He was born in a broken neighborhood in East Los Angeles. When his parents divorced, his heart and home were broken. Statistically speaking, Frank would likely never amount to anything but trouble.
Yet God had his hand on Frank. After graduating from a Christian university, Frank sensed a call to evangelism and scheduled a series of meetings in the summer of 1961.
Yolanda remembers. She was 15, babysitting at the home of a liberal mainline pastor’s family. “I honestly don’t think he was saved,” Yolanda recalls.
But Yolanda was spiritually hungry and wanted to study the Bible. When she mentioned that to the pastor, he handed her a flyer advertising a week of evangelistic meetings at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.
The pastor offered to drive Yolanda and her friends to the school. She smiles, recalling, “It ended up that we had nearly 25 kids and it took several vehicles.”
Speaking that night was a young trumpet-playing evangelist named Frank Gonzales. His music was bright, his message was clear: apart from Christ, there is no hope for salvation.
That very night, Yolanda received Christ, as did ten of her friends. As for Frank Gonzales, he went on to share Christ with people all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Guatemala.
But the remarkable thing about Frank was that he didn’t do this ministry alone. He assembled teams of college-aged kids (like Yolanda) to travel with him and sing and share in week-long outreaches that included sports, door-to-door witnessing, and evening concerts and preaching.
Notably, many of the team members Frank took only be described as broken. They came from troubled families, were former drug addicts, or had social issues. Frank loved them and discipled them all.
Team members attended class every morning. My wife Diana, who traveled with the ministry for three years, recalls. "We were taught theology, Scripture memorization, and personal evangelism. Frank was absolutely committed to our growth."
By the time Frank died in 1994, he had discipled more than 4,000 young people, and many thousands more were saved at churches and other meetings where he spoke and played.
The world said that Frank would never amount to anything. But God whispered otherwise.
Maybe you feel broken at this very moment. Broken emotionally, relationally—maybe spiritually. You might have a broken past, a broken track record. And every voice you hear seems to say, “You’ll never amount to anything.”
But God whispers otherwise. Search the Scriptures and you’ll discover the undeniable: Christ loves to use broken people.
Just ask the thousands of people touched for eternity by the broken boy from the broken neighborhood in East Los Angeles.