From Goths and Gangs to a Gospel Choir

On a recent chilly evening inside a North Hollywood rehearsal studio, an unlikely group of former gangbangers, high school misfits and Satan worshipers is tearing the house down.

They are bouncing and swaying, these kids from the streets of suburban Los Angeles. Their bodies are animated and they are hyped--not by drugs or mischief--but by music. And not just any music.

For these are the Soldiers on Soul Patrol, a gospel choir of mostly Latino youngsters that has reached the finals tonight at the Shrine Auditorium for the 16th annual McDonald’s Gospelfest, which searches out the best amateur gospel talent in Southern California.

The success of the Soldiers in a musical genre steeped in the traditions of the black church surprised Lindsay Hughes, chairman and co-founder of Gospelfest. Hughes first saw the group during an early round in the competition.

“I’m looking at them, and I don’t know what they’re going to do,” said Hughes, who recalled how they first sang in Spanish, switched to English and then really “went to church. I sat up and said, ‘I don’t believe they’re this good.’ ”

But the very existence of this cheerfully devout group says much about the fusing of cultures, religions and identities so typical of Los Angeles. Soldiers on Soul Patrol is the first majority-Latino group to be represented at Gospelfest, Hughes said.

Among the nine finalists is One Voice, a white choir from Victorville. Most of the others are from black churches.

Randy Quesada, the charismatic 19-year-old who founded Soldiers on Soul Patrol a year and a half ago, said gospel music was foreign to most of the group’s members. But its rhythmic beats and responsive chants became a natural expression for Latino kids steeped in popular music and eager to embrace newfound evangelical beliefs.

The group’s fast-paced, almost hip-hop sensibility represents a new generation of Christian ministry geared to kids reared on television, rap and the Internet.

For Quesada, the path to the finals seems a little unreal. The group went through a crowded preliminary round and a semifinal competition in September, when it was chosen as one of two youth choirs that will compete.

“We just laugh ‘cause there’s no way we ever imagined being here,” Quesada said.

Many of the group’s 95 members--who are based at El Monte’s Santa Anita Apostolic Church--say they come from troubled backgrounds, including broken homes, alcoholic parents, drug abuse and aimlessness. None claim much musical training.

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During a recent rehearsal, Quesada resembled a manic traffic cop. Afterward, he motioned a few singers over for some short solos.

“Sing ‘Sweet Anointing,’ ” he commanded best friend Rudy Lemus, a 19-year-old from Tujunga who warbled a bit before going off key.

But when they put their voices together, “something happens,” said Quesada, who is hoarse from long days of rehearsing. “They’ve got a reason to shout, to get up and make complete fools of themselves.”

What the Soldiers lack in musicianship they make up in enthusiasm. Because most of them did not grow up as church-goers, they bring with them the zeal of the newly converted. Much of that conviction is attributed to Quesada, a shepherd to this flock of not-quite-innocent lambs. He was a jock in junior high, who did not smoke or drink yet seethed with an anger born out of an abusive relationship with his father, he says.

At 14, he would stay out all night at parties, get into fights and shoplift from stores in his Palmdale neighborhood. He saw psychiatrists and spent time in a youth detention camp after putting a gun to his father’s head and threatening to kill him. No one was injured and father and son have since reconciled.

But Quesada said he started to change after he began attending an Apostolic church with his mother. The family moved to Sylmar and he transferred to Tujunga’s Verdugo Hills High School, where he stood on lunch tables and preached to fellow students.

Some of the classmates who mocked his beliefs became converts. Twenty-year-old Jessie Quintana was on his way to get a tattoo when a friend persuaded him to attend a church where Quesada was preaching.

Nearly a year later, Quintana talks about how close he came to self-destructing. But since then, there has been a happy transformation.

“We went from the biggest dysfunctional family to the Brady Bunch,” Quintana said, smiling. His parents are helping him to pay his rent and to attend Los Angeles Trade Technical College, where he is studying to be an English teacher.

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For 18-year-old Sharlotte Nahas, the conversion from a mascara-wearing, suicidal Goth to a sunny, well-scrubbed gospel singer has been bittersweet. Raised in a traditional Lebanese home, her Catholic parents have not accepted her new denomination.

“I went from being an alcoholic to an Apostolic,” Nahas said with a laugh.

The Soldiers are among the vanguard of a new generation of musically inspired Christian youth, said Jason Aguilar, a 25-year-old Orange County founder of the West Coast Christian Tabernacle in Santa Ana. He encouraged the Soldiers to develop their own style and write their own music, even if it is not appreciated by church elders.

“It’s a whole different game today, and you are not going to reach young people like you did before,” Aguilar said. “Banjos and harmonicas are not going to do it.”

The 16th annual McDonald’s Gospelfest will be held from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. at the Shrine Auditorium.

Proceeds will benefit the Pride and Leadership for African-American Youth Scholarship Program.