provides comfort and a feeling of family to youths from broken homes and new immigrants who sometimes turn to alcohol and drugs for escape when they find that this is not the promised land they envisioned.

Jorge Moya, formerly a welder for an Irvine company that made oil drilling bits, founded the church seven years ago in his Mission Viejo home. He and his wife, Lucia, went door to door in San Juan Capistrano’s poor Latino neighborhoods, passing out food and Bibles.

He said they found a lot of families sharing apartments to make the rent. These housekeepers, restaurant and hotel workers, gardeners and dayworkers form the core of Moya’s congregation.

In a year the church outgrew Moya’s house and for the next six years rented space several times a week at the Women’s Club of San Juan Capistrano. The high-spirited worship, full of singing and shouting, sometimes to the accompaniment of a tambourine and a synthesizer, triggered complaints from neighbors of the club, Moya said, so the church two months ago leased new quarters on the second floor of an office building down Paseo Adelanto from City Hall.

“For seven years we made tamales, tacos and enchiladas and sold them on the street to raise the money we needed to put down $7,000, including first and second months’ rent,” Moya said.

On Saturday, he held a fast and a prayer service to ask for divine help in meeting a rent payment due the first of the month.

Moya said he is certain that the Lord will provide. His confidence is shared by his family, including two adult daughters who work to support his ministry.

Gina Moya, 24, who manages a branch of Union Federal Savings Bank in Mission Viejo, said the church is different from most because it gets involved in the lives of its congregation. “We don’t just preach God and them send them home with a bulletin,” she said. “It is people helping people.”

The help starts with getting the congregation to the services, which are held weeknights as well as Sundays. Since most members do not own cars, those who do regularly offer rides to the rest. The church also provides a van pickup service in San Juan Capistrano and Dana Point.

In some cases, Jorge Moya said, the church provides a safe refuge for children who would otherwise be left home alone by parents who make low wages and thus must work second jobs at night.

Moya shook his head while recalling a 6-year-old boy who came his first night to the church clutching a pocketknife that he had found while playing outdoors.

“He said it was for protection,” Moya said. “He said his mother works in a hotel, the Ritz-Carlton, so he was alone all night long.”

Moya said that he was an uncontrolled alcoholic before he became a Christian and that he believes that acceptance of God and what the Bible teaches will enable Latino immigrants to achieve peace while changing antisocial behavior.

“These people have a lot of emptiness,” he said. “Sometimes they are victims of persecution, or their families are in other countries. If they don’t find peace in themselves they start drinking and doing drugs and doing other things that are against the law.”

Moya said his flock does not need wealth to be happy: “The people I have are living well. Even if they eat tortillas and beans, they eat them with peace.”

Each Saturday evangelists from the church knock on doors that are sometimes slammed in their faces and preach the Gospel to gang members who often laugh at them.

Jose Montoya, a leader of the evangelists, said he regularly visits parks and street corners where young Latino toughs, called cholos, hang out.

“Every cholo in San Juan Capistrano knows me, and they run,” Montoya said with a laugh.

Moya said he often assists church members in finding jobs, free food programs or medical attention--and intervenes for Latinos whose employers try to cheat them on wages.

“Some employers scare people,” he said. “They say you don’t have (proper immigration) papers, so you don’t have rights.”

Moya said when he threatens to report the employers to authorities, they generally relent.

He said Latino immigrants who speak no English “are told that they don’t have anybody to protect them. That’s wrong. When they come to this church, they are under our protection.”

Moya spoke of the hardships that Latino immigrants have when they try to enter the country illegally from Mexico. He knows of a 65-year-old woman who walked through a sewer pipe and became ill from the filth and rat bites, and a 14-year-old girl who was raped by a coyote--someone who charges a fee to help illegal immigrants cross the border--while her mother watched helplessly.

His dream is to have a place in the city to feed the homeless. “We have rich people in San Juan Capistrano,” he said. “They call us for maids. But we would like them to help economically too.”

As a step toward the kind of cross-cultural cooperation Moya is seeking, on Saturday morning an outreach ministry from Christian churches scattered throughout the county distributed food and clothes to poor Latinos in Descanso Park next to City Hall.

While the people from these mainly white churches handed out the goods to the poor Latinos, representatives from Mision Cristiana Fuente De Vida and the leader of a Latino ministry at Calvary Chapel in Capistrano Beach tried to persuade the recipients to come to church.

Two men carrying shoes and jeans under their arms listened patiently to Montoya as he expressed his enthusiasm in the Bible that he carried. As he spoke, their interest began to perk up. But they have no way to get to the church, they said. So Montoya told them about the pickup service.

“Manana, “ they said.