Speakers at the Clark County Prayer Breakfast recognized that as they were being served breakfast in the expansive ballroom of the Hilton Vancouver Washington, others were blocks away living in tents, dealing with a blustery Friday morning.
“Somebody’s son is there. Somebody’s daughter is there,” the Rev. Bill Ritchie said. “Where are these people supposed to go? What are they supposed to do?”
Ritchie, the founding pastor of Crossroads Community Church, was honored during the 14th annual prayer breakfast. Along with founding the 7,000-member church, Ritchie is the chairman of the Clark County Commission on Aging and helped launch Cornerstone Christian Academy.
“I never set out to build a church this size,” Ritchie said. “It was God’s idea. … We tried our best to listen to him.”
Clark County’s homelessness problem has been on Ritchie’s radar because it’s on God’s radar, he said. This issue has created an opportunity for people to get together and change the community for the better, Ritchie said. Members of the faith community are getting together to build huts for the homeless, which keep them warmer, drier and safer during the cold months. Ritchie urged people to put their egos aside and serve those who are most vulnerable.
A common thread among the speakers at the prayer breakfast was the notion that it’s better to serve than to be served.
The Rev. Dennis Fuqua led the crowded ballroom through a five-part prayer, where people clustered together to pray over people who protect and serve the community, including first responders. Several people clasped hands and prayed in a circle around a table where Sheriff Chuck Atkins and several of his deputies were seated. Others crowded around Vancouver police officers.
“We’re praying because we’ll never give up,” the Rev. Joyce Smith said.
Broussard’s story
Eldridge Broussard III has come a long way since his tumultuous youth, and that’s thanks to people answering his prayers.
“I’m not here because I’m an expert,” said Broussard, the keynote speaker at the prayer breakfast.
After a brief stint with the Portland Trail Blazers and the Los Angeles Lakers, his father, Eldridge Broussard Jr., opened the Ecclesia Athletic Association compound in Sandy, Ore. Beatings were reportedly routine for the 50-some children living on the property, billed as a training camp for Olympic hopefuls. It was shut down in the late 1980s after 8-year-old Dayna Broussard was beaten to death while other children watched. Eldridge Broussard III, who goes by El, was 9 years old at the time.
Broussard knew no other lifestyle and was so used to living with a large group of people that he struggled once he entered the foster care system.
“My whole life has been about my father,” Broussard said.
He got passed off to several different families, was expelled from school repeatedly and eventually dropped out of school in the 10th grade. One day, while at a McDonalds, a local youth pastor offered to buy Broussard a hamburger. The pastor — like so many others who lifted him up — answered a prayer Broussard hadn’t made.
From then, he had church friends and gang friends. While he was at a Taco Bell one night, rival gang members drove by and threatened to kill Broussard. Angry, Broussard drove past them and fired off 14 rounds, striking three people, before crashing his car into a tree. He woke up in jail, facing decades of prison.
He got sentenced to four years for unlawfully using a weapon. The sentence came with the promise that his record would be expunged when he reached adulthood. For a while, he was mad at his lawyer — who committed suicide weeks after the trial ended — for getting him years of imprisonment for a weapons charge. Later, he realized how hard that lawyer had worked and how valuable it was to have his record expunged.
“It’s not always the reality we have that’s the problem. It’s how we view that reality,” Broussard said.
Having left boot camp and prison, he landed a job at the Troutdale, Ore. Home Depot.
“I went from selling crack cocaine to selling appliances,” Broussard quipped. The gifts God gave him were intentional, he said, but he had applied them in the wrong way during his youth.
He was so successful at his work, that he moved up to supervisor and then over to the loss-prevention department. His boss — unaware of his criminal past since it had been expunged — said Broussard had an unusual knack for spotting criminals a mile away.
Although he was making good money, the work weighed on him, made him feel guilty. He was arresting people for committing crimes when he secretly had a criminal past.
When he first began telling his story to incarcerated people, he struggled; he wasn’t recognizing people who lifted him up.
Broussard transferred to a sales job at Costco and got into a heated argument with a co-worker in which Broussard revealed his criminal past. Though he eventually left Costco, his boss told him that he would give a formerly incarcerated youth a chance at a job. Broussard began wondering how many people he could help if he told his story to more people.
So many people had been the answer to his prayers. They had held him accountable, set high expectations and helped him meet those expectations. Now, it was his turn to be somebody’s answer.
“I do know why God put me here,” he said.
As Broussard’s story and the prayer breakfast ended, people joined Vancouver police Officer Rey Reynolds in singing “Amazing Grace.”
