Standing in the park where they’d met, Jorge Flores remembered his fallen friend, an “hermano,” or “brother”—as he called every male brought to the church.
“Yes, it is a sad thing that he died,” the man said quietly in Spanish. “But his soul had been saved. And really, that’s the most important thing.”
This man, he described, had aided an already drunken stumble with the slowly bouncing swagger of the belt-less. He’d walked with one hand free, Flores recalled, the other clenched into a tight fist as it bunched the front of the trousers together and folded one end over the other in an effort to keep the pants at his hips and not at his knees or ankles.
“It broke my heart,” he said of the man’s uneven gait. “I took off my belt right then and there and handed it over before giving him a hug.”
Wrapped in a stranger’s embrace, the man began to cry.
“‘No one’s touched me in 25 years,’” Flores remembered the man saying.
“He was homeless and dirty and hadn’t seen his family for a long time,” he explained. “But I didn’t mind the dirt; I told him he was beautiful as he was.
“I asked him if he knew Jesus and that Jesus loved him,” Flores continued. “He didn’t know Him yet, but it was at that moment that he let Jesus into his heart, accepting that Christ is his salvation.”
Briefly adjusting his powder blue “Jesus Dream Team” baseball cap with paw-like hands, Flores said the police found this man dead 16 days later, huddled on a sidewalk next to the grassy lawn of a south L.A. park.
“I only saw him that once,” Flores’ said before his thin lips curled into a small smile. “But at least I know we’ll meet again in Heaven.”
Like what conventional wisdom would deem most of Central America, Flores grew up a devout Catholic. But also like many of those living within the region, he became a Pentecostal after experiencing a “supernatural electricity” course through him as what he said was a presence, the Holy Spirit, overtook and baptized him for the second time. After his spiritual awakening, Flores felt strongly enough about his faith to wish to aggressively recruit others to join its ranks. And that active desire to save souls has allowed the religious Movement emphasizing baptism by the Holy Spirit and practices such as speaking in tongues to become the fastest growing religion in the world.
Bloody and prolonged Civil Wars as well as massive internal proselytizing have primed Central Americans for the acceptance of fresh ideals. And Pentecostalism has swept Central America—as well as its satellite community in Los Angeles—up in a maelstrom of religious zeal. Many adopt the new religion in the old country; others enact a new birth in a new home.
Coming in at 1.8 million, Latinos make up nearly half of L.A.‘s population. Mexicans may comprise the majority of that number, but Central Americans don’t merely embody a visible component. The city’s 670,000 Central Americans form the largest community of Guatemalans, El Salvadorans and Hondurans outside of Central America itself. And increasingly, that community has traded Catholic roots for Pentecostal lives. Though no hard numbers exist, scholars at USC and the Latin University of Theology have calculated that 4,700—or 94 percent—of the city’s 5,000 Hispanic churches are Pentecostal.
“Storefront churches”-makeshift places of worship set up for tiny groups in old buildings or, true to their name, storefronts—may most properly describe a significant chunk of that 4,700. But others just as effortlessly fit the moniker “Megachurches,” holy houses accommodating congregations of 4-, 5- or even 10,000.
When asked what drew them to the Movement, most explain there was no “draw;” the Spirit simply filled them, they said, and they were born again.
But further conversation with these Central American Pentecostals as well as with scholars involved in a “Pentecostals in LA Project” aimed to research the Movement’s growth in Los Angeles have indicated numerous further factors motivate this group toward its rapid, widespread and fervent conversion.
Missionaries attract new members in the old country, in the gardens and street corners of the adopted city and through good works such as feeding the homeless. Immigrants draw strength from the familiar, flocking to a community and absorbing its dominant practices along the way. Alcoholics and drug addicts seek salvation from the Lord, drawing comfort from a religious group more likely to warmly welcome new souls than to judge those “fallen.” Mouthing along to the acoustic strains of the missionary’s songs, the predominantly Guatemalan and El Salvadoran contingent recognize the sounds they grew up with, substituting the original words with those that praise God and Jesus. Exuberant singing and dancing dominate the majority of time spent in hours-long services, as electric guitars, drums, keyboards and choirs blast their contemporary-sounding tunes out to what at first glance resembles a participating audience far more than it does a devout crowd of church-goers.
To those born again, however, nothing can parallel the ecstasy of becoming one with the Holy Spirit. Communicating with God through that baptism as well as having the spirit communicate through them via the knowledge of speaking in tongues, Pentecostals may eliminate the desire for the implicit hierarchy the Catholic Church provides.
Representatives of the city’s archdiocese explain the church has baptized more babies than it has years and that Pentecostals seek to discredit L.A.‘s Catholic presence. But Pentecostals have simply said they no longer relate to what they thought a rigid structure.
Renewalists do not need a priest to speak with God, and anyone may become a Renewalist.
In that manner, Pentecostalism becomes the great equalizer—allowing even those marginalized by society through their ethnic, economic and linguistic situations to approach the Kingdom of Heaven. And as more Central Americans affiliate themselves with Californian Pentecostalism—churches long predominantly Anglo- and African American—they will change the identity and image of Christianity in Los Angeles.