They Went Shopping, Found a New Church

When the Huntington Beach Church of Religious Science outgrew its 140-seat New England-style church in late 1979, a search was begun to find a temporary home while a new church was built.

After six months, church leaders found themselves with only one option: two vacant storefronts in the Seacliff Village Shopping Center a mile from the beach.

The Rev. Peggy Bassett wasn’t sure how her 250-member congregation would react to attending church in a stark building devoid of stained-glass windows and other religious symbols--a building in a shopping center, no less.

“I was a little bit embarrassed by it and asked, ‘Is that the best we could do?’ ” she recalled. But “we had an 18-month lease while we built the new church, and then something happened, and I’m not sure what.”

What happened was that by the end of 1980--with little advertising and no sign posted in front of the shopping center--they already had outgrown the 300-seat church that was still in the planning stages.

Today, nearly six years after Bassett delivered her first sermon at the shopping center during an Easter sunrise service held next to an outdoor fountain, the Huntington Beach church has 1,800 members. It is, say church officials, the largest Church of Religious Science in Orange County and one of the fastest-growing in the nation.

The sanctuary now occupies five storefronts (seating up to 900), and nine other storefronts have been annexed for the church offices, counseling rooms, meeting rooms, classrooms and a metaphysical bookstore called the Aquarian Age.

Each month, about 50 new members--most of them under 50 and many of them young professionals--join the nondenominational church, which teaches a positive approach to life based on church founder Ernest Holmes’ “Science of Mind” philosophy.

In response to the church’s continued growth, the City Council in February granted permission to expand the sanctuary 20 feet into an alleyway--a $350,000 terraced-seating remodeling project that will add 500 seats. The council vote, which spurred cheers from the 100 church supporters in the audience, prompted one city planning staff member to remark in jest that “they’re going to take over the whole center.”

Bassett is no longer the least bit embarrassed by what she affectionately refers to as the “marketplace church.” After all, she said, “The Master Teacher taught in the marketplace and in the fields where the people were.”

“When I want to get a laugh,” Bassett added, “I say I’m the storefront preacher.”

They began arriving--about 900 strong--half an hour before the start of the 9:45 service, the second and largest of the three Sunday morning services held at the “marketplace church.”

A dozen parking monitors stationed throughout the shopping center lot were keeping watch to make sure church members didn’t park in spaces reserved for store customers.

Parking on Sunday has been a minor source of friction between the church and some of the merchants, who have complained that churchgoers are taking their customers’ parking places.

Parking Spaces Rented

To help alleviate parking problems and remain “good neighbors,” the church now runs two buses between the center and an office park across the street where 300 parking spaces have been rented. And an arrangement has been made with nearby Huntington Beach High School for additional parking spaces, if necessary.

But many of the shop and restaurant owners are the church’s biggest boosters. In fact, many open their doors early on Sunday mornings to take advantage of the heavy churchgoing foot traffic.

“We actually design our hours around the church,” said Jed Donohoe, co-owner of the Original Toy Box, which opens at 9 a.m. on Sundays. “We originally were going to close on Sundays, but you can’t pass up 1,500 people.”

“The parking problem has been corrected, and it’s working out very, very well,” said Ray Ross, president of the Seacliff Merchants Assn. “The biggest majority of merchants are thrilled that the church is here. On Sundays, (business) is just fantastic.”

Although the 9:45 a.m. service would not start for another 20 minutes, the large patio in front of the sanctuary was packed with people, many of whom had stayed after the 8 a.m. service to drink coffee and socialize. It was a warm, friendly crowd, with a lot of easy laughter and a lot of hugging.

‘Having Patio’

Bassett, always a visible presence after each service, called it “having patio.”

“The people here are a lot more friendly,” said Lana Grace, 37, of Huntington Beach, an unemployed aerospace worker. A former Baptist, she has been attending the church for 2 1/2 years.

“What I like about it is the positive approach to life and that there are no judgments involved,” she said. “You can just be who you are.”

“I was brought up a Roman Catholic, and that didn’t have the answers for me,” said Grace’s friend, Mark Helmer, 35, of Long Beach, a free-lance sportscaster who also works at KTTV.

With the Church of Religious Science, Helmer said, “You go in with the idea of expecting just about anything. It’s a very open-minded approach.”

A first-timer to the Huntington Beach church, Helmer said he had heard about Bassett at two other Religious Science churches he has attended in the Los Angeles area. He grinned when asked what he thinks of attending church in a shopping center.

“It’s just a whole new way of doing things,” he said. “(The Rev.) Robert Schuller started in a drive-in, so why not?”

First-Timers Cheered

Inside the sanctuary, music director Eric Strom, a young man in a gray three-piece suit, had finished singing “Peace on Earth,” and the 50 to 60 people attending the church for the first time were asked to stand. They were greeted with enthusiastic cheers and applause by the congregation and long-stemmed red carnations handed out by the ushers.

Finally, the striking, six-foot-tall, gray-haired Bassett--dressed for success in a rose-colored suit--stepped to the lectern.

Quoting variously from Jesus, Ernest Holmes, psychologist William James, motivational author Wayne Dyer and “someone” who said “there are no victims in life, only volunteers,” Bassett delivered a 30-minute sermon that was upbeat, humorous and--most of all--motivational.

“Too many of us get into mediocrity; we get into what the world thinks is normal or average, and we live our lives there,” she said in a slight accent that retains the flavor of her native Arkansas. “What a waste of precious time to be average or ordinary or mediocre! We were designed for much more than that. . . .”

Last year, Bassett was saying in an interview, church officials investigated the possibility of building a church on land next to the shopping center.

But, she said, that would have meant spending more than $4 million for 8 1/2 acres and at least an additional $3 million to build a 2,000-seat sanctuary and support buildings.

“It just seemed like more than I wanted to get into unless there was no other solution,” she said, seated in her office, a former loft in a stationery store. “That’s not to say if it worked out--if it just came up, and I didn’t have to do a big fund-raiser--I’d be happy to do it.”

“At the age I am,” Bassett observed, while declining to say how old she is, “I don’t see my legacy being mortar, bricks and stained-glass windows. I’d rather have a community of people who are supportive of each other. I see church as not necessarily something to be perpetuated, but a vehicle that brings people together around common values.”

Having a church in a shopping center, she said, has its advantages: “We’re integrated into the community, and as we grow we just take the space as we need it. The flexibility is great.”

The church has two more years on its shopping center lease, with a five-year option. Bassett said she plans to work seven more years as a minister. “I will never retire, but I feel I have at least seven more years because I’m a high-energy person. One of my idols is Bucky Fuller; he went on until he was 87, I think.”

R. Buckminster Fuller, the late inventor-futurist-philosopher, spoke at the church in 1984. He praised Bassett at the time by saying: “I want to acknowledge you for being willing to do church a different way and for not wasting raw materials and putting another 10 acres under asphalt.”

Fuller, along with such other guest speakers as authors Norman Cousins and Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, former Harvard psychology professor Ram Dass and United Nations Assistant Secretary General Robert Muller, have not only boosted the church’s recognition in the community but also have helped increase its membership, the majority of which is from the coastal area between Costa Mesa and Long Beach.

People ‘Open-Minded’

Offering such diverse speakers, Bassett said, “gives people the idea we’re not just locked into looking at life through one bias. People (who come to hear the speakers) say they don’t know what Religious Science is, but if they are in alignment with people like that, let’s check it out.”

Noting that many church members are teachers and therapists and, yes, yuppies (“Somebody’s got to love them,” she joked), Bassett said: “People here are very open-minded. We have people who have done EST, Lifespring and other intensive training. Our basic philosophy is that, as Ernest Holmes would say, we’re all divine, and making that discovery is what life is all about.

“I think this church appeals to people who have moved out of other religions because we definitely appeal to non-churched people. It’s a great joy to be involved with people who are alive and open to new things.”

The Church of Religious Science, Bassett explained, “is more of a philosophy of life than it is a religion. Meaning it is not dogmatic and leaves people a lot of options.

“We say if you can conceive it, you can do it. We believe that whatever I think I can do, I have the inner resources to make that a reality because if God made me out of Himself, that must mean I have inner resources I’ve never tapped.”

“It’s the philosophy of optimism and joy and positive thinking that’s attracting people,” said Ron Bassett (no relation to Peggy), a former Catholic monsignor who discovered the Huntington Beach Church of Religious Science three years ago and now serves as a receptionist-secretary at the church.

‘Parallel With Christianity’

“To me,” he added, “the philosophy of Science of the Mind is pretty parallel with Christianity. There’s no big jump. Anyone coming to us from a different persuasion doesn’t find it that traumatic.”

Although Peggy Bassett believes that the “non-traditional” and “non-threatening” environment provided by the shopping center location accounts for much of the church’s growth, it is Bassett herself, say her associates and members of the congregation, who attracts many newcomers and keeps the old flock from straying.

When asked to describe Bassett, her associates echo the same terms used by members of her congregation: “warm,” “very, very real,” “sincere,” “down to earth,” “a very human person,” a minister who is “not afraid to expose her own feelings.”

“Her relationship with the congregation is very personal,” said associate minister Linda McNamar. “She remembers people’s names, when they had their babies, what their kids are doing. Sometimes I’m really in awe of that because with a congregation this large she still knows the people.”

Asked if Bassett’s “high energy” self-description fits, McNamar laughed: “We’ve had ministers from other churches come in and follow her around and leave exhausted,” she said. “She’s always searching in her life for ways to expand and become more. And she shares that with us. It permeates everything around here.”

“The first time I heard Peggy speak,” said Ron Bassett, “it dawned on me why the Catholic church doesn’t allow women to be priests. I think they’re afraid of the competition because they (women) have a warmth and empathy about them.”

When she was 10, Peggy Bassett moved with her family from Arkansas to the Los Angeles area. A member of a “fundamental church,” which she declines to identify, Bassett said that as a teen-ager she wanted to become a missionary.

But after a year at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles--by then she was married and had a small son--World War II broke out and, she said, her dream of becoming a missionary was “put on hold.”

When she divorced her Seabee husband during the war, she said, “that ended my relationship with that particular church. They didn’t believe in divorce.”

Worked Two Jobs

Like other single women with children, Bassett said, “I did whatever I needed to get my son raised. I basically worked two jobs because I wanted him in private school.”

During the day, she worked on a switchboard. She worked nights as a waitress in South Gate. After the war she did office work for a home builder in the San Joaquin Valley and, in 1953, she moved to Long Island, N.Y., where she worked for another builder as a “girl Friday in a one-girl office” and eventually got into real estate and property management.

In 1961, after divorcing her second husband, she returned to Southern California, where she worked for a builder in Compton for four years, working her way up from “girl Friday” to administrative assistant. All the while, she said, she was studying the Science of the Mind philosophy.

In 1962, Bassett had met a woman from Woodland Hills who changed her life. The woman was the same age as Bassett and had the same type of background. And yet, Bassett said, “she had converted that into success. I said, ‘How did you do it?’ She said, ‘Because of my philosophy.’ ”

For Bassett, Science of the Mind was a revelation: She discovered, she said, that despite what had happened in her life in the past, “I had the freedom to make a new choice and that I had the inner resources myself.”

Her experience with a fundamental church, she said, had been that “God is ‘out there,’ and it is a God I have to placate by doing what the religion said I had to do, and a healthy self-image was interpreted as ego instead of discovering God.”

By following the philosophy of Science of the Mind, she said, “it moves a person from being an effect of what’s going on around them to seeing how they’re being a cause of it. It moves a person from being victimized in life to being a co-creator with God of our individual lives.”

By the early ‘70s, Bassett was working for a trade school selling educational programs to state agencies. She had married Fred Bassett, a salesman for a computer management service, and, she said, “I had taken all the non-ministerial (Science of the Mind) courses available. I said I can’t stop now.

“In 1972, I said to my husband, ‘I’m going to the seminary.’ He said, ‘You’re what? ‘ “

Filled In as Speaker

In 1961, after divorcing her second husband, she returned to Southern California, where she worked for a builder in Compton for four years, working her way up from “girl Friday” to administrative assistant. All the while, she said, she was studying the Science of the Mind philosophy.

In 1962, Bassett had met a woman from Woodland Hills who changed her life. The woman was the same age as Bassett and had the same type of background. And yet, Bassett said, “she had converted that into success. I said, ‘How did you do it?’ She said, ‘Because of my philosophy.’ ”

For Bassett, Science of the Mind was a revelation: She discovered, she said, that despite what had happened in her life in the past, “I had the freedom to make a new choice and that I had the inner resources myself.”

Her experience with a fundamental church, she said, had been that “God is ‘out there,’ and it is a God I have to placate by doing what the religion said I had to do, and a healthy self-image was interpreted as ego instead of discovering God.”

By following the philosophy of Science of the Mind, she said, “it moves a person from being an effect of what’s going on around them to seeing how they’re being a cause of it. It moves a person from being victimized in life to being a co-creator with God of our individual lives.”

By the early ‘70s, Bassett was working for a trade school selling educational programs to state agencies. She had married Fred Bassett, a salesman for a computer management service, and, she said, “I had taken all the non-ministerial (Science of the Mind) courses available. I said I can’t stop now.

“In 1972, I said to my husband, ‘I’m going to the seminary.’ He said, ‘You’re what? ‘ “

Filled In as Speaker

While Bassett was attending Ernest Holmes College in Los Angeles (the church seminary) in 1974, the aging minister of the tiny Huntington Beach Church of Religious Science was hospitalized and Bassett’s minister in Seal Beach asked if she would fill in as speaker one Sunday.

Bassett brought along her resume, which she gave to the president of the church board after the service.

At the time, Bassett said, she was still overcoming a stutter. But when the church board met the next week to discuss whether to hire her to replace the dying minister, her business experience far outweighed her speech handicap. As she later learned, the president told the board, “Heck, anybody can learn to talk. We need someone to run the business end.”

In December, 1974, the newly minted Rev. Peggy Bassett delivered her first sermon, titled “Set No Limits,” to her 50-member congregation.

In light of the church’s phenomenal growth over the last six years--the annual budget has climbed from $150,000 to $2.5 million--Bassett acknowledges that the title of her sermon was prophetic. At the time, however, she didn’t know to what extent: “I thought, ‘set no limits,’ by golly, maybe I’ll get a hundred people here.”

For Bassett, her last 12 years as a minister has meant “new challenges and new opportunities.”

“What it’s really done for me is allow me to grow spiritually, and to get instant feedback on how I’m doing,” she said.

And Sundays, she added, “are the high point.”