A Leap of Faith : From the sprawling church complexes in East Los Angeles to storefront parishes in Hollywood, Pentecostal evangelism is attracting a growing number of Latinos, who have long been considered steadfast legions of the Catholic Church.

When Angel and Virginia Andino went searching for a deeper religious experience 18 years ago, they found it in an unexpected place. Not in the Roman Catholic Church, traditionally a Latino stronghold and where Virginia had been raised, but rather in an evangelical Pentecostal church a few miles from their East Los Angeles home.

“We didn’t feel that connection” in the Catholic Church, said Angel, 42, who with his wife attended Catholic services for two years with increasing dissatisfaction before converting to Pentecostalism. “I have nothing against tradition, but I wanted a relationship with Jesus Christ.”

He explained how easily they have sustained that bond over the years--a spiritual link he says is free of feelings of obligation and full of the vigor of personal commitment.

“In the Catholic Church, we were guided by the priest,” says Virginia Andino. “In Pentecostalism, we’re being led by the Holy Spirit. It’s completely different.”

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 the shouts of approval 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 past 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 similarly 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,” he added.

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%.

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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 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 in 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.

For Victor Castro, going to Mass in his native Peru was often seen as a social outing, not as an opportunity to renew religious faith. “You go because your uncle, your daddy or your friends go,” said the 37-year-old Echo Park fabric worker. “You don’t go by yourself. And your heart and mind are not there.”

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.

“The rituals and ecclesiastical means of worship don’t fill the soul of man,” Sandoval said. “Ceremonies are not a way to know God. We believe in a ‘right-now’ conversation with God.”

Concurred Fernandez: “To us, the church is not important. What’s important is your relationship with the Lord.”

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.

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By its own acknowledgment, the response of the Catholic Church 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. One example: Ten years ago, the archdiocese mandated that all of its priests and bishops speak Spanish.

Other efforts to rise to the challenge of evangelical Protestantism are also being made. 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.

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. At the very least, the reaction is one of sharply raised eyebrows.

“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.”

Julio Umana, 40, a Whittier X-ray technician who belongs to the Universal Christian Gnostic Movement in Los Angeles, said he initially had difficulty talking to his mother and father about his conversion 14 years ago. Eventually, though, he brought himself to have the discussion, and eventually both his parents joined his church for a brief time as well.

“This type of philosophy is sometimes difficult (for Catholics) to swallow,” said Umana, who says he grew up in a “drugs and sex era,” on which his Catholic upbringing had little influence.

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There is the matter, too, of whether Christian evangelism can maintain its rate of growth among Latinos. Some religious observers say that 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.

Deck said that the move of immigrant Latinos away from Catholicism is in keeping with documented cycles among other ethnic groups.

“In the history of different immigrants, the first generation always represented a movement to churches that were not the traditional ones,” he said. “It’s a phenomenon of American sociology.”

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 the 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.

“The Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Presbyterians have lost millions of people to Pentecostalism,” said Fernandez, whose family converted from Catholicism after becoming poverty-stricken decades ago in New Mexico. “They went the route of the Catholic Church and became a sophisticated, rich, social and political religion. There’s nothing to say that we won’t follow suit. But we’re not there yet. We found our success in the Lord, not religion.”