Missing its weekday bustle, the only thing loud about the intersection of south LA’s Vermont and Slauson Avenues on a Sunday afternoon was the bright yellow McDonald’s sign, indistinguishable from those lining street corners around the globe.

An occasional car whizzed down the wide, treeless road, passing an El Pollo Loco and Yoshinoya along the way.

Then a voice pierced the relative silence.

“Lord Jesus, please forgive my sins…I open my heart to you and I receive you now as my Lord and Savior,” its owner said in Spanish, voice amplified by a microphone, its speaker launching into a 25-odd minute stream of preachings as he paced back and forth on the greyish sidewalk of the corner.

As his voice droned on like the mantra one repeats endlessly in the back of his or her mind, people approached him with the purposeful strides that come from recognition.

The group’s members collected at the corner, with the speaker speaking on and one of his cohorts carrying a guitar, preparing to play with and accompany his fellow missionaries as soon as the preaching would end.

As the stragglers filed back to their temporary proselytizing HQ at 3 p.m., the “preacher” stopped and stepped aside to let one of the organizers of the Sunday 2 p.m. missions coming out of south LA’s Elim Central Church—one of 12 in the city and 228 in the world, including those within Central America—and announce the week’s success rate.

“How many people did we save today?” asked Hermano Samuel Padilla in Spanish.

“10!” one missionary said.

“25!” shouted another.

The missionaries had spread out, trolling the neighborhood for people. They had managed to spot whatever folk were walking down what had seemed like a deserted street and asked them if they knew Jesus Christ and that he had died for them and if they would like to accept them into their hearts.

“So what’s the grand total?” Padilla queried his group, after a few more numbers had been shouted out.

“63!” called a woman wearing a red scarf and silver earrings with “Jesus is the life/Jesus is the light” written on them.

“Well, thank God!” Padilla said enthusiastically.

The “hermano” carrying the guitar strummed a chord, leading the group into a Guatemalan folk song that started off with the words “I will praise the Lord…”

Whether in Central America or in Los Angeles, the missionaries distribute pamphlets asking the reader “which way are you heading in life?” showing two paths, each leading to a diagram of a tombstone, one with “fame” and “drugs” written on it, the other with “money” and “liquor.”

The middle space created by the diverging paths says “Jesus is the life” and is clearly the one the missionaries would point new souls to.

USC Religion Professor and Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement co-author Donald E. Miller said Central Americans tend to convert in their native countries, bringing—in a move defying the history of missionary work heading south from the United States or west from Europe—their religion north with them.

There’s comfort that comes from the familiar, and he described how those newly arrived will wish to seek those like them. Once united with people speaking the same language and eating the same food, immigrants will integrate their “ecstatic religion” into their community, the converted will go proselytize at parks and street corners, on TV and radio through their church and the growth will feed on itself.

“Pentecostalism,” he said. “In contrast to that sort of neatly structured view of Roman Catholicism, is more like a wild bush that has branches growing out.”

For those who are not already Pentecostal but have only just come to the States, the church provides a sense of home that they would, perhaps, not otherwise find.

“These churches almost become an extended family,” Miller said, “not of actual relatives, but of people who provide social support system for them, a sense of community.”