THE SUNDAY PROFILE : A Man for the People : For Juan Carlos Ortiz there is ‘always a spiritual message’ in life’s events. And that’s the approach he takes to connect with his fast-growing Hispanic Ministry.

Juan Carlos Ortiz lifts his palms skyward--his gesture magnified by a 15-foot Jumbotron television--and smiles.

Always upbeat and encouraging, he is preaching to Latino worshipers at the Crystal Cathedral, a church that until five years ago had an all-Anglo congregation. They listen intently to the Spanish-language service, many of them fanning their faces with programs asthe sun beams through the 10,000 panes of glass that enclose the renowned Garden Grove church.

Juan Carlos, as he is known to his congregation, delivers his message with polished precision. He has long been spreading the Gospel, from the remote forests of Argentina to a prayer breakfast at the White House to the readers of his five books throughout the world. He speaks with his hands and rarely leaves God from a story. He tells of personal glory, challenge and hardship, including the heart-wrenching time four years ago when he watched his 28-year-old son die of AIDS.

On this day, the 90-foot-tall doors that allow air to flow through the cathedral are closed to a gusty wind. But the hundreds of men, women and children dressed in their Sunday best don’t seem to mind the heat, and their collective voice fills the huge space as the 16,000-pipe organ leads them in hymn.

“Cristo, Cristo, Cristo,” they sing, “Nombre sin igual. . . .”

They have come from Garden Grove, nearby Santa Ana, Los Angeles and elsewhere to see 61-year-old Juan Carlos, the vibrant preacher who began teaching Sunday school 47 years ago in his native South America.

“Why did we come?” responds one father of four, holding a squiggling toddler in his arms. “To hear the words of Juan Carlos. He is the best. He talks to us, as a family, like we are friends.”

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The steady growth of the Latino congregation at the 15-year-old Crystal Cathedral is testament to Ortiz’s appeal, but some believe its increasing popularity has hurt other congregations. The vast majority of those attending are baptized Roman Catholics.

Since the church’s Hispanic Ministry was formed in 1990, the number of worshipers has ballooned from 32 to a returning crowd of 1,200. On Palm Sunday and Easter, more than 2,200 attended services, the ministry reports. And, until this spring, the services also had been televised.

The Rev. Robert Schuller, 68, the founding pastor of the Crystal Cathedral who invited Ortiz to start the ministry, describes the current turnout as fantastic.

“I predict that the Hispanic Ministry will be the single most rapidly growing wing of our church,” Schuller says. “It has a super future.”

But in the Catholic community, some have raised concerns about people who might mistake the cathedral for a Catholic church.

“People who are new in this country are drawn to all that is American,” says Msgr. Jaime Soto, vicar for the Latino community of the Catholic Diocese of Orange County. “The concern that comes to my attention is that some Catholics go to the Crystal Cathedral thinking that it’s a Catholic church. And when they get there, they find out otherwise. I’m concerned that the ministry represent their church fairly.”

Soto adds that he has “continually and openly” corresponded with Schuller and the Crystal Cathedral about the issue.

Pastors at the Crystal Cathedral practice the doctrine of the Reform Church of America, Ortiz says, which he describes as a “sister church” to the Presbyterian ministry.

“Our people are not asked to leave the Catholic Church,” he says. “We want the people who don’t go to Mass, the non-practicing Catholics. I would say that 99% of them are Catholics who never attend church.”

When Ortiz came to the cathedral, he contacted area Catholic priests, explaining his intentions with the new ministry.

“I told them that this is not to compete, it is to complement,” Ortiz says. “If we speak against another church, it’s like banging your head against the wall.”

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Juan Carlos Ortiz was born July 8, 1934, in Buenos Aires, the fifth child of Concepcion, a seamstress, and Helario, a railroad engineer.

As he describes it, his was a loving, sheltered and deeply religious childhood. Retracing each step, he says there has always been one constant in his life: his faith in God.

“There was no dancing, no smoking and no drinking,” Ortiz says with a smile, sitting in his seventh-floor office at the Crystal Cathedral. “It was a clean life. Our recreation was to sing hymns and tell clean jokes. That was our culture. I don’t feel I missed anything. Even now, when I go on vacation, I find a church.”

Although his evangelical upbringing in a predominantly Catholic culture was the source of some friction with classmates and teachers, Ortiz describes those experiences as a simple test of faith.

“When I didn’t get my homework right, the teacher would say, ‘instead of reading the Bible, you should do your homework,’ ” he recalls. “The kids, some of them used to tease me, but my mother always told me to do good things and be good to people. That is what I will always do.”

The advice of the late Concepcion Ortiz rubbed off not only on her youngest child, but on all of them. Four of the five Ortiz children became ordained ministers, and the other is a lay preacher in Argentina.

“She taught us well,” Ortiz says.

Fluent in English, Spanish and Italian, young Juan Carlos began his evangelical career before his siblings did, teaching Sunday school at 14 and preaching before a 500-member congregation of Italian immigrants two years later.

“I was quite an attraction because I was just a boy,” he recalls. “So they came to watch.”

He translated for a popular faith healer and traveled “just about everywhere.” But the biggest challenge of Ortiz’s young life came at 19, when he went as a missionary to live with the Mataco and Toba tribes for two years in the far northern forests of Argentina.

“That was my first call. They lived under the trees like animals, and we bathed in the same water as the pigs. I came from Buenos Aires, a very sophisticated city, so I felt very sad, I missed my family. But I wasn’t depressed, I felt like a martyr, not a victim. There was always a spiritual message.”

Always innovative in his methods, Ortiz recalls how he attracted the Indians to his services.

“I got a cart, and I strapped a battery and all these loud speakers to it,” he says. “I rode all around the town nearby, saying, ‘Come to see Juan Carlos tonight.’ It worked, they came.’ ”

Ortiz met his future bride while founding a church in Capilla del Monte. Martha Palau, then a teacher at a nearby boarding school, remembers that Juan Carlos’ presence created quite a stir.

“He was already quite known then. All of the people were gathering by the hundreds, and I went to the church to see what was going on,” she recalls.

Soon after, Palau was playing the accordion alongside Ortiz in church, and the couple began planning their life together.

“I went back to school to learn theology,” Palau says during an interview at their son’s Anaheim Hills home. “I knew that if I was to be a minister’s wife, there was a lot to learn.”

The couple married in 1961 in Buenos Aires. They had four children--David, Vera, Georgina and Robert John--all of whom grew up with strong ties to the church.

Robert John, who died of AIDS in 1991, was a musician who often played the grand piano at the Crystal Cathedral. Ortiz says that while some churches and a few individuals ostracized his son because of his homosexuality, the Crystal Cathedral embraced him.

Both mother and father say they loved their son deeply and learned a great deal from him at the end of his life.

“My son was very courageous,” Ortiz says. “He died with dignity, with all of us around him. And he taught me how to die . . . how to approach death positively.”

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When Ortiz and his family moved from Argentina to the United States in 1978, they settled in the Bay Area. Ortiz went on the preaching circuit, appearing in churches of various denominations worldwide.

He had already written three books by this time, and they helped him earn recognition in the religion community. “Disciple” (Creation House, 1975), with more than 100,000 copies in print in several languages, is his most widely read. It and his other titles--”Call to Discipleship,” “Living with Jesus Today,” “Cry of the Human Heart” and “God Is Closer Than You Think”--speak to his abiding faith.

It was a speaking appearance at an international conference featuring the Rev. Billy Graham in Lucerne, Switzerland, that ultimately led Ortiz to the Hispanic Ministry at the Crystal Cathedral. Schuller heard Ortiz speak at the event, and he was struck by his words. “I felt he was one of the most positive, inspirational, dynamic and dedicated Christian men I had ever seen,” Schuller recalls.

It would be several years, though, before Schuller contacted Ortiz.

“(Rev. Schuller) told me later that he saw me preach and was quite impressed,” Ortiz says. “When he saw the Hispanic community growing around the church, he called me, and here I am.”

Although Ortiz and Schuller lead Sunday services under the same roof, they do so separately. Schuller’s services in English are at 9:30 and 11 a.m.; Ortiz’s is at 1 p.m.

When the church empties after the 11 a.m. service, ushers in neon orange vests work traffic control, directing the surge of cars out of the cathedral’s parking lot and onto Lewis Street. A few minutes later, the arrivals for Ortiz’s sermon filter in, ultimately taking up less than half of the 2,890 seats.

“We’ve almost filled (the cathedral) a few times,” Ortiz says. “When we started, there were 32 of us . . . that was really just my family and friends who I invited.”

The Hispanic Ministry continues to grow, but Schuller’s congregation numbers almost 10,000, constituting almost 90% of the worshipers.

Still, Ortiz says members of his ministry “are not second-class citizens” and have the full run of the church.

“In some churches, they make the Hispanics preach in a different room, or they might even have to purchase their own building for their services,” Ortiz says. “But Dr. Schuller gave us the whole cathedral.”

Ortiz’s Spanish-language services didn’t start out there, though.

“First, we started in the chapel on the 13th floor, and we stayed there for a year and went to the (on-site) Arboretum. When we outgrew it, we came to the cathedral, and we have been here two years.”

According to Martha Palau, who also works at the church, donations from the worshipers constitute 40% of the Hispanic Ministry’s operating costs, “and Dr. Schuller provides the rest,” she says.

“The Hispanic community is poorer, with less community resources,” she says. “We teach them to give 10% (of income to the church), but we never pressure them. They give what they can.”

Despite its growth, the Hispanic Ministry was dealt a difficult blow this spring when the church, citing financial reasons, decided to discontinue televising Ortiz’s services.

“It was quite a shock,” Palau says. “But when there is no money, you can’t produce it. Maybe someday we will have it back again, but for now, we are happy.”

Ortiz’s 4-year-old version of Schuller’s “Hour of Power” television program, “Hora de Poder,” had about 11,000 viewers in Los Angeles and Orange counties, according to the Nielsen ratings, before being pulled March 12. The Glendale station that aired it, KVEA, confirms that it raised the show’s weekly broadcast rate from $2,900 to $5,000.

“The Hispanic community doesn’t have the means to support (the program), and we are overloaded in missions worldwide. . . . There was no way,” Schuller says.

Meanwhile, “Hour of Power” is translated into Spanish by the ministry, and viewers who have a SAP (Secondary Audio Program) button on their remote controls can access it.

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Ortiz says he preaches much of the same doctrine incorporated within many denominations, but in a different way.

“Most churches just preach theology, and those terms are hard to understand for most people,” he explains. “You can say to someone, ‘You are a sinner,’ or you can say, ‘You have low self-esteem.’ One is insulting to you, the other makes you get help. I am using more human and modern terms to say the same thing.”

The ministry Ortiz heads has eight employees, including two other pastors. Its programs include drug and alcohol counseling, soccer instruction and team competition for disadvantaged youths. To help keep newcomers coming back, the ministry hooks them up with home support groups of established members.

To recruit first-timers, Ortiz, his wife and other ministry members go into Latino neighborhoods, using flyers and word-of-mouth to spread their message. “We have ministered the wealthiest of the wealthy and the poorest of the poor,” Palau says.

Arnoldo Escobar, 21, of Anaheim, is among those who attend Ortiz’s services weekly. A former gang member and drug dealer from Guatemala, he says he remembers the day three years ago when he went to the Crystal Cathedral with a friend.

“I had not been in church since I was 7 years old,” Escobar says. “When Juan Carlos started talking, it was like he was talking personally to me, not to all the people in the church.”

After the service, Escobar’s friend urged him to meet Ortiz.

“My friend took my arm and pushed me into him,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to go, I felt ashamed of all the bad things I was doing. But after I met him, I felt special, worth something. He means a lot to me.”

In publicity kits put together by the Crystal Cathedral, Juan Carlos Ortiz is described as “a dynamic orator who combines psychology and theology, formulating a positive faith of self-esteem and self-image.”

But most people around the church describe him in simpler terms.

“He has this way of talking to you,” explains Alicia Fuentes, 23, arriving for the Sunday afternoon service with friends. “He doesn’t talk down to you or anything. He talks about life, and how you can be a better person.”

After holding open an elevator at the church for a group of visitors, Ortiz embraces almost everyone with whom he comes in contact. The spring in his step moves him along like a gust of wind.

He doesn’t hang glide on the weekends, golf, or even play soccer.

“I have no other interests,” he says. “My sport is to preach, my relaxation is to preach. That’s all there is.”

Juan Carlos Ortiz

Age: 61.

Background: Born in Buenos Aires, lives in Anaheim Hills.

Family: Married for 34 years to Martha Palau. One of their four children, Robert John, died in 1991. They also have four grandchildren.

Passions: Spending time with family and preaching.

On his Hispanic Ministry: “The key to our growth is that we delegate and empower people. . . . Otherwise, the church is like an orphanage, and the minister is the head of the orphanage.”

On his relationship with other congregations: “There might be some animosity, but not from here. . . . Our mission is to attract the Catholics who don’t go to Mass.”

On the death of his son: “He held my hand and smiled. He would say he was looking forward to heaven. . . . He taught me how to die.”