Body and Soul : Victory Outreach Travels the Mean Streets, Offering Spiritual Refuge to Those Who Have Lost It All

They carry an urgent message beneath the drone of circling police helicopters. Apostles who have been to hell and back, they roam Pico-Union, offering food, shelter and a way out.

They eschew psychology and job-training programs in the belief that those treat the shell of a person. To resist the pull of the gutter, Victory Outreach followers say, one must fill the inner void. And only Jesus can do that.

Fifty gangs with more than 2,000 members occupy the area patrolled by Rampart division police, near Downtown. Etched in blue across necks, shoulders, hands or foreheads are the names 18th Street, Mara Salvatrucha or Crazy Riders. Although murders are down this year, police so far count 88, most of them gang-related.

Death looms large here. It touches many, and it loves the young. One 31-year-old says only three of his 20 boyhood friends are alive, out of prison and ambulatory. The gangs prey on universal human needs. “They give love,” a member says. And they watch your back.

Eager to prove they are “down,” the youngest recruits follow orders. Later, they learn to give them. Opting out means being branded a coward, and alienation from friends or even family.

For those who stay in, a life of crime, prison or death await. Those who survive to have families tend to set a poor example. “Like produces like. Father dies and the son takes over,” says Abel Reyes, a Victory Outreach assistant pastor. “It’s a chain and Jesus breaks it.”

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Sonny Arguinzoni started Victory Outreach in 1967. A heroin addict living in New York, he stumbled across two evangelists, Nicky Cruz and David Wilkerson, who led him away from drugs and encouraged him to begin praying at their Teen Challenge center. They sent him to Los Angeles and enrolled him in Latin American Bible College in La Puente. Before long, he started his own church in Boyle Heights.

Arguinzoni has since moved back to La Puente, and his ministry, Victory Outreach, has inched its way across the world. It relies on former gangsters and addicts to help themselves by helping others into a refuge. Once there, the ministry attempts to rehabilitate them with food, shelter, jobs and more: Victory Outreach works on “the inner man.”

A decade ago, Arguinzoni, 55, plucked Francisco and Angie Cruz from the streets. After they spent five years praying at and evangelizing for his La Puente church, now 3,500 strong, he sent them to start their own Victory Outreach ministry.

Francisco Cruz found a two-story house on Dewey Avenue off Pico Boulevard. He turned the upstairs into a home for his family--wife Angie and three sons--and offered the ground floor as a refuge. Cruz now delivers sermons to 300 in a Presbyterian church on Valencia Street, and a nearby refuge sleeps 40, with room for 60 more.

His and other Victory Outreach ministries subsist on money collected from the congregation and the surrounding community. Stores donate food and other items to the refuge, and the ex-gangsters, -felons and -addicts living there do odd jobs to help pay the $3,800 monthly rent.

Each branch also helps subsidize the ministry’s expansion throughout California--where it has 49 of its 152 churches--and the world, Cruz says. He recently sent a missionary to El Salvador to establish a church and is grooming another for Guatemala City.

Stuart Wright, a Lamar University sociology professor who studies non-mainstream religious groups, says the experiential, emotional brand of religion espoused by such ministries appeals to those who feel disinherited by society. They go places “where a lot of churches are intimidated to go,” he says.

Pedro Facio, a rehabilitation coordinator who has a contract with the county, regularly refers clients to Victory Outreach, he says, but only if they express interest in religious guidance. The nine-month program works, he says, because it uses discipline to prepare people with chaotic lives for a structured work world.

Victory Outreach members believe its grass-roots quality makes it effective. “You cannot Xerox this ministry, you cannot duplicate it,” says Reyes, the 58-year-old assistant pastor. “We have our feet on the soil. We come from the dust.”

Economic help, such as government relief checks, he argues, can’t change a person’s values: “You can get the man out of the ghetto and take him to Beverly Hills. But how do you get the ghetto out of him?”

Reyes and Cruz, 32, both admit that many people come to the shelter simply to take a shower or hide out. Half of them disappear after a few days, but others stay on.

Once within the fold, they are invited to spend nine months living in the refuge and adapting to a life of discipline. Reyes hustles jobs, contracting out workers to wash cars or do construction, plumbing or painting in exchange for donations.

On some nights, they hit the streets to evangelize. On others, they attend Bible study sessions or pray. They go to church four times a week. With so many former refuge residents in congregation, the comfort level is high.

“Somebody can go there stinky smelly and they won’t throw them out. They treat them like somebody in a suit,” says a four-year Victory Outreach member.

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On a sunny Sunday morning, Pastor Cruz delivers a sermon that alternates from Bible readings to booming testimony of his own voyage from gangs and drugs. Many of the several hundred who have come to hear him, even the newcomers, writhe in seeming anguish or rapture when the music--electric guitar, drums and song--kicks in. Arms flail, tears drop, voices wail. Some shield their eyes, as if from an unbearable light, or drop to elbows and knees, clutching heads with arms.

Many in attendance were raised as Catholics, and some of them say that the religion’s layers of ritual and its confessional system make it difficult to stay clean. Catholics “can drink, fight and destroy things and then feel good. They come in and say, ‘I’m sorry’ and then do it again,” Cruz says.

For him, the rules are simple: pray, live by the Bible and reach out to others. “When you know God, then you got a passion for people. If you don’t pray every day, then you lose the passion,” he says.

Despite the passion, despite the commitment and despite the support of fellow church members, one-third backslide, he says.

Says Jessy Murillo, a 21-year-old who came to the refuge last December after spending more than a year in jail: “You got an empty space in your heart. When you don’t fill that up with the presence of God, you got other things around you.”

Evangelizing helps cement a commitment to reform, Cruz says. “Jesus said, ‘Go out to the people and preach.’ ”

On weekends and Monday evenings, church members gather in the parking lot to pick a bad neighborhood. Equipped with flyers printed in Spanish and, on occasion, a bullhorn, they roam the streets in groups of 10 or more.

They tell of their lives on the streets and exhort anyone who will listen to come to the church. To those who appear homeless, they offer refuge. Many passersby cross the street to avoid them, but others accept the flyers and politely listen. Some nights, someone goes with them to the refuge.

Some in the neighborhood don’t appreciate their presence, especially when they bring the bullhorn. But, says a police officer watching over a drug bust in MacArthur Park, “We’re not going to kick them out. They’re the only ones saying anything out here worth listening to.”

On a recent excursion, a group of church members approached a huddle of gangsters leaning on a car. They listened attentively to the pitch about a life with Jesus watching their backs, and some requested flyers. But they later piled the papers on the sidewalk and burned them.

Their time will come, say the church members. Adds 17-year-old Robert Baldison: “A lot of times they don’t (come), but they remember that moment. They know that there’s a way out--maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But they’ll come.”

*

The needle tracks running across 32-year-old Yolanda Flores’ arms, ankles and neck belie her quiet life with her two children and husband Pablo.

“When we tell people what we used to do, they don’t believe us,” he says.

For years they lived day-to-day, sleeping in parks or abandoned cars and robbing stores and passersby to pay for heroin, crack and cheap wine.

Pablo, 31, would steal cars with a friend by asking drivers for directions before holding an ice pick to their necks.

Police once arrested Yolanda mid-heist when she was nine months pregnant with a previous boyfriend’s child. The state has long since relieved her of the three children she had by him.

“We were like Bonnie and Clyde,” she says of that relationship.

After “Clyde” went to prison in 1988, she followed a friend to a Victory Outreach ministry in Santa Monica. (It has since moved to Hawthorne.) She had never seen a church like that, she recalls, where people with slicked-back hair talked about their gangster pasts. But the pull of drugs was too strong, and she was soon back in the streets.

Then, four years ago, pregnant with her first child by Pablo, she spotted people singing, clapping and carrying the same signs she had once briefly carried. “Jesus is the answer,” the sign read.

“Oh man, they’re Christians,” she remembers thinking. A girl approached Yolanda to say she had used cocaine when she was pregnant, and her baby was born prematurely. Yolanda started to cry, but she and Pablo refused to go to the refuge. “There was a part of me crying out for help, but there was another part of me that didn’t want to let go of the drugs,” she says.

Later that month, Pablo was arrested by narcotics agents. When he was released a few days later, Yolanda persuaded him to go to the church with her. “I knew it was my only hope,” she says.

Yolanda hasn’t touched alcohol or drugs since, she says. “It was weird, man. The moment I prayed, God freed me--even from cigarettes.”

Today, Pablo works for minimum wage delivering refrigerators. Yolanda stays home with the children and plans to work when they’re older.

They attend church four times a week and try to spend one night a week helping others from the streets. When they aren’t in church, they pray at home with friends or attend Bible study sessions.

“You can’t help people if they’re thinking they are fine,” Yolanda says. “They need to hit rock-bottom.”

Her brother Frank, 25, hasn’t crashed yet. He visits her house when he needs advice or time to think. He says his fellow gang members are great friends. They look out for each other and share their problems.

The Flores home functions as an informal refuge and sanctuary for a few torn between the church and the streets. A pregnant 18-year-old who has lived on the streets since her parents turned her out five years ago comes to get away from the father-to-be. “His goal in life is to get tattooed and go to the penitentiary,” Yolanda says of the 16-year-old.

The Floreses are trying their best to raise their 4-year-old boy and 3-year-old girl. They refuse to buy them toy guns and point out that the violence on television doesn’t hurt like the real thing. But they fear the pull of Los Angeles’ streets and the time when children must choose for themselves.

“I trust in God, but I also have to live in reality,” Yolanda says.

Adds Pablo: “When they go to school, they’re going to be living in two worlds. They teach that you come from monkeys. They tell you to use condoms.

“There’s an age that you can’t stop them,” he says. “It’s going to be our job to guide them the right way. We’re going to be praying for them.”