Pastor Emmett Neal is often described as someone with a serious and intimidating demeanor — and he doesn’t take no for an answer.

Neal, an SF State alumnus, sat at a coffee shop in San Francisco with a solemn stare on his face. He gently held a black folder filled with awards and other recognitions from his days at SF State, and began to reminisce the marks he had made.

“I have always kind of been driven to be successful,” Neal said. “I knew the importance of getting up and getting to class on time.”

Neal graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in social work from SF State in 2000. Today he is a child protective service worker and helps children in dysfunctional households at the Human Services Agency of San Francisco.

“I have a heart for helping people,” Neal said. “I like to see people improving their lives, to see other people enjoying their lives. I think that’s wonderful.”

When he is not helping more than 30 different families, Neal is pastoring at the Macedonian Baptist Church in San Francisco. He has been involved in ministry since 1991.

He grew up interested in all aspects of the church from a very young age. The ministry of preaching and singing was like soul food for him.

“I needed to be in church,” Neal said. “It was a calling inside. You have to go. This is for you.”

Neal even met his wife through the church as a young boy. Both of their families attended St. John’s Baptist church.

“He’s very young, but he has a strong mind,” said Makia Neal, 31, who also has a large involvement with the church. “He’s outstanding. You would never know a young person could be doing something like that, a big church as it is.”

Today Neal, in collaboration with the church, is working to establish a youth home for boys in San Francisco. He said it should be open by this spring and will include a full staff of counselors and volunteers.

In 1999, Neal first began pastoring at the Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church where he strove to establish outreach programs and clothing drives, but the church did not embrace his ideas. He said he left the church because he reached his limit for what he could do there.

Now Neal finds himself at the Macedonian Baptist Church, where he participates in a food drive every Wednesday. The program feeds more than 300 people, and he said the line goes out the door.

The church has services every Sunday at 10:30 a.m. Neal said about 200 people gather to sing, listen to his sermons, conduct responsive Bible readings and study the church’s mission statement.

Knowing that the church embraces outreach programs, Neal derived an idea for a youth home. The soon-to-be boys’ home in Richmond is a property of the church, which has been rented out to various tenants throughout the years. After the last tenants left the three-bedroom house in July 2005, Neal decided it was time to make the home a part of a service to the city. He introduced the idea to the church in August 2005.

“They need so much,” Neal said, of young adolescent boys. He said a lot of the kids he came across through his work have trust issues and live in dysfunctional households where parents neglect their children.

Funded through federal and state dollars in collaboration with a newly-established non-profit organization called the Bedford Place Inc., the home will be ready to run as a full-fledged facility, according to Neal.

“I think its great,” said 71-year-old Billie Calvin, a longtime member of the church. “I am a foster parent and I take in children in my home, and so I'm working with the group home, helping to get it together so that it will be ready for licensing.”

According to Calvin, the intent of the home is to provide children with a stable place to live, a safe environment, and to give them the opportunity and the ability to do better than they were doing before.

“I need workers. I need people who are going to use their hands and their feet — use their gifts and talents,” Neal said. “We need people who are going to be dedicated to this particular ministry. I can’t do it all by myself.”