Gospel on a Shoestring--Storefront Churches Get By : Religion: Money is always short, pews may be empty. But preachers show determination, often fired in adversity.

“And the flood was 40 days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it was lifted up above the earth.”

--Genesis 7:17.

*

Noah had his flood; the Rev. E. L. Woods has a $34,000 water bill.

The debt threatens to wash away tiny Ebony Missionary Baptist Church in South-Central Los Angeles. Not only is Woods unable to pay it, he is not much inclined to try. Instead, he frets over last-ditch measures to forestall disaster.

Electrical cords run from one halfway house to another behind the church storefront, providing power where the city has already taken action by cutting off not only the water but also the current. Neighbors have been lined up to help. If the power to every building should go out, they will string cords over the fence. Woods, meanwhile, has written pleas for help to the President, the governor and a long roll of bureaucrats, so far to no avail.

“We know the day of reckoning is sure to come,” the bespectacled pastor said ruefully.

The predicament is a singular case, brought about by repeated fines for excessive water consumption--mainly, showers for the homeless--during the California drought. But, like a tragic parable, the drama offers a vivid insight into the struggles of weary preachers to keep their storefront ministries alive.

To run these embattled churches is to take up a cross with bare hands and haul it through the forgotten miles of a fractured, forbidding world. For the hundreds who do it, sin is far more than an abstract concept, or even an occupational hazard: It engulfs them like an ether, the defining element of their work, their city, even in many cases their own pasts.

The rolls of the chosen are crowded with the likes of the Rev. Dorothea Washington, whose womanizing husband for years threatened her with guns and knives, trying to scare her from God. “(Once) he put the knife around my throat and he began to mash my throat,” she remembered, “and he said, ‘You call your Jesus,’ and I said, ‘Jesus, I trust in you.’ And he said, ‘I’m going to cut your neck off.’

“I said, ‘Lord. . . .’ ”

With that man now dead--a job accident, then a stroke--Washington rejoices every week at her Miracle Faith Apostolic House of Prayer on South Broadway.

Bishop W. A. Davis tells his own harrowing story at the Go Tell It on the Mountain Pentecostal Mission. He went through electroshock therapy at Camarillo State Mental Hospital--the fallout, he said, of a wife who opposed his ministry and left him for another man.

“People laugh at me . . . (saying,) ‘He ain’t got no members,’ ” Davis, 57, mused at the boxlike sanctuary, where only seven or eight worshipers convened one recent Sunday to hear the joyous voices of the choir. “That’s kind of hard, but I believe God destined that I go through this, go through all these troubles. . . . That’s how I can stay out here for so long, with sometimes two or three members, sometimes none at all.”

A fair share of storefront preachers are university graduates who donned their first white collars in the corporate world. But many are former outlaws--often raised in the church before yielding to sinister urban influences.

At the Greater Upper Room Church of God in Christ Apostolic on South Hoover Street, 48-year-old Elder Forest L. Person is an example of how wrenching counterforces can all but rip a man apart--and how that torment can form the underpinnings of a philosophy.

Person’s battle began at birth: Strangled by his umbilical cord, he was pronounced dead--or so he says he was later told. But his grandmother screamed for someone to beat the baby, so they beat him and beat him until the infant began to wail. Grandmother then clucked over the miracle, telling everyone around, “God wants this boy to preach.”

But Person ran the other way. He became a drug addict, car thief and pimp. He wandered the Midwest--Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit--and finally hit Los Angeles, where one night he collapsed on drugs in the middle of the Sunset Strip.

He shot heroin, snorted cocaine, dropped acid--ran the gamut.

“Drugs got me in a state of mind where I thought there wasn’t (any) hope,” Person said. “It became my friend . . . my shelter . . . my provider . . . my keeper . . . my defense. It put (me) in a twilight zone, all alone.”

Then came a drug-filled night in which Person was beaten at a Hollywood pool hall. He was rushed to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center with a shattered skull. A doctor there scrambled to save his life, removing bone and implanting a plastic plate. Person emerged from surgery no more than a vegetable.

“I lost my mind,” he said. “I lost my smell, I lost my hearing, and I lost my thoughts.”

Specialists could not seem to help him. He was laid up more than a year. His sister began taking him to church.

There was no miraculous transformation, no instant when God swept down in a thunderbolt to make him whole, but gradually Person improved. Today, long surgical scars cut a swath down each temple, a legacy of the man torn. He breaks down in tears, unable to speak, recalling how that brain surgeon--a total stranger--labored into the night to save the life of one unpromising black drug addict.

That gesture will not be wasted, the pastor has determined. Just as that stranger reached out for him, Person now reaches out to others, scraping together $20 at a time, or rounding up a few sheets and blankets, to feed and warm the legions on Skid Row.

He looks in the eyes of those broken, dispirited men, and he sees himself as clearly as gazing in a mirror.

“I’m not looking at that man for what kind of person he is,” Person said softly. “I’m looking at what he can be . . . because I was what he is.

“And I know there is a way out.”

No Job for the Poor of Spirit--or Wallet

Even if they manage to slay their own demons, storefront preachers often find hardship awaiting them at every turn, grasping with taloned claws to try to bring them down.

Only the hardy survive, as Woods is quick to point out. Twenty years ago, about a dozen tiny sanctuaries opened in his part of town. And now, he said, only two are left, Ebony Baptist being one of them.

But there have been times, like now, when the church has gone on life support because of the entrenched problems that afflict storefront ministries. This time, it is the water bill. A few years ago, a pimp took up residence in the halfway houses behind the church, chasing away the $100-a-month tenants.

“He was loan-sharking, and he was also selling them drugs,” the 56-year-old pastor recalled. “They would owe him so much money that it was easier for them to move and run than to pay the program fee.”

While recuperating from a heart attack, Woods found himself at war with the recalcitrant boarder, an expert on renters’ rights who physically intimidated the church staff and refused to move out. “He’d strut around like a peacock,” Woods remembered, “until I hit him up the side of the head.”

Not long after that hooligan left, the church ran into nearly the same problem with a man dealing drugs and firearms. Lost revenues have forced the church to close two of its shelters, Woods said.

“The best thing that could happen to me would be to go on vacation for two days and not have to worry about something collapsing,” Woods said. “I can’t do that.”

In impoverished communities strewn with storefront churches, an intense competition for cash fuels a ceaseless run of spiritual revivals--nights of thundering speech, rollicking hymns and fast-moving offering plates. Revenues are often substantial, but rarely are they enough.

Ultimately, most preachers become stretched taut between lofty dreams and austere realities--yearning to grow, to erect splendid new buildings, even as the needy cry out for aid.

The Rev. Alfredo Noble, an ex-drug dealer, has been stuck for eight long years with folding chairs and a flaking, water-stained ceiling at his Christians for Christ sanctuary on South Figueroa Street. On Saturday mornings, the transients and addicts wander in for free breakfasts of pancakes and sausage. Noble, 48, also buys them hamburgers, gives away pocket change and dips into his own social worker’s salary by $300 a month just to keep the doors open, because the weekly offering cannot pay the bills.

“The guys we feed and so forth,” Noble lamented, “they don’t have a dime.”

With money always tight, storefront churches must adhere to the most careful financial planning. But often, they don’t. Some pastors are unsophisticated in business matters or even unscrupulous in their dealings, clerics complain. Like reckless sea captains, some seem to guide their followers into fiscal chaos with no one knowing how they got there, or how to get out.

The Rev. Junius Moses Casimier, who preaches to fewer than a dozen worshipers at the Gabriel Missionary Baptist Church on South Hoover Street, is loquacious in describing for his flock the crisis that now grips his ministry. Having borrowed $110,000 some years back to remodel the onetime schoolhouse, Casimier says he is overdue on payments of $1,500 a month and in dire need of help.

Diminishing revenues have forced the church to abandon a religious radio show and to shelve plans for a child day-care center, he said. “We’re not in foreclosure,” the 65-year-old pastor said, shaking his head. “But it’s rough.”

Asked to account for the loan money, the preacher cited repayment of the original note, $40,000, and a string of capital improvements--a new choir stand, new red-tinted plastic in the front windows, new outdoor signs, new padded pews soft enough to sleep on, new concrete out back, new lights, new wine-red carpeting, as plush as you’d find at the Waldorf-Astoria, he boasts.

The cost of the work “may have been $20,000 (or) it may have been better,” Casimier said, but he cannot pinpoint where the remainder of the money went. He shakes his head, saying no, he spent nothing on himself. He frets over sections of fallen ceiling in a church restroom and a storage room. All that needs fixing too, somehow. The damage in the storage room is substantial. Weeds line the broken driveway macadam.

“My firm belief is, if you’re going to give God anything,” Casimier said, “give God the best.”

Despite the obstacles, some clerics manage to make slow headway in the struggle to grow.

Over 33 years, the Rev. Eddie Ray Thomas has gradually bought up all but one parcel on the block surrounding his Greater Mt. Calvary Baptist Church on South Main Street. Hanging on a wall of his cluttered office is a rendering of his dream--a tall church with a handsome belfry and a pitched roof, big enough for 300 people.

With the sagacity of a Wall Street maven, Thomas has turned his storefront empire into a miniature conglomerate.

Seventeen needy families rent federally subsidized apartments on church property, and part of the church itself is rented to a Latino congregation, which holds its own worship services. There are eight coin-operated washing machines and dryers, open around the clock. A pay phone on the sidewalk brings in a flow of quarters. A church-operated thrift shop is jammed to the ceiling with everything from used toilets and TVs to old pianos, lamps, knickknacks, sofas, water beds and eight-track cassettes.

Every few weeks, despite complaints by neighbors, Thomas drags much of the rummage outdoors for sidewalk sales that reap up to $700 on a good day. A network of benefactors extending as far as Beverly Hills assures that new merchandise is always coming in. The church’s five trucks go out every day, collecting donations and whatever else the drivers see on the roadside.

Abandoned water heaters are good for scrap. The church recycles newspapers, rags and aluminum cans. It also buys and sells old refrigerators, cars, even an occasional boat. “The heart of our business,” Thomas said with some pride, “has been what other people don’t want.”

The 78-year-old pastor has come to doubt whether he will live to build that big sanctuary. But, unlike many preachers in the Central City, he is no longer tempted to cash out and escape to the suburbs.

Years ago, Thomas said, he considered that. Then he had a vision.

“In my vision, I was told, ‘Don’t move, improve. There are diamonds where you are.’ ” The pastor gazed around at his yard filled with used sinks and broken typewriters. “I’m just starting to see the diamonds.”

The Religious Wars

Even where congregations bow as one in prayer, the darker sides of human nature move in to grip a small church and rock it to its foundations. Petty personality clashes and contrary motives can touch off months, even years, of infighting.

The Rev. Chris D. LeGrande, 37, a onetime thief, drug dealer and con man who started preaching at several storefront temples, became the focal point of a particularly vitriolic dispute at the 75-member Great Hope Missionary Baptist Church on Compton Avenue, where the survival of both the church and its ideals seemed under grave threat.

About two years ago, LeGrande leased a small trailer and put it outside the church to start a drug program. That drew the wrath of conservative church elders who were concerned about bringing drug addicts into contact with families and children. Elders later charged LeGrande with a whole series of transgressions--among them, squandering $30,000 and driving the temple into bankruptcy.

LeGrande’s detractors circulated a letter from his ex-wife, accusing the pastor of allowing his two young children to go without good shoes and clothing while he escorted women to dinner and to various motels.

“A total lie,” LeGrande said when asked about the accusations. The church is solvent even after substantial refurbishment and equipment purchases, he said. His ex-wife is simply bitter and angry, LeGrande said. “They dug that letter out of my divorce papers, mailed it to all the membership, to all the pastors around (town),” he complained.

At last, the sordid episode is nearly over; although a lawsuit is still pending, the preacher’s adversaries have moved on to a new church. Most of the congregation has stayed, supporting LeGrande, and the pastor is trying to get his life--and the ministry--back together. Virtually all his personal savings have gone to pay legal fees totaling $40,000, he said.

“You feel like going home, getting (a) pistol and saying, ‘You all want something to sue me over? Sue me over this,’ ” LeGrande said. “(But) these same folks I’m talking about, I love them. If I had to pray for them right now, I would, because I love them. That’s my job.”

A Philosophy of Survival

There are times, the preachers say, when the struggle seems nearly in vain--when teen-agers and drug addicts are dying on the streets, when families are crumbling, when children have no clothes, when the church bills are unpaid and no one in the sin-wracked city seems to care.

“Sometimes you say, ‘I’m tired, I’m not going to do it any more,’ ” said the Rev. Raymon Harris, who is deep in debt running his Greater Zion Flower Missionary Baptist Church on South Main Street, where he has toiled, unheralded, for 11 years. Harris is forever spending his last few dollars to buy Christmas toys, or to load up someone’s shopping cart, or to help pay for a funeral.

But he has known worse. Raised in rural Tallulah, La., by a sharecropper father and stepmother, Harris was jilted at Christmas and forced to forage for maggot-infested meat in the garbage, he remembers. Wanting love, he was rejected, ignored, forced to sleep in the cold, molested by a neighbor, beaten up by other children.

Many times he thought of suicide, but Harris stepped from that fiery furnace of pain with a resolve that others should not suffer the way that he suffered. Circumstances gave him--and gave so many storefront preachers--an iron will, a will to hang on.

And that will, he figures, is the will of God.

“There’s a Scripture, ‘Cast your bread upon the waters,’ ” the pastor said, looking ahead in his own life, to a future still hidden behind the cloak. “One day I’ll get old. Maybe I won’t have a place to go. And maybe somebody will say, ‘Oh, I remember that old man . . . he tried to help.’ And he’ll take me in, or help me.

“You never know.”

Churches Given Wide Freedom From Scrutiny

Even among preachers, the suspicion runs high that some storefront churches are tax dodges, set up by profiteers looking only for a source of income.

But federal and state regulators say they believe no enforcement actions have been taken against any of the smaller sanctuaries in Los Angeles in at least a decade, largely because of constitutional protections afforded religions. According to those officials, worshipers are generally expected to police their own churches, which are exempted from paying income tax and property tax.

No law requires that they even file records with the government, officials noted.

“We are not in the business of going out and hounding churches,” said Robert Giannangeli of the federal Internal Revenue Service. He said that the agency usually initiates investigations only if it has received a specific allegation of wrongdoing.

Though some preachers complain that their rivals exploit the tax laws to live well and drive flashy cars, religious leaders in Los Angeles note that the revenues of most storefront churches are too small to support corruption.

NEXT: Stories of Salvation