When Pastor Lonnie McCowan of Solid Rock Christian Center preaches about picking yourself up after you've hit bottom, he talks from experience.
"I know what pain is. I know what hurt is," said the 41-year-old McCowan, sitting behind an immaculate mahogany desk in his large office. "I walked through it."
Friends say the Oxnard man is at his best when times are tough. He is a visionary who drives hardest when the pressure is on or when he is told that something can't be done, said Darrell Gooden of Oxnard.
"He is a let's-get-to-the-top-of-the-mountain-type leader," said Gooden, a longtime friend. "When people tell him no, he gets charged up. . . . He takes it as a challenge."
Life started out rough for McCowan. His mother was 15 when McCowan was born, and his father, then 18, has spent only five years of his son's life outside prison. The last time Roosevelt McCowan was free, in 1993, he attended his son's church, lecturing youths there on the pitfalls of drugs and crime. But he was soon caught stealing cologne from an Oxnard drugstore and sentenced to 25 years to life under the three-strikes law. He now calls his son collect from Folsom State Prison.
"I only remember my dad at home three times, and every time it ended with the police picking him up," McCowan said. "My experience with my dad was visiting him in prison."
McCowan caused trouble every Thursday afternoon in sixth grade to avoid his class' reading circle, where kids teased him for not being able to read. It was one of those afternoons when an educator told McCowan, "Guys like you, they don't make it," McCowan recalled.
That prediction echoed in McCowan's head for two years until a flag football coach at his middle school made a different prophecy. Armando Garcia told him, "I've been watching you, and one day you will be a great one."
McCowan took it to heart.
"The power of the spoken word can either cripple you or fortify your destiny," the preacher said.
McCowan learned to read as a high school freshman and is now an avid reader and author.
Agreeing to attend youth services at a Baptist church only so he could play on its basketball team, McCowan also found religion in high school. He was a Hueneme High School junior when he began preaching at St. Paul Baptist Church in Oxnard. He graduated one semester early to study ministry and was ordained at 19.
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