Food and Faith

Spare ribs, glistening in a savory sauce. Hot links, smoky and sweet. Brisket of beef, plump roaster chickens and the juiciest turkey necks that ever graced a plate. At the Prayer Assembly Church, they’re all works of God.

Add a scoop of homemade macaroni salad and another of beans (vegetarian style--this is California, after all) and you have, as the pastor himself puts it, “one heavenly meal.”

With every plate served up from the church parking lot at 442 E. El Segundo Blvd. in South-Central Los Angeles, Elder Clevester Williams Sr. reaches out to the homeless, the hopeless and the just plain hungry souls of Los Angeles.

“They come in need of earthly sustenance,” says Williams, “but they leave with somethin’ a little more.” And it’s not only a slice of sweet potato pie.

For 39 years, Williams and his church family have been using barbecue not only to support the church’s work, but also to build its new home, a $5.5-million edifice of stained glass, marble and burled woods.

The imposing three-story structure was designed and built by L.A. contractor Roy Bennett, who came to the church as a small boy and stayed to help make its pastor’s dream come true. “We sent Roy back to school to learn what he had to. He drew up the plans for the church and then I let him build it,” Williams says.

But the story of how such a dream came to the pastor in the first place is a story almost as popular--and authentic, say believers--as the barbecue itself.

For its proper telling, all the other church officers, including assistant pastor Clevester Williams Jr., defer to the pastor himself because, as his son will testify, “It just doesn’t sound convincing coming from anybody else.”

On truck tailgates, leaning against their station wagons and sitting around picnic tables, a chatty flock of barbecue lovers is digging in to their pork half-slabs ($10.50) and their chicken dinners ($6.50). Others had taken their dinners home. The prices are for those who can afford them. No one goes away hungry. Elder Williams excuses himself to take a few moments to describe the most life-altering experience any God-fearing man could have. The 71-year-old pastor puts down his fork, removes the oversized paper napkin from under his chin and pushes his plate of spare ribs aside.

“It was back in 1958,” Williams begins, “when all we had was a real small little chapel and nowhere to sit down. What we needed was pews, but there was no money. So that night, I went to bed and I prayed. I asked the Lord, ‘Help me, please help me find a way.’

“And that is when the vision was revealed to me: Barbecue! The Lord said, ‘Barbecue.’ And that’s how it all began.

“Oh, yes, and the sauce part, the Lord gave that to my wife.”

*

Two hours before dawn on a cool spring Friday, a broad-shouldered man in a starched white apron pulls into the Prayer Assembly Church parking lot to fire up a pair of barbecues beneath a blue-and-white striped awning.

This morning the chef is the pastor’s son-in-law Jack Edmonds, who has been doing more and more of the cooking since Elder Williams’ heart attack in 1995--an event that has had little impact on the pastor’s legendary consumption of barbecue.

Days after Williams had his barbecue dream, the pastor says he was divinely moved to sketch out on paper a blueprint for his first barbecue barrel. The second metal cooker was built to order for the church by “a kin of the president” in Hope, Ark.

When both barrels are burning at their hottest, Edmonds and other church men can cook up as much as 4,100 pounds of beef, pork and poultry between Friday morning, when the barbecue opens for business, and Saturday night, when it closes.

The aroma of meat drippings splashing onto the white-hot bed of mesquite charcoal and wood is the barbecue’s single most effective advertisement. “The reason I started out cooking at 4 a.m. was people would be goin’ to work and that smoke would get in the car and ride all the way to work with them,” Williams says. “They’d drive right by me standin’ here cookin’ at dawn or 8 or 9, and they’d just yell out, ‘Hey, save some for my dinner tonight!’ ”

The idea, says Williams, is to invite folks in for barbecue and they might just come back Sunday for church. “Sure we use the barbecue to pay our mortgage, but it’s also one fine way to bring people closer to God. We’re giving people a nice meal and teachin’ them something about what people can do if they work together and this is a hard-workin’ church.”

In addition to a jail ministry and nursing home ministry, the “barbecue church” is well-known for helping steer neighbors ravaged by drug addiction into rehab and then to help them find work to stay off drugs.

*

With more than 1,000 members, the Pentecostal church has one of the largest congregations in Los Angeles. But Williams is always looking for more. “Except for his fishing, my Clevester just can’t stop lookin’ for new folks to bring into God’s grace,” says Sister Toledo Williams, the pastor’s wife. In a good month, the barbecue grosses about $50,000, according to church officers, and brings in perhaps a half-dozen new members.

“In my life, I’ve chopped cotton, picked cotton and plowed cotton. I worked years on the railroad cookin’ for Hollywood celebrities before I turned my life over to Jesus,” says Williams. “Work is what saves me--and it’s the chance to do good work that I want to give to people right here in Los Angeles.”

“To feed people who need to eat--isn’t that what God wants us to do? Lotsa times, folks will say, “Why you doin’ all this here? Why build such a fancy church in a neighborhood like this?’ You know what I tell them? I tell ‘em, never has this church been robbed, never vandalized, never bothered in any way by anyone. This church is here because this is where I live.

“I’ve stopped and taken my apron off more than once to marry folks, to counsel folks. And we’ve taken in young people, like the boy who grew up to help me build this church, and helped them get the education they need. This is a story about a church that’s feedin’ a lot of people all right, but, hallelujah, they’re leavin’ the table with a lot more than barbecue.”