Neighborhood Spotlight: East Hollywood Passion L.A. with Pastor Bobby Lopez
/Indigenous Leadership From Broken to SUPER
Imagine you’re 13. Your Dad is murdered. Your mom, a part of a gang, marries a drug dealer who becomes an addict and is abusive. One night your parents are high and drunk, beating each other up, so you run. You run straight to the church parking lot, hungry for what they have – the people pouring out of the church – you want whatever it is they have. Tears are pouring down your face. But as you’re reaching out, desperate for a lifeline, a pastor stops you. He says, “Go back to where you came from.”
Shocking. Sad. Infuriating. Convicting. Those are my immediate reactions to the unnamed pastor. Because the 13-year-old boy? He has a name, Bobby Lopez, and that is how his story begins. Ministry is tough. Especially if the community you’re called to is a tough neighborhood. But it’s equally tough for those like Bobby Lopez to get plugged in, let alone welcomed into, a vibrant Christian community. Even then, is the ministry team equipped to support and council broken children into fully redeemed and healed sons and daughters of God?
When the pastor told Bobby to go back where he came from, Bobby left the way he came, over the fence. And continued to cry all the way to his room where he began to draw. Years later – after walking out some life, spending four years in the Marine Corps, irrevocably finding Jesus, and committing his life to ministry – his wife asked him a question.
“When you ran back to your room, what were you drawing?”
Bobby’s reply, “I was drawing a picture of kids walking into a building, broken, and coming out superheroes.” And his wife said, “God gave you a vision for what you’re going to be doing.”
Mrs. Lopez’s words rang true when Bobby Lopez founded Passion L.A. three years ago, an outreach ministry to reach kids outside of the church walls. The heart of the organization is to reach the kids across the street who don’t normally go to church, the Bobby Lopezes of the community, and raise them up as indigenous leaders to minister to their own backyards. We interviewed with Bobby to ask him some questions about the ministry.
Q. You mention Passion L.A. has been really blessed. How have you grown? What is Passion L.A.?
Bobby: So originally, we had three programs. One was a social emotional learning program and we used to go to the schools, juvenile halls, and foster communities. The other was our faith-based program where we discipled kids and the last was our leadership program where we trained urban leaders. We really believe that the key to reaching these areas is not just sending missionaries but developing leaders within the communities we serve.
We were doing that, and we expanded to create our South L.A. program. And now we are working with UYWI to build their leadership network as a resource to raise urban leaders. We’ve been really blessed; God has placed us in a leadership position to help create this network of leaders and raise the next generation of the church.
Q. I’ve been hearing a lot about revival and specifically revival being spurred out of the youth in L.A., since you’re on the ground working with youth do you have any thoughts or witness to that?
Bobby: When I was in the Marines, I was the operation chief, so I spent a lot of time studying war and strategy books. Someone asked me once, Why L.A.? Because L.A. is strategic spiritually and culturally. You have the city that influences the world, it literally connects to every part of the world. We believe that the key is developing those indigenous leaders to go into those L.A. communities and get off the trail of church. Church tends to be family based, so in their outreach they tend to go after families, and that’s really good, but there’s going to be a lot of organizations coming out of L.A. that are going after specific people groups. And I think that’s going to be where the revival really happens because those groups aren’t stuck to a model of how church should be, they just want to get to know Christ. I really think that this is an opportunity for the rest of the world because what happens here, everybody knows about.
Q. Tell me a little about the kids you work with and what you’ve seen happen through Passion L.A.’s outreach?
Bobby: We have different groups. For example, Cielo, we’ve had Cielo since she was 14. Her parents were drug addicts. Her dad had recently died, and her mom had abandoned them, and she was with her brother and sister who were meth addicts. She was just acting up a lot, and when we met her, we saw that God wanted to use her in a mighty way. Today she’s the events coordinator for Youths for Christ, she’s the administrator for Passion L.A. and she runs our Eastside L.A. program. She’s been such a huge blessing to us, our personal house, we ended up adopting her.
Then we have Railene. Her family is all from one of the biggest, most violent streets and gangs in America. And now she’s running the bible study at Lincoln Heights High School. She just restarted it because it died out during covid.
Q. How do you track your work? Is Passion L.A. a building? Do you have different groups going out into the community, to schools, what is that interaction/connection piece that you guys are utilizing to reach the youth?
Bobby: We had an emotional learning program where we would go into the schools and teach. We’d volunteer to teach a secular program about relationship health or emotional development. It was a curriculum based secular program but, in that process, we’re developing relationship with them, and we never tell them about God because we’re not allowed to. All we tell them is yes, we do pastor on the side. But eventually, what happens, is the kid wants to know. Why does this person care so much? Why does this person come and bring pizza and not get paid for it? Why does this person love me like they do? Why do they ask me how I’m doing or listen to me?
They’ll ask if they can go to our church, and we say well it’s up to you, but we can’t tell you information and they’ll find a way through Instagram. And that just creates a flood of kids.
During Covid we couldn’t meet with the kids, so we used TikTok. And we ended up with 7 million views last year. Our target group was a kid who feels like they don’t want to live anymore at 2 o’clock in the morning in their house. What do they need? So, we created a mom and dad that are giving them advice on relationships, and then we just talked to them as if they were in our house, walking around, putting away the dishes, or cooking. We also put our testimonies online. We spent a lot of time messaging kids back and forth.
Q. So how is your support system, your team, your staff? Do you have a lot of help? Or is there an area of need or growth?
Bobby: Our staff is 95% from the communities, so everybody we served we raised up. We have a lot of volunteer churches around us who come out and help cook, clean, some help pick up kids, whatever the need is. The hardest part for us right now is some of these guys are working as hard as they can and doing whatever they can, but we work in a low resource community with high need. The problem isn’t getting the kids through the door, the problem isn’t figuring out what the need is, we have plenty of need, the problem is the community doesn’t have enough resources for us to develop, fulfill, and have impact. So, we usually have to go outside of our community for funding and use of facilities. We do raise our own funds through certain grants but it’s hard because this model is so rare through indigenous leadership. We sat down with missionaries to ask how they raise funds and they said to go to your five most affluent families, and we laughed because we don’t have that, when they told us what to do, it was based off a model that doesn’t work for what we’re doing.
Passion L.A. needs help. In Bobby Lopez’s community it’s life or death. Gangs, drugs, and violence threaten to steal the youth from their appointed purpose. These kids need access to the church, the vibrant, reaching across the street, across the fences, Christ filled church. Bobby Lopez’s indigenous leader model, raising up mentors and difference makers to serve the community they grew up in, is a necessary and impactful source for kingdom change. Kids are being mentored and taught by people who understand what it’s like to be on the streets, around gangs, and what it means to be fully seen and loved. It’s life changing for these kids. You can partner with Passion L.A. and help bring kids from a place of brokenness to a redeemed son or daughter of the King. They can become a Superhero, an Indigenous Leader, just like Bobby’s vision he drew. To learn more about Passion L.A. and the work they do head over to their site or check out their inspirational posts on Tiktok @DadandMomADvice.