Skid Row Preacher Serves Up Religion--and Sandwiches

Like an unexpected vision, the Bread of Life Church materializes out of almost nothing each Sunday afternoon. At a nondescript street corner in an otherwise desolate tract of industrial land in downtown Los Angeles, a lectern is set in place against the loading docks of an aged shipping warehouse.

Then come the folding chairs--about 70, clustered in a narrow arc.

Then comes the congregation, mostly homeless men such as Willie Green, 40, whose go-to-meeting clothes at a recent service included a baggy T-shirt, droopy socks exposing a skin sore, and a Lakers cap. Green has been living on the streets for a decade, fighting the demons of loneliness and a cocaine addiction that runs him $200 a week.

“Cocaine’s a demanding woman--she’ll take your last dollar,” he said, explaining why he cannot afford rent. “Down here . . . the drugs are too easy to get. The dope man, he stays open 24 hours.”

To the rhythms of an up-tempo hymn (“. . . praise the Lord!”) emanating from a portable stereo, the early arrivals begin to settle in, while preacher Bill Gibbons passes out chocolate chip cookies. When services are over, there would be sandwiches, too, free to all.

“He’s got a good heart,” Green says of the lay minister, a former office supply salesman. Coming to these services, as Green has for the past four months, has made the Skid Row resident realize he can do a “whole lot more” with his life. He has notions of getting off the Row--”It sounds easy, but it ain’t”--and finding a woman.

As for the sandwiches, hey, hallelujah!

“I come because of starvation,” Green adds with half a smile. “The bottom line is, you be hungry.”

*

The preacher wears sweat pants and a T-shirt. Gibbons said he would never show up in a tony suit, looking important. That kind of attire is for another world.

Since April, Gibbons has been conducting his 3 p.m. Sunday services here at Seaton and Palmetto streets while going to Bible college. Volunteers at Magnolia Park United Methodist Church in Burbank prepare the sandwiches, and a few, including Gibbons’ assistant, Traynore Johnson, also come down to help lead hymns and group prayers.

“We find that people are basically lost,” Gibbons said of the homeless. He tries to give them a little earthly and spiritual nourishment, plus a feeling that they matter. “There’s hopelessness . . . loneliness. You have 10,000 to 15,000 people down in the Skid Row area, and it’s hard to believe they’re lonely.”

The flock includes the down-and-out of all sorts, from drug addicts and alcoholics to white-collar professionals who lost jobs and homes. “We’ve been fortunate to see nine people get off the streets” after coming to services, Gibbons said. One is now in Alcoholics Anonymous, he said, and plans to attend Bible college.

As the service began, the preacher led the congregation through “Amazing Grace,” the traditional hymn whose sweet-sounding strains filtered out past chain-link fences and vacant lots, down the empty street to a lone vagrant sitting in a trash heap against a wall. The eerie moment gave way to a short sermon. Gibbons opened by asking: “How many (of you) are in a position where it has to be amazing?”

About half the faithful raised a hand.

Gibbons spoke on a street level, direct and no-nonsense. But eventually, he grew impassioned about the sins of their ways.

“Drugs? . . . Drinking? That’s a tool of the devil!” he declared. “We seem to want to think God is with us while we sin. I’ve got news for you--He’s not!”

*

Midway through, a burly man in a sleeveless shirt stood and wandered off, past street trash and a discarded tire. Half a block away, he stopped and loitered, then came back, his eyes unfocused. He had just vomited.

“Better to go down there,” he remarked, “than it is to do it here, right?”

But most of the others were rapt as they listened to the clean-cut preacher. Edward Mahaffey, 37, was a staunch believer--had been all his life, even during time in drug and alcohol rehabilitation. An occupant of a hotel nearby, he had been out of work since breaking his hip and cracking his skull a few years ago. During an argument, he said his brother had pushed him out a second-floor window.

Stricken lately by depression, Mahaffey had hit the crack pipe again. “I need a little bit more strength,” he said. “Sometimes I just fail. I’m crying inside myself.”

Another worshiper, Delores Guidero, 40, said she discovered the church when she saw the free food one Sunday. She washes trucks at a nearby yard.

With a broken sandal and unwashed feet, Guidero was lined but faintly attractive, a former hooker and heroin addict who had been in and out of mental hospitals, she said. But she feels welcome here, she said.

“They’re great, they’re really beautiful people,” she said of Gibbons and his half-dozen volunteers. “They don’t care who you are, how dirty you are or where you come from.”

At the close of the short sermon, Gibbons organized the homeless into small circles. They held hands in the shadow of the sheet-metal warehouse for a silent prayer.

Then the preacher piped up again.

“You guys hungry? Sandwich time!”