Soul-Searching on Trinidad's Streets

Pastor Tries to Feed a Hunger in Crime-Shaken D.C. Neighborhood

Carlos Williams swore he'd never return his children to Washington, the city where drug deals, fights and drunks outside his father's apartment used to keep him and his brothers awake at night. But there they were, Carlos, his wife and their seven children -- all under 13 -- tumbling out of the family's white van one Saturday in Trinidad, the small Northeast D.C. neighborhood plagued by more than 125 violent crimes in the past year.

As they began their rounds, the kids giggling and running up alleys, young men on sidewalks and older women on stoops tended to stare, as if to say, What are you doing here?

Saving souls, or at least trying.

The Williamses believe that God called them to Trinidad two years ago, and they have reorganized their lives around the neighborhood, even if it costs them the stability it took more than a decade to build. In September, they sold their home on a wooded, 1 1/2 -acre patch of Anne Arundel County and moved into a rented, one-bathroom rowhouse on Florida Avenue, where Zenobia Williams home-schools all seven children. Before moving, they drove 25 miles to get to Trinidad every Saturday, an unlikely looking missionary troupe, checking on people, praying with them on doorsteps, walking past a police checkpoint. Twice they brought a mobile baptismal tank in a school bus and prayed in tongues as Trinidad's children plunged beneath the water.

But saving souls involves more than just desire, Carlos Williams is finding. Residents of Trinidad tell him, yes, they need Jesus, but first they have more pragmatic questions: Can Williams, a baby-faced 38-year-old telecom worker, help them find a job? Pay their utility bill? Other residents are indifferent to religion. Then there is the devil, whom Williams considers a direct rival.

He said he sees the Devil in "a spirit of oppression, a heaviness over that neighborhood. There is an adversary that opposes any spirit of God," he said the day after a slow Sunday. "To me, it's crystal clear that it's not people we're up against -- it's a spiritual deal."

That's the mind-set of a grass-roots, walk-the-beat kind of soul saver, a throwback. A guy who runs Bible study every Wednesday night in a McDonald's. Who won't get on the train home on Fridays until he prays with a desperate-looking stranger. Who thinks Washington has too much religion and too little Jesus.

"A church on every corner and all this carnage?" he said one Saturday outside the Trinidad Recreation Center. Inside, a memorial service was underway for a 13-year-old shot dead during the summer while visiting from Alabama.

As his kids scurried up a grassy slope to a playground, Williams laid out the stakes, the reason he is willing -- eager, even -- to uproot his family. He wants to test the identity around which he has constructed his adult life.

"This is not some, 'Hey, why don't you come to church on Sunday, and we'd love to have you leave the same way you came in,' " he said. "This is life and death."

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Williams got the call to start a church July 31, 2006. His nondenominational Pentecostal church, Antioch Apostolic in Arnold, has been launching churches since it was founded, and at that night's service, it was the Williams family named to spread the Gospel to Washington. Carlos had worked with programs for youths, the homeless, prisoners; church leaders knew he was headed for some type of ministry, and they saw a huge need in the District.