A Ministry Built From the Bottom Up

When Pastor Lonnie McCowan of Solid Rock Christian Center preaches about picking yourself up after you’ve hit bottom, he talks from experience.

“I know what pain is. I know what hurt is,” said the 41-year-old McCowan, sitting behind an immaculate mahogany desk in his large office. “I walked through it.”

Friends say the Oxnard man is at his best when times are tough. He is a visionary who drives hardest when the pressure is on or when he is told that something can’t be done, said Darrell Gooden of Oxnard.

“He is a let’s-get-to-the-top-of-the-mountain-type leader,” said Gooden, a longtime friend. “When people tell him no, he gets charged up. . . . He takes it as a challenge.”

Life started out rough for McCowan. His mother was 15 when McCowan was born, and his father, then 18, has spent only five years of his son’s life outside prison. The last time Roosevelt McCowan was free, in 1993, he attended his son’s church, lecturing youths there on the pitfalls of drugs and crime. But he was soon caught stealing cologne from an Oxnard drugstore and sentenced to 25 years to life under the three-strikes law. He now calls his son collect from Folsom State Prison.

“I only remember my dad at home three times, and every time it ended with the police picking him up,” McCowan said. “My experience with my dad was visiting him in prison.”

McCowan caused trouble every Thursday afternoon in sixth grade to avoid his class’ reading circle, where kids teased him for not being able to read. It was one of those afternoons when an educator told McCowan, “Guys like you, they don’t make it,” McCowan recalled.

That prediction echoed in McCowan’s head for two years until a flag football coach at his middle school made a different prophecy. Armando Garcia told him, “I’ve been watching you, and one day you will be a great one.”

McCowan took it to heart.

“The power of the spoken word can either cripple you or fortify your destiny,” the preacher said.

McCowan learned to read as a high school freshman and is now an avid reader and author.

Agreeing to attend youth services at a Baptist church only so he could play on its basketball team, McCowan also found religion in high school. He was a Hueneme High School junior when he began preaching at St. Paul Baptist Church in Oxnard. He graduated one semester early to study ministry and was ordained at 19.

Forced to Resign After Divorce

After serving as a youth pastor in Port Hueneme, McCowan started New Beginnings Christian Church in 1988. The Foursquare congregation grew quickly, but then problems mounted. When McCowan and his first wife divorced, a Foursquare official asked him to resign because regulations wouldn’t allow a divorced pastor, McCowan said.

“The rug was pulled from under me,” he said. “I lost everything, and at that point I didn’t know what to do. I considered leaving the ministry.”

But McCowan felt he had to continue preaching. With 60 people from New Beginnings, no money and no building, McCowan set out. Two months later, in 1994, he started the nondenominational Solid Rock Christian Center. The congregation grew to 1,000 members within four years and now numbers 1,500.

McCowan also remarried in 1994. He takes joy in providing things that he never had as a youth, like cars, for his four children and stepdaughter.

His children and his mother, Vivian, all attend Solid Rock, where McCowan’s services are as energetic and positive as he is. His flair for speaking transforms Bible passages into messages that members can apply to their lives, often using examples of the storms he has weathered.

“I think one of the reasons a lot of us like coming there is his lessons are just real,” said Pat Mescus, a Camarillo woman who followed McCowan from New Beginnings. “They’re not filled with religious words that are incomprehensible.”

He uses props, computer presentations and video clips projected on a large screen to drive his messages home. He also videotapes his sermons for broadcast on the Sky Angel cable network across the United States and Canada.

McCowan’s vision of what a church should be takes him far beyond preaching, though. Solid Rock offers paralegal services, weekly tutoring, home-buying assistance and a debt-recovery program. Across the freeway, McCowan’s wife, Kimberly, a nurse, runs the Building Better Lives Medical Group and Wellness Center, which treats patients with traditional medicine and prayer.

“Before you can minister to a person’s spiritual needs, you have to minister to their physical needs,” said McCowan, who also volunteers as an Oxnard Police Department chaplain. “If I can get a guy’s lights back on, he can listen to me.”

Gooden, who helped McCowan start New Beginnings and Solid Rock, said the church has launched almost every project McCowan has envisioned, although some haven’t lasted. The church closed the Solid Rock Cafe in Ventura a few months ago and is shutting down Heavenly Skies Travel Agency.

“Does he take unconventional risks?” Gooden said. “Much more than the average pastor, but he is a pastor for the 21st century.”

McCowan’s determination to make the improbable happen usually pays off. It took three years, but he convinced famed evangelist Oral Roberts to speak at his church. Jim Bakker, the evangelist who served five years in prison for fraud related to his PTL Network, also talked to the congregation.

Fund-Raising Begun on $5-Million Project

McCowan’s biggest project now is the $5-million Miracle Dome, patterned after the Rev. Fred Price’s Faith Dome in Los Angeles. McCowan envisions a 5,000-seat church and room for the medical center and all the church’s current programs as well as a Christian academy and Bibleland Amusement Park. He’s gotten $280,000 in pledges toward the first $1 million needed since fund-raising began in June.

Efforts like this are part of what keep members like Mescus coming back to Solid Rock.

“All the time people ask me, ‘Why do you still go to the same church?’ ” Mescus said. “I say, ‘Because it never stays the same.’ ”