Tiny San Juan Capistrano Church Aims to Change Lives : Latinos: Mision Cristiana Fuente de Vida offers the poor community material as well as spiritual help.

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 eventually 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 who try to help their community materially as well as spiritually.

The church provides comfort and a feeling of family to youths from broken homes, as well as new immigrants who sometimes turn to alcohol and drugs for escape when they find they are not in 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 many families sharing apartments to pay 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 he 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.

“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.

Moya said he is certain 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 many because it gets involved in the lives of its congregation.

“We don’t just preach God and then 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 as he recalled 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 described himself as an uncontrolled alcoholic before he became a Christian, and said 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.”

One of the young activists in the church, Leonardo Martinez, 22, said he came to the United States from Mexico five years ago with the intention of making enough money to return to Mexico and attend a university.

But he said he soon realized that the restaurant job he got would not pay enough to achieve that goal.

“I got angry and even thought of killing myself,” he said. Then came drugs and alcohol.

Once he joined the church, Martinez said, all that changed. He credits a new sense of responsibility for enabling him to work himself up from a dishwasher to a host in the restaurant, where he has also found jobs for other church members who were unemployed.

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 that, 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 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 a recent Saturday morning an outreach ministry from Christian churches 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 he carried. As he spoke, their interest began to grow. But they had no way to get to the church, they said. Montoya told them about the pickup service.

“Manana,” they said.