A Walk With Pastor Pete

It isn’t a good time for anybody to be walking down Clarence Street. East L.A.-13, one of the four gangs in and around the Aliso Village housing projects, had been marked for an ambush.

But that word on the street doesn’t matter to Pastor Pete Bradford. It’s Friday night, and his weekly walks through the neighborhood with former gang member Mike Garcia are a holy ritual, a spiritual signature known by the people of Boyle Heights.

Crossing gang lines, Bradford and Garcia approach some homeboys hanging out, working on a six-pack of Miller Draft. Garcia asks them what’s up. After some chitchat, he turns it over to Pastor Pete.

“Go ahead, man, do your thing,” he says.

Holding his hand above the heads of the young men, Pete closes his eyes and loses himself in a prayer. He stands tall yet unassuming in aging blue jeans, shoulders draped by a worn satin Raiders jacket. His head of sparse hair is slightly sunburned. In a strong but steady voice he pleads with the Lord to watch over these kids and help them. One dude sits on the hood of his car uninterested. But another bows his head, accepting the brief blessing that will carry them through the night.

Since 1990, when he first started preaching with puppet shows in Hollenbeck Park, Pastor Pete has become an apostle in Boyle Heights. On his prayer walks through the projects, gang members and drug addicts call out when they see him. “Yo, Pastor Pete!” Young mothers spot him in the street and run to squeeze his hand or brush his cheek with a hello kiss.

In his church, the Boyle Heights Christian Center, which sits across from Aliso Village, Bradford, 51, has done what few other pastors in hard neighborhoods have been able to do: reach young black and Latino children before they turn bad, and reform the teenagers that already have. In many cases, after the children start attending the church, their parents follow. With gang members, Bradford reaches beyond the religious icons on the streets, beneath rosaries around their necks, and finds faith.

To understand this place, you need to hear the pastor’s story and meet some members of his congregation.

Beyond the graffiti-marked mural on the 1st Street facade, an old, dilapidated furniture warehouse has been resurrected as a church. “At first, I didn’t even want to start a church,” Bradford says. “But at some point I got so frustrated [with teenage drug use and violence], and I thought, ‘Why don’t we try and get these kids while they’re still young, before they’re all messed up?’ ”

Walk into the two-story warehouse that is the Boyle Heights Christian Center in the early afternoon and it sounds more like a bustling social center than a church. On the first floor is the main chapel, where the worship team is practicing songs for Sunday services. Across the hall, toddlers squeal in the nursery.

In the computer room, Charles Williams, a church youth group member, cracks jokes as Mercy Lovano types membership applications. In the weight room, gang members who don’t belong to the church and others who do grunt beneath barbells.

Upstairs, Bradford and his wife, Janet, tend to the church office. Nearby is a cozy kitchen and two bedrooms: one for live-in ministers Ralph and Cheryl Hernandez, and another for Tim Prins, the children’s pastor.

Pastor’s Tale of Sin and Redemption

With its wide range of services, which also include placement in drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs and distribution of emergency food, the church is an example of how smaller congregations in the urban core are serving community needs. John Orr of USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture sees an “evolving network of religion-based after-school centers” blooming across Los Angeles.

Bradford’s story is a tale of sin and redemption, and despite his chosen path as pastor, he is never preachy.

Drinking a cup of coffee, he tells of becoming addicted to drugs as a teenager and says he intentionally designed worship services, outreach programs and after-school activities to attract children to the church. Once a week, children’s pastor Prins holds programs in a neighborhood park with free candy, games and prizes. If children want to come to church, the Christian Center has two vans that will drive to their homes and pick them up.

“I just think: If we don’t get them in here, what’s going to happen to them?” Bradford says. “Not all of them take part in services, but that’s all right. They know they can come here. They know they’re welcome here.”

For most of the youths who come from broken homes or gang life, the church has become a haven. Neglected children stumble in searching for more than faith; they seek an after-school center, a sense of solace and a second family. One 15-year-old girl turned to the church as a warm refuge from a mother addicted to heroin. When asked why she comes to the center, she says, “I’d rather be here than on the streets.”

Charles Williams is one of the many twentysomethings in the neighborhood whom the church touched at an early age. He first met Bradford in 1990, when he was about 13--just after his father died. At that time, the preacher and his wife were staging Christian puppet shows out of a Chevy pickup and holding services out of their two-story house on Clarence Street.

“The first time I saw them in that beat-up truck, I thought, ‘My God! What the hell are these people doing in this neighborhood?’ ” says Williams, 21, who now plays the drums at Sunday worship.

“It’s like home here. You know how home feels. You can spend the night here and wake up in the morning and have breakfast,” Williams says. “There’s a need for God in this neighborhood, and he blesses this church over and over.”

In contrast to Williams, who discovered the church early in his life, Lorenzo, 23, found Bradford after nearly suffocating in the violence of the street. Abused as a child and kicked out of his South Gate home, Lorenzo discovered a new family in neighborhood gangs. He’s done drugs, robbed, carjacked and been stabbed.

The turning point, Lorenzo says, came when an old girlfriend gave orders for him to be killed. Caught off guard one night, he was shot in the neck twice with a .22-caliber revolver. Doctors said that because the bullets came so close to vital arteries, they could not be removed. Today, the two bullets remain lodged in his neck, like relics of a past life.

“I was in the hospital that night choking on my own blood,” Lorenzo recalls. Weeping, he thought to himself, “That’s it. My soul is destroyed.”

A few months later Lorenzo ran into Bradford on the street during the pastor’s prayer walk. As he usually does, Bradford approached Lorenzo and asked, “Hey, brother, can I pray for you?”

“It was strange, but I could feel the peace and love in him,” Lorenzo says. “I started seeing something that I never saw before. And all the negative washed off me.”

For Bradford, the road to Jesus was just as bumpy.

A Calling to a Different Place

Born to a 15-year-old single mother, he never received the attention he craved as a teenager, and soon turned to drugs. At 16, he was shooting heroin. By 20, he had joined a hippie colony in Northern California and was doing LSD.

Wanted for drug possession, Bradford fled to New Mexico and met his soul mate, Janet. There, the couple built a tepee and in 1972 had their first son, Chris. About that time, Bradford met a group of missionaries preaching to the drug-addicted and the homeless.

“They would come tell us about God when we were stark naked. It was what you might call non-condemning love,” Bradford says, breaking into a smile. “It was touching, because most churches didn’t want hippies. They thought we were children of the devil. We were treated in much the same way gangbangers are treated today.”

Bradford and his wife became Christians, and in 1976 he returned to San Diego and turned himself in. Bradford says that when the judge heard his story, he decided Bradford had been rehabilitated, and all charges against him were dismissed. Bradford returned to New Mexico and became active in the Assemblies of God, opening a rescue mission for drug addicts.

But he felt a calling to a different place.

In 1987, he applied to become a nationally appointed missionary for the Assemblies of God and traveled across the Southwest raising funds to start a Southern California ministry.

Three years later, he moved to Los Angeles and started his Hollenbeck Park puppet shows. Though many thought the puppets corny, the shows made Bradford known and helped him gain acceptance in the community.

But the crowd that came was always composed of different people, and Bradford wasn’t getting a congregation of regular followers, as he had envisioned. It also bothered him that the children coming to hear him were going home to unhealthy situations. He became attracted to the projects.

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Before the Friday walks, you can find Bradford on his knees in the chapel, his head buried in his hands against the wooden pews. When Garcia arrives at the church, the two walk in the neighborhood searching for lost souls.

“I call the church a Holy Spirit hospital, but we need to be paramedics also,” Bradford says. “Most of the times I go with Mike; other times I walk out there by myself.”

The scenery around the neighborhoods evokes the violence in everyday life. On Gless Street, a sign outside Dolores Mission Catholic Church pleads for peace: “Christ Is All and in Everyone. Don’t Kill Him.”

Garcia, 54, left from gang life 13 years ago and has been walking in the neighborhood counseling gang members ever since. He met Bradford three years ago, and the two began walking together on Friday nights.

“The gang member knows his life is not going to last long. He knows deep inside there is a God,” he says. “For a lot of them, [the Friday walks are] the only time of the week they have a connection with God.”

“I feel like we’re just scratching the surface,” Bradford says. “But that’s better than nothing.”