A former hip-hop artist, Pastor Stephen “Cue” JnMarie was a member of College Boyz, who had a hit with the song, “Victim of the Ghetto.”
He established The Row LA – The Church Without Walls in 2006 after moving to Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, a few blocks from Skid Row. The Church Without Walls, as the tagline implies, holds non-denominational worship services on the streets of Skid Row.
“Our group was considered a conscious hip-hop group,” says Pastor Cue, who was previously the founder and executive pastor at NewSong LA in Culver City and has also preached at Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood.
“There’s always been a connection to communities like Skid Row. I started walking down the streets and it felt like God was saying to me, ‘I need you to do the Church Without Walls.’ It felt like God wanted to have different expressions of the church… so people who are a little bit different can connect to God.
“Even if we may not agree with their theology [or] their religious beliefs, we agree that they are human beings. And if there is service to be done or love to be given, then we can do our best to do that.”
Pastor Cue says that in 18 years working in Skid Row, he has seen conditions worsen.
“The reason they’re getting worse is we always say this: that houselessness or homelessness is a racial justice issue,” he says.
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“You can trace it back even to the Japanese internment, when the Japanese were unjustly kicked out of their homes… next to Skid Row in Little Tokyo [and] Black folks … who were looking for a place to live in the second migration, moved into those homes that the Japanese were evicted from. Eventually, when the Japanese came back four or five years later, the Black folks had to move.
“It doesn’t matter what numbers you look at, whether it’s the national or state numbers, the county numbers, the city’s numbers,” says Pastor Cue.
“When you look at the numbers, African Americans will always be overrepresented, and Skid Row has been a containment zone for a long time. Deindustrialization contributed to homelessness. People say that Reagan did away with the mental institutions. It’s always a problem being added on to another problem.”
Pastor Cue notes that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, about 1.2 million people in Los Angeles were “living one paycheck away from being homeless.”
“There’s not a day that goes by when we’re on Skid Row that I step into the area that someone doesn’t come up to me and go, ‘Pastor Cue, can I get a job?’” he says. “They say folks are lazy and they don’t want to work. That’s not true.”
The Row LA currently has 20 employees as well as volunteers. Its ministry’s pillars include helping people find housing, aid and resources, and economic empowerment.
“We believe if folks have their own resources and generate their own resources, they may be able to sustain themselves better than we can,” says Pastor Cue, who established Creating Justice LA, a nonprofit that complements The Row LA with safe and creative opportunities for the Skid Row community.
One project is The Hip Hop Smoothie Shop, a worker-owned cooperative that starts employees at $20 an hour. Creating Justice LA is currently finalizing the purchase of the Skid Row People’s Market, a longtime family-owned business in the neighborhood, to provide more job opportunities and to continue local access to healthy food and necessities. In addition, Pastor Cue opened the Peace and Healing Center in 2023.
He says that the space, located at 116 E. 5th Street, provides, “a place to belong,” with events such as open mike nights and a book club, and most importantly, a clean, safe place to come in from the streets.
“Oftentimes, people see homeless folks as people … to help, but they don’t see [them] as part of the community,” says Pastor Cue.
“It’s a place to connect, it’s a great place to express. Watching people flourish, with their dignity intact, it’s an amazing thing to see.”
While the Peace and Healing Center is not intended as a pipeline to the Church Without Walls, Pastor Cue says that people gravitate to the worship services.
“When we opened the Peace and Healing Center, I specifically told folks, ‘Do not invite people to church,” he says.
“That’s not what we’re here for. But the funny thing is that everyone who comes to the Peace and Healing Center, follows us to church.
“We have quite a few folks who are LGBTQ+. These are folks that are not accepted in other areas. I’m not here to prove that I understand everything about humanity, but I tell people that if we’re going to err, we’re going to err on the side of love.”
