How does the author compare his involvement in ministry with the thugs on the Avenue in "Down at the Cross"?

The author makes the implication that he and the young men and women on the Avenue were doing essentially the same thing. They were making a desperate, self-blinding effort to escape from the economic, spiritual, social, political and emotional oppression of being black in white America. There is the sense that, for the author, Jesus was his addiction. Just as the young people in the street avoided the pain of their situation through the use alcohol and/or other drugs, so did the author through the church.