Membership Grows in Glendora Quarters : New Site Opens Doors for Church

With basketball hoops hanging overhead and bleachers folded along cement walls, members of the Church of the Open Door prayed for fairness in their legal battles to determine the church’s destiny.

They prayed for victory, too.

“I’m going to ask that truth and justice prevail--and that we win,” said the Rev. Dale O. Wolery, associate pastor of the Glendora church during a recent Sunday service.

The congregation of about 500 savored with the pastor the prospect of victory in its legal problems, the one problem that could reverse the fortunes of a church reborn.

Full Congregation

Sunday services are filled and Bible classes are overflowing at the church, which moved in 1985 from its landmark building in downtown Los Angeles to 40 acres that formerly were part of the Azusa Pacific University campus.

That alone is testament, church leaders believe, to the wisdom of the congregation’s decision to move to a rural setting after 72 years in the same urban neighborhood.

They also cite declining membership, an aging congregation, increasing building maintenance costs and parking rental fees as reasons for uprooting the congregation from its home, a building widely known for its towering sign proclaiming “Jesus Saves.”

Although the church lost many members when it moved, it has grown steadily since it opened in the gymnasium, church leaders say. But its continued growth could be stymied.

Challenged by Lawsuit

A lawsuit filed last September by a woman who claims she was a former member of the church challenges the church’s right to sell the downtown building.

Television evangelist Gene Scott, who bought the building for $23 million, has made only one payment on a debt that was to have been retired by the end of this year.

Church leaders had thought their problems were solved when Scott agreed last year to buy the building. The money was to have been split between the Church of the Open Door, which owned the 4,000-seat auditorium, and Great Western Hotels, which owned dormitories on both sides of the building.

Scott, who was seeking a hotel and headquarters for his broadcast ministry, made a $6.5-million down payment on the building last year but has made only one payment, $166,000 in August. The Rev. G. Michael Cocoris, senior pastor of the Glendora church, said no payments have been made since then.

Scott now owes $7.5 million in payments on principal and interest, said Edward L. Masry, attorney and chief financial officer for Scott’s Westcott Christian Center.

Masry said the payments have not been made since the lawsuit was filed “because we don’t know the status of the property.”

Church of the Open Door officials had planned to use proceeds from the sale to buy the $6-million property in Glendora and finance construction of new church buildings.

The church has been able to pay only $2 million and the remaining $4 million is due by the end of next year, church officials said.

‘We’re in Limbo’

“We’re just in limbo until we get the money that is owed us,” said Raymond Killion, a lifelong member of the church and an elder there for several years. “We don’t have the money to build.”

Despite the legal entanglements, however, church leaders are enthusiastic about the changes they’ve witnessed at the church’s new address.

“The problems we have now are problems relating to growth,” said the Rev. Thomas L. Vangeison, minister of Christian education. “The problem we had before was about decline.”

The 29-mile move “was something we had to do,” said Killion, who was chairman of the committee in charge of finding a new location. “That building was simply deteriorating. It seemed every Sunday we had leaking pipes or flooded classrooms.”

It cost $250,000 a year to maintain the building, and another $41,000 a year to rent parking space, Wolery said.

There were other problems, too.

Denied Day Care Permit

Cocoris said the church applied for a permit to operate a day-are center but was refused because there was no play area outside.

More important, an aging and declining membership blurred the future of the church.

In the downtown church’s heyday, as many as 3,500 people filled most of the three-tiered Hope Street auditorium. Over the past 10 to 15 years, however, membership fell and by 1979, when Cocoris became head pastor, the church had only 500 members.

Cocoris said membership had grown to about 800 before the congregation voted in 1983 to move, but “once we decided to move, every time we’d make an announcement about it, we’d lose 50 people.”

Historically, the church has consisted mainly of white, middle-class members who commuted to services downtown, Cocoris said.

‘Regional Church’

“Churches reflect the community,” Cocoris said. “But the Church of the Open Door has always been an exception. We’ve been more of a regional church.”

A member of the staff once counted personal checks from about 30 communities in a single collection, Cocoris said.

Cocoris said the downtown church did not actively seek out members of some of the ethnic groups who lived in the vicinity of the church. It “was kind of futile to us because Little Tokyo, East L.A. and Koreatown each have their own churches.”

The downtown location, however, did have a special program for Latinos. At the time of the move, about 25% of the members were black, 10% were Asian and Latino and the rest were Anglo, Cocoris said.

Loss of Minorities

The move to the suburbs has cost the church minority members. About 5% of the current membership is black, Cocoris estimates, and there are only a few Asians and Latinos.

But the move to Glendora has not changed the basic ministry of the fundamentalist, evangelistic church, Cocoris said. That ministry was established in 1915 by the church’s first pastor, R.A. Torrey, who emphasized evangelism, missions and the spiritual life.

About $280,000 of the church’s $1.4-million budget this year will support missionaries around the world, and Sunday services and daily messages are broadcast on two radio stations.

Since moving from downtown Los Angeles, church officials say, increasing numbers of younger people have joined the church. Officials estimate that the average age of the congregation has fallen from 50 to 30.

And young parents arrive at services early to deliver their children to special church and Bible classes.

Commuter Congregation

About 100 of the 400 people who attended services regularly at the downtown building now travel to the Glendora church, Cocoris said. And about 500 people have joined since the move, he said. The morning service draws an average of about 550 adults, and another 100 children attend their own services.

“We knew that all the older people were going to stop coming,” Cocoris said, because many would be unable or unwilling to make the trip to Glendora. “But as they started dropping out, they were being replaced.”

One of those who stayed with the church is Nelli Jackson, who drives with her husband, Mel, from their home in La Cresenta. The couple has belonged to the church for 20 years.

“A lot of our friends aren’t coming here anymore. It’s like starting all over again,” Nelli Jackson said.

But the Jacksons continue to attend Church of the Open Door services because they like Cocoris. “He’s really concerned for the people. He has a real heart.”

Increase in Young Congregants

Vangeison said he is heartened by the increase in the number of young people who attend the Glendora church. Sunday school classes for children in nursery school through sixth grade are full, and the number of junior and senior high school students also is growing, he said.

Downtown, between 30 and 50 children were enrolled in Sunday school classes. Now, as many as 140 children attend Sunday school each week, church officials said.

And when it moved, the church had only about 30 teen-age members, Vangeison said. Now there are about 120.

“Young people in the church and young couples were unheard of,” Vangeison said. “They just weren’t going to start driving to (downtown).”

Cindy Mann, 21, said she joined the church in September after attending one service. “I like the mix of people. There’s a wide variety, older people and younger people, whites and blacks.”

Growing Pains

And the number of adult Bible classes has increased, Vangeison said, from two downtown to as many as eight each Sunday. Recently, the church also started a special class for young married couples.

But the church is experiencing growing pains.

It has run out of classroom space and recently moved one of its larger adult classes into the gymnasium. Another class is being taught in a house that was to be demolished.

Church officials want to build a 2,500-seat auditorium for services and a hall with a nursery, more classrooms and seating for another 1,200. The church also has plans for parking for up to 1,000 vehicles.

But those plans are on hold pending resolution of the legal disputes.

Claim to Deed

The lawsuit seeking to prevent the church from selling the building was filed late last year by Lehua May Garcia, who said in her suit that she had been a member of the church when she was a child growing up in downtown Los Angeles 30 years ago.

Garcia contends that a long-forgotten deed dedicates the church property to “the promulgation of the eternal trusts of God’s Holy Word” and casts doubt on whether the building can ever be sold.

Scott had used the purported deed restriction as the basis of a suit of his own against the leadership of the Church of the Open Door, seeking to rescind the purchase agreement. But the suit was dropped after church officials agreed to lower the down payment.

The agreement between Scott and the Church of the Open Door was reached after Lincoln Property Co., a San Francisco developer, defaulted on an earlier agreement to buy the church complex, demolish it and erect a 33-story office tower.

Scott, whose prominence and income are derived mostly from his broadcast ministry, moved his two Glendale congregations into the newly named Wescott Christian Center in the downtown building and held his first service there last July before a crowd of about 4,000.

Foreclosure Started

Although he has not been making payments, Scott has continued to preach there. Church officials started foreclosure proceedings in November. Scott subsequently sought an injunction to stop the church from foreclosing, but Superior Court Judge Ricardo Torres denied the motion last month.

Westcott officials have appealed Torres’ ruling and asked for an emergency stay of the decision, “so that the foreclosure would stop,” Masry said, adding that he expects a decision on the appeal within days.

Joel Klevens, a lawyer who represents Church of the Open Door, said the foreclosure will go forward unless Scott pays the church what he owes it.

For now, the church is trying to raise funds to refurbish the gymnasium and install air-conditioning.

Despite the problems, the congregation remains optimistic as it gathers on Sunday mornings.

Betty Chamberlain, who joined the church in 1966, said members of the downtown congregation voted for the move “because they knew the church had to live.”

“Downtown, I always considered our church to be a conference center. It wasn’t a local church because no one lived downtown.”

Chamberlain regards the growing number of children as a sign that the move was the right thing to do.

“It gives us a future,” Chamberlain said.