Ablaze With Faith : Storefront Minister Jean Perez Got a Star to Say No to Crack; Now He’s Helping Her

Along a dreary strip of West Florence Avenue, just down the block from Angelina’s Sea Food and across from Revived Faith Community Church, squats a spotless tan and bright red building whose sign proclaims: Ablaze Ministry.

In its foyer rests a book of prayer requests: End his demon possession, asks one signer; let me walk with God, requests another; deliverance from drugs, pleads someone else. From beyond the foyer comes the rumble of hundreds of voices--old black women from Inglewood on their knees; middle-aged white women from Rancho Palos Verdes seated and bent in prayer; whole Korean families from Los Angeles praising the Lord during a Friday night prayer clinic.

All of them seek a oneness with a spiritual force they believe greater than themselves. All of them issue ecstatic, unintelligible speech. All are talking in tongues, articulating what Paul in the New Testament called the unutterable groaning of the spirit within, a spirit in search of God’s wisdom, God’s voice rather than man’s, as some theologians explain.

To talk in tongues is a gift, the Bible says; so, too, is the ability to interpret this language of prayer. Jean Perez has both gifts, she believes. And she is a vehicle, she says, for God’s healing power--a power that singer and songwriter Smokey Robinson claims helped cure him of a crack addiction three years ago, he writes in his recently released autobiography, “Smokey (Inside My Life).”

“I’d never seen a woman preacher before, and she was dynamite,” he writes of Perez. “She didn’t come at you from the Bible; she came from the street, said how she’d done it all herself--the drugs and drinking--and she’d seen another way. She was real. Her speech was captivating.”

“I feel the anointing coming on,” Perez says of the night Robinson--frail, eyes sunken in his head, pus in his bowels, the lining of his stomach eaten away--walked into Ablaze.

Robinson, brought to the church by his friend, actor Leon Kennedy, writes in “Inside My Life” that he was “skeptical, even as she started healing people. . . . I watched as she touched them, prayed over them and caused them to pass out from the power of their prayers.”

Perez, who had never met him before, motioned for Robinson to come to the podium. Tentatively, he made his way to where she stood.

“I know who you are,” she told him. “I didn’t call your name because not everyone recognized you. You look so bad. . . .” he recounts in his book. “The Lord put you on my heart. . . . He sent you here tonight so I could heal you in the name of Jesus. I know about your pus, I know about your stomach, I know about your heart palpitations and the way you sweat at night.”

Robinson says he was “stunned.” He hadn’t told anyone about any of those things.

As she prayed for him, she passed out, was revived, prayed again, then fell unconscious again for a few moments. When she awakened, she told Robinson he was a “powerful spirit in the Lord.”

The composer of “The Tracks of My Tears” says he left Ablaze that night in 1986 feeling higher than at any time in his life.

Since that night, he writes, he never has touched any form of any drug.

So far, Robinson has been the most famous person to be touched by Perez, an independent, nondenominational minister. But the 48-year-old pastor says she has been helping drug addicts get unhooked in her Crenshaw area community for years.

Now, with Robinson, Perez is speaking around the country, conducting “Smokey Robinson Set Free Drug Clinics.” And today and Friday, she will mount one of her separate “Crack Attack” clinics at the Ablaze Believers Christian Center at 2323 W. Florence Ave.

As with previous clinics she has conducted, nurses and doctors will be present to provide counseling and referral information for drug users, says Perez, who recognizes that faith in Jesus alone won’t necessarily beat a drug addiction.

A registered nurse by profession, Perez was born in Port Arthur, Tex., was graduated from Texas Southern University in Houston, then came to Los Angeles 29 years ago.

She was raised in a middle-class Baptist family but became a Catholic while a teen-ager because “all the cute boys back then were Catholic.” In high school, she was a teen-age disc jockey for radio station KJET when “Earth Angel” and “The Great Pretender” filled the airwaves, she says.

“I was known as Groovy Jean on the Scene,” the Ablaze co-founder says with a laugh.

After college, she married Joe Perez, co-pastor of Ablaze but a Catholic when they met. “Marrying Catholic” held her to that faith for awhile, she says. But she was a Christian who didn’t take Christianity seriously until 12 years ago. That’s when she was born again, “while I was in a bar drinking Harvey’s Bristol Cream.” (A friend in the bar told her about the Lord, then invited her to church.)

Even though she claims to have been into “drugs and alcohol” before she found the Lord, when pressed it becomes evident that she drank little and used marijuana only occasionally. Basically, she was a straight arrow. “Sex,” she finally reveals, was the greatest temptation. That’s why she’s so glad the Lord sent her “Pastor Joe . . . a good-looking, Christian man.”

Lives Off Husband’s Salary

Her husband is also a building engineer (he repairs heating and air-conditioning systems) for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “His salary is what we live off of. All donations from the congregation go back into supporting the ministry,” Perez explains.

“Let me tell you, nobody was more surprised than me to have Smokey Robinson come to the ghetto and walk into my little storefront ministry.”

The Rev. Frank Stewart, pastor of the Zoe Christian Center in Los Angeles, says the Perezes are “respected in the Christian community here.” For four years, they conducted prayer meetings in his church before branching out on their own. “I don’t know how successful their crack attack programs are,” he says. “But, like other ministers in the community, they’re doing what they can to address the problem.”

One Sunday morning, while her husband is preaching, Perez shows a visitor several rooms in the boxy Florence Avenue ministry filled with young children in Bible classes.

“We’re going to rent a building nearby that will be a day care center for low-income working mothers in the neighborhood,” says Perez, the mother of three grown children who live in Los Angeles.

The next night, a Monday, she is holding one of her weekly prayer classes for women.

Many she ministers to suffer from incestuous encounters--past and present, Perez says. This has generated low self-esteem among many of the women she counsels. And there is always the issue, she says, of loneliness for the large number of single black women who outnumber men in their communities.

“I was peddling flesh just to have male attention,” one woman testifies at the Monday prayer meeting.

“And it felt pretty good,” Perez says.

The group of women laugh and applaud.

Ministers on a Pedestal

Perez says too many ministers try to place themselves on a pedestal, acting as if they never were tempted by pleasures of the flesh. That’s the problem with “Jimmy Swaggart and (Jim and Tammy) Bakker,” she tells them. They sinned, and were unwilling to “confront the truth. But I’m going to tell it first, “ Perez says. “No one can blackmail me. My life is an open book. . . . I was an adulteress,” she says. “Anybody else here was an adulteress?” Perez booms.

“Lust is a bona-fide reality,” she tells them.

But she adds that if they can turn from Satan, be celibate and wait for marriage “a sexual union blessed by the Lord, there is nothing more erotic.”

Toward the end of the evening, as the women stand together to pray, one insists she cannot smile; she is unhappy; she thinks herself crazy.

“I don’t want to hear,” Perez says with steel in her voice. “I been knowing you for 10 years,” she tells the woman. “You can smile. . . . I don’t pet no religious demons. . . . I don’t play that. . . .

“You have a will in this thing,” she preaches, her voice hoarse and rising. “I choose to pray a lot. You have a choice to be free or you don’t . . . and you can’t tell me you don’t. After 10 years of hearing the same thing over and over you can’t tell me nothing new. . . .”

Perez turns to the other women. “I’m saying that to her not to offend anyone. I’m not really talking to her. I’m addressing the spirit that operates through her, not her. Open rebuke is better than secret love; it keeps some people alive.”

Then she reaches for the woman and stabs the air with denunciation: “Now I curse you, foul, sinful, snide and slimy little devil. I curse you and I told you to get out of here before and I’m telling you to go now. . . .”

The hum of dozens of women speaking in tongues rises steadily.

“I told you, I’m not going to play no games with you. In Jesus’ name, GO ! GO! , GO! In Jesus’ name, I command you to GO ! Let it go. Let it go. . . .”

The woman’s knees begin to buckle; she swoons.

“That’s it baby, let it go, let that power go in there and set you free, girl. . . . In Jesus’ name, in Jesus’ name, in Jesus’ name!”

The woman falls to the floor, momentarily unconscious. When she awakens, she walks away dazed.

It was on such a night, when Perez held another of her weekly women’s prayer meetings, that Kennedy, singing star Robinson’s best friend, walked into the church. He had heard about Perez through the grapevine.

A friend called him, saying, “It’s like the Azusa Street Mission revival,” he recalls. “A lot of spiritual people remember the Azusa Street revival. It took place in Los Angeles in the early 1900s. They had round-the-clock prayer, a lot of people were healed, a lot of miracles were associated with it,” says Kennedy, star of the “Penitentiary” movies.

The friend told him the class was for women only, but he went anyway. Perez and company politely told him it was for women only. But he wouldn’t leave. “It felt too good,” he says. “Here are all these ladies praising God and the spirit, talking in tongues, just having a revival type of time. I sat right down in front so I would not miss anything.”

There were “miracles” that night, he claims, “people set free from bondage and healed of various sicknesses.” After that, he visited regularly. When he saw his friend of 25 years dying, he told Smokey he had to see Perez.

Robinson--who had a Mr. Clean image throughout his long career as a member of the Miracles, a solo artist, composer of now classic tunes and a Motown record executive--also seemed to have a stable happy marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Claudette. But when his father died and his marriage ended after he admitted fathering another woman’s child, he turned to drugs--rock cocaine smoked in a cigarette.

“I’ve got to paint the picture for you here,” Kennedy says, “because it’s a strange picture, taking Smokey down to the ghetto into a storefront church, full of women, dancing around singing and praying in tongues. These are things that he certainly wasn’t used to, and he really looked at me like I had absolutely lost my mind. And I looked at him and I said: ‘Just be patient, and you’ll see.’ ”

Robinson, on the road performing and unable to be reached for comment, will be part of Perez’s “Crack Attack” clinic, Kennedy says, and will testify to Perez’s spiritual healing power.

To Doubting Thomases, Kennedy says: “Are there any of us so intellectual to say we know all that there is to know, and are any of us so conceited to say just because I don’t know it and haven’t discovered it, that it doesn’t exist?”

Add to those who doubt miracles the legions skeptical of those who claim to speak in tongues--glossolalia, to be precise. It’s no coincidence the experience of talking in tongues is found predominantly in black churches in the United States, some theologians explain.

African people “brought a unique disposition to incorporate these kinds of ecstatic, intensely emotional experiences, many of which were part of traditional African religions, into Christianity,” says George Cummings, a professor at the American Baptist Seminary of the West in San Francisco. “Whereas the European has tended to separate religion into discrete categories, separate from other aspects of life, for Africans, reality is interconnected. There is no real separation between our emotions, our psychological self and our religious self.”

Adds Cummings: “It’s not always clear to figure out what’s going on (in these churches). Sometimes, I’m really skeptical, but that ambiguity does not negate the experience; it just makes us more vigilant about evaluating them.”

To the majority of mainstream theologians, the phenomenon of talking in tongues is “gibberish,” says Father James Coen, CSS, director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington.

There is “no consistent language across cultures” where glossolalia is heard, he says. Though the apostle Paul does refer to it and the ability to interpret tongues as a gift, he took a relatively “dim view of it,” Coen says. In the New Testament, he says that “you should seek after the higher gifts, and finally winds up with that incredible passage in Chapter 13, 1 Corinthians, describing charity as the highest gift of all.”

Yet, Coen says, one might liken speaking in tongues to “Paul saying all of us can pray and articulate prayers, but there is the unutterable groaning of the Spirit within you (Romans 8:26); the spirit is praying . . . and asking for what you really need in the mind of God, rather than in your own mind.”

Or, as in the “Jewish religion, if you are going after God, your head is only part of the pursuit; your whole being is involved in the process, and the closer you get the more inarticulate you get. So that finally, in the presence of God, there is nothing but ah, ah, ah. “

Jean Perez stands on the porch of her home in the Crenshaw area. A placard behind her reads, “ ‘Behold, I come quickly. Hold fast . . .’ Rev. 3:11.”

When she puts the sign outside her home, the police are usually not far behind. “It’s supernatural,” she says, but she later admits it’s probably just a coincidence.

The police arrive and raid the crack house next door to her. One recent night, she had to wait “five hours to get into my own house,” because the police had cordoned off her block after the drug bust.

She knows the neighborhood kids who have been regulars at the crack parlor. Some have come to her for help and “been healed of drugs,” she said. “I know because my staff does follow-ups to see how these young people are doing.” Not all of them stay off drugs, she says, but many do.

She’ll wage crack attacks until she’s helped rid the community of the “poison,” she says. But her long-range goal is to build a tower of prayer to serve as a place of meditation and a hospice for people with AIDS, cancer and other terminal diseases.

“I’ve been doing my work in the community quietly for years,” Perez says, and suddenly, with the March release of Robinson’s book, “I’ve been getting all this attention. . . . it’s supernatural, the way my name is being spread.

“All kind of people from all over the world are coming to me. Jimmy Swaggart told a Guatemalan couple to come see me. I guess he saw my name, Perez, and thought I was Spanish.

“But so many Hispanics are coming to Ablaze, my husband and I are learning Spanish. When they come now, there’s only one thing I can tell them and I do: “El Diablo es un monteroso! Christo vive! The devil is a liar! Jesus lives!”