From Despair to New Life

Michelle Ortega was losing her faith. Raised in the Catholic tradition of her mother and grandmother, Ortega went through the motions and rituals of the church until she turned 21. That year, her younger brother died unexpectedly. Ortega fell into a depression. She stopped praying.

A year later, she started to hear about a man in Diamond Bar with a story of salvation. At first, she was reluctant to see him, but when she listened to his lesson, she started to cry.

Now 24, the Fullerton College student says she’s found happiness and meaning in her life. Ortega is praying again. And she credits Raul Ries, pastor of Calvary Chapel Golden Springs in Diamond Bar, for restoring her faith.

Ortega is among a growing number of young Orange County residents who are willing to drive to Diamond Bar to learn from a man who has faced his demons, confessed his sins and now teaches the word of God.

Before he even approaches the pulpit, the crowd is energized by a band playing rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm and blues. The crowd stands and claps, sings and prays.

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Every Sunday, they come to fill the 2,000-seat chapel and spill into another room to hear the pastor speak. Church officials say attendance tops 10,000 in five services a week--about a fourth from Orange County.

“I could go to another church closer to me, but I choose to go out there to hear him speak,” Ortega said. “I feel like I know him. Every time Raul speaks, it applies to me. It’s real. Before, I was wandering. I was lost.”

“We follow people we can relate to,” said Michael Chon, 25, of Irvine. “I can relate to Raul. He teaches the truth and doesn’t candy-coat anything. He tells it like it is.”

Ries, 51, has more than just charismatic preaching to offer: He tells his flock a dramatic story about his own brush with murder and suicide--and the redemption that followed.

That story began on Easter Sunday of 1972 in Azusa.

Ries, then 24, was back from a tour of duty as a Marine in Vietnam, studying kung fu san soo and working as a supermarket cashier. He had married Sharon Farrel, a missionary’s daughter he met during his senior year at Baldwin Park High School.

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Comfortably separated from the past, Ries and his wife of 30 years sit on a sofa in his office. They begin to tell the story together: Raul came home from work early that day to find Sharon’s bags packed in the living room. She was fed up, they say, with his physical abuse and infidelity.

As his wife was in church that Easter Sunday with their two toddler sons praying, Ries loaded his .22-caliber rifle and waited in the living room for them to come home, his mind boiling with plans for murder and suicide.

Driving home from church, Sharon Ries thought about the sermon she had heard at the service, taken from Revelation: “And God shall wipe away tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.”

Ries says his plans for death abruptly ended when he saw a man on television talking about love, Christ and forgiveness: pastor Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel in Santa Ana.

Ries listened.

“I got on my knees and cried like a baby, and I asked Christ to come into my life,” he remembers.

He got on his knees and prayed. He is still praying.

At first, Sharon Ries said she was not inclined to forgive.

“I thought: ‘Wait a minute, there’s no punishment for this,’ ” she said. “But then I had to think about what the cross means. Jesus took the punishment for all of our sins, including Raul’s.”

Shortly after his conversion experience, Ries attended Smith’s church. He started a lunchtime Bible study for high school students and converted his kung fu studio in Azusa into a makeshift church once a week.

In 1975, he was ordained as a senior pastor affiliated with Calvary Chapel, a collection of churches founded by Chuck Smith in the late 1960s. Ries moved his congregation of 25 from the kung fu studio to the Fox Theater in Covina, where attendance eventually rose to about 800.

In 1994, the church moved into a converted commercial property where 101,000 square feet unfold on 28 acres off the Orange Freeway.

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Today, thousands come to hear him speak twice a week; even more tune in daily to hear his 26-minute syndicated radio program, “Somebody Loves You,” said church spokesman Michael Falabella. Ries can be heard throughout Southern California at 107.9 FM.

“People without a shepherd are lost. I want them to come to know God the way I know God,” Ries said after a recent sermon. “I have peace in my life now.”

That sense of peace and security is very attractive to those who feel lost, said Grace Dyrness, associate director of the Center on Religion and Civic Culture at USC in Los Angeles.

“It sounds as though he had this experience with God that dramatically changed his life, a calling beyond a shadow of a doubt, and people who are searching for that security are easily drawn to a person like this,” Dyrness said. “He sends the message that you don’t have to be super-human to be OK in the presence of God.”

That message seems to reach his congregation and change young lives.

“It’s easier to relate to him because he wasn’t always together,” Ortega said from her Fullerton home. “He may have been worse off than me, but look at him and the work he’s doing. I see that I can get there too.”