Many Latino Catholics Experience Leap of Faith : Religion: They leave the church of their upbringing to embrace evangelical Protestantism for a ‘personal relationship with God.’

Victor Castro is talking about his past sins, his Catholic education and how, after a loyal but unexamined allegiance to that church, he left it to find his faith.

“My parents raised me as a Catholic, but I never put my faith in it,” says the 37-year-old Echo Park fabric worker, who eight years ago forswore Catholicism for evangelical Protestantism. “This is not just religion; it’s an experience with God.”

That experience came quickly for Castro, he says. It took less than a month from the time he was approached by Pentecostal church members to overturn years of a staunch Catholic upbringing. “In the past, when I prayed, nothing happened. Now, it’s different because Jesus is alive to me,” Castro says simply.

In Silver Lake, meanwhile, the Rev. Moises Sandoval is shaking the rafters of an auditorium that houses the overwhelmingly Latino congregation of the Iglesia Evangelica Latina church. Responding to shouted approvals by members of his flock, Sandoval implores them to discover Jesus in their everyday lives. “The people don’t want to have a religion that is habitual, that is a practice,” says Sandoval, a dapper man in his 50s who has been preaching Pentecostalism for more than two decades. “They want a personal relationship with God.”

Latin America has been home to many revolutions, but perhaps none as fundamental and far-reaching as this. During the last 20 years, Protestantism--primarily evangelical Pentecostalism--has exerted a powerful and unprecedented undertow against the prevailing Catholic current, winning millions of new believers.

As a result, Los Angeles, which draws most of the nation’s Latin American immigrants, is witnessing a similar, profound shift in the religious habits of its 2 million Latinos.

From storefront parishes in Hollywood to sprawling church complexes in Silver Lake and East Los Angeles, Christian evangelism, mostly with services in Spanish, is galvanizing a huge population long considered to be a steadfast legion of the Catholic Church.

“We (Catholics) have a lot to learn from Pentecostalism,” said Father Alan Figueroa Deck, coordinator of Hispanic Pastoral Programs at Loyola Marymount University. “This is the most dramatic development in the world of religion today.”

The numbers, on a local, national and global level, testify to the enormity of the change. Between Santa Barbara and San Diego, there are 2,000 to 3,000 Protestant parishes with primarily Latino congregations, said Jesse Miranda, an associate dean at Azusa Pacific University and president of Alianza de Ministerios Evangelicos Nacionales, a national organization of Latino evangelical ministries.

Nationally, Miranda added, about 60,000 Latinos each year convert from Catholicism to Christian evangelical sects. And, Deck said, the number of Latinos in the United States who identify themselves as Catholics has dropped in the past 25 years from 90% to between 70% and 75%.

Worldwide, the shift is even more evident. A study by anthropologist David Stoll estimated that given fundamentalism’s present rate of growth, Brazil, El Salvador and Guatemala will be predominantly Protestant by decade’s end. Currently, about 35% of Mexicans already profess a belief in Protestant evangelism.

At Iglesia Evangelica Latina, Sandoval and Larry Barnes, a church trustee and its sole African American member, eagerly recount the church’s growth. Begun 15 years ago in storefront fashion with 20 members, the church within five years grew to a congregation of 120.

Now it has 1,800 members and has spawned seven additional missions--five of them in Los Angeles and two in Las Vegas. Services at the Silver Lake church became so crowded that they are now held in the cavernous auditorium of a nearby middle school.

“The evangelical church has people Hispanics can relate to,” Miranda said. “This appeals to the needs of Hispanics, culturally and spiritually.”

Those needs, according to Latino pastors, are many, given that the city’s Protestant churches with predominantly Latino congregations are mostly filled with immigrants and the poor. The Rev. Sammy C. Fernandez, pastor of the longstanding church La Puerta Abierta--which means “the open door” in Spanish--in East Los Angeles, said he counts 12 different Latin American ethnicities in his congregation, including Hondurans, Puerto Ricans, Costa Ricans and Cubans.

His parishioners are particularly drawn to an evangelical church, Fernandez said, because it offers a sense of community in a new and often hostile environment. Moreover, evangelical services involve fewer people than do Catholic Masses, and many church leaders have risen from the local community--unlike priests and nuns who are frequently transferred from other areas--which makes the religious experience less anonymous for immigrant worshipers.

“We consider the No. 1 problem to the Latin people to be isolation,” said Barnes, who with his wife is a member of the Iglesia Evangelica Latina congregation. “This is proof that these people have found their place and resettled here spiritually.”

Another reason that immigrants become open to Christian evangelism is that, unlike in their native lands, Catholicism is not inexorably tied to American culture. “They don’t sense that pressure to stay in the church in this country,” said the Rev. Philip Lance, who presides over an 85-member Latino Episcopalian parish in Westlake.

Another attractive element of Christian evangelism to Latinos, pastors say, is the religion’s style of worship, which places less emphasis on the church as an institution. In addition, unlike Catholicism, which the pastors say emphasizes the rituals of faith, evangelical services encourage outpourings of emotion and spontaneous displays of religious commitment.

At one recent and typical Sunday service at Iglesia Evangelica Latina, the 700 parishioners joined in heartfelt song, accompanied by an organ, drums and tambourines. As a long procession of male and female church leaders took the stage to minister to the flock in Spanish, many in the well-dressed congregation broke down in tears and became lost in prayer.

Some members rose to speak in tongues. Later, Sandoval prayed over a line of emotional parents and grandparents who took the stage to “present” their infant children to the Lord amid the flash of photos.

“Ceremonies are not a way to know God. We believe in a ‘right-now’ conversation with God,” Sandoval said.

Many evangelical churches also include a strong social component in their community outreach. Iglesia Evangelica Latina, for example, runs a much-used immigration service next door. Stored in its computer are the names of 12,000 immigrants who have sought help from the church in obtaining green cards and other official documentation.

Likewise, at La Puerta Abierta, Fernandez says he deliberately has only one office for himself and his four staff ministers. “I want them out in the streets and in the homes, touching people,” he said.

By its own acknowledgment, the Catholic Church’s response to the rise of Latino evangelism has been a mixture of remorse and alarm. The church, said Father Pedro Villarroya of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, took its Latino flock “for granted.” It has stumbled in tending to its Latino constituency--especially its poorer members--and needs to find ways to again make itself relevant, he said.

“For many years, (the poor) were not the priority of the church,” said Villarroya, who directs the archdiocesan Office for Hispanic Ministries. Now, he says, the church is playing catch-up.

Villarroya said the Catholic Church is beginning to hold smaller, more intimate services and has started educating its lay members in interpreting the Bible, a function traditionally reserved for the church leadership. In perhaps the biggest departure, many Catholic parishes are offering charismatic services, which emphasize direct divine inspiration.

“We’re moving away from a passive version of the church to a more active one,” said Loyola Marymount’s Deck.

The church is also counting on history. Although it may be weakening, the bond many Latinos feel with Catholicism is still a strong one. Many Latinos say they have had difficulty asserting their new faith in the face of families and friends and the overriding context of the community’s Catholicism.

“When someone comes into Christianity, there’s always somebody in the family who objects and says, ‘You were born Catholic,’ ” said Jose Ramirez, who preaches to a 40-member Latino congregation at the Foursquare Church in Culver City. “It’s the tradition.”

There is the matter, too, of whether Christian evangelism can maintain its rate of growth among Latinos. Some religious observers say the fervency with which many Latino evangelicals embrace Pentecostalism and reconfirm their faith in the religion can be difficult to sustain over a long period.

In East Los Angeles, at La Puerta Abierta, Fernandez is acutely aware that the appeal of Christian evangelism among Latinos may be transitory, and that the strength of his message lies in maintaining contact with day-to-day needs of his congregation. The attraction of Pentecostalism, said Fernandez and others, is that it is theology for the common folk, an “experiential religion” with a promise of empowerment that speaks directly to those in society without power.