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Obed didn't know what to do or where to go. His family wouldn't talk to him. One day around meal time, he stood outside his home looking through a window and watching his mother in the kitchen. "My mom was cooking good."

"I knelt at the door that was kept locked to keep me out," he said. "My mother wouldn't look at me."

"Mom, can I talk to you please?" Obed implored. His mom at the stove ignored him.

"Mom, I have decided to go to the Lord!"

"Ha! Is that right?"

He shouted, "Call the pastor or I'm dead!" She made the call.

That morning last July, Obed's mother called a pastor at Victory Outreach in the Los Angeles area. Obed found out that if he could get transportation to a Victory Outreach residential treatment program nearby, he would get a chance to turn his life around. Riding to the center, Obed hid in the back seat of a blue Celica with darkly tinted widows. Victory Outreach's lay counselor Cesar Zavala, formerly a gang member, caught a glimpse of Obed. All he could see were gang tattoos. He said to himself, "Oh, man! What are we going to do with this guy?"

Obed, fearful of being outside his gang territory, darted out of the car and into the rehabilitation home. "It was tearing me up," he recalled. "I had all my clothes in one small suitcase, and a lot of anger."

But a young man came up to Obed and said, "Brother, here is some coffee."

"Pretty cool," Obed thought. "The atmosphere was different for me. Usually, my anger went to violence, but from that moment, little by little, God is taking it from me."

Sonny Arguinzoni Jr. is the senior pastor at the original Victory Outreach church that his father founded in 1967 to minister to drug addicts, gang members, and anyone else at the bottom. Worldwide, there are 260 Victory Outreach churches and 228 treatment centers in 24 countries.

Arguinzoni Jr., 31, said his generation and this generation of new immigrants from Mexico are far apart culturally. "I have not one tattoo, nor did I participate in gangs or big drug use." A Puerto Rican-Mexican American, Arguinzoni Jr. nonetheless believes that new immigrants will listen to an honest presentation of the gospel. "I teach Jesus to the gangbangers, immigrants, and second generation [Latinos]. We are building for the future: God is raising up a church of a different nature, a real ethnic mix, not a cookie-cutter church."

The Victory Outreach movement has a controversial past. Some dropouts from Victory Outreach programs and churches have complained of leaders' lavish lifestyles and the controlling environment. Evangelicals have been concerned about the group's association with the Word-Faith movement, which critics fault for teaching a "prosperity gospel."

But starting in the 1990s, Victory Outreach and founder Arguinzoni Sr. sought endorsement from a wide spectrum of well-known leaders. Its website features supportive letters from Jack Hayford, Nicky Cruz, Marilyn Hickey, and Jesse Miranda, as well as President Bush, former President Clinton, and many other politicians.

At a recent funeral for a gang member who had come to Christ, Arguinzoni Jr. proclaimed to the warring immigrants from rival gangs that new life in Christ is possible. Victory Outreach leaders, with police officers present to keep violence at bay, prayed, "It is done. You have brought all sides together, Lord, through the death of your Son, who now takes our brother. May we have la vida [life] without loca [craziness]!"

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February 2003, Vol. 47, No. 2