Axel D. Steuer, executive assistant to the...

Axel D. Steuer, executive assistant to the president of Occidental College and a professor of religious studies at the Eagle Rock campus, has been named president of a Lutheran college in Minnesota.

Steuer, 48, will become the 13th president of Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter--a school that in his words “has taken the step from a highly regarded regional college to a nationally ranked liberal arts institution.”

In a recently published survey of Lutheran colleges, Gustavus Adolphus was one of several that exceeded their fund-raising goals.

Steuer, who came to the United States in 1952 from Europe as a “displaced person,” earned his bachelor’s degree at Occidental and returned as a faculty member in 1976, chairing the religious studies department for several years. His academic specialty is religious philosophy and ethics.

CONGREGATION

Toluca Lake Trinity Church, an independent Pentecostal congregation located on Alameda Boulevard in the high-priced Media District, has voted to join the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, based in Los Angeles. The Rev. Walter Wentworth, 74, who founded the congregation 33 years ago and once had Bob Hope for a landlord, said he will preach his last sermon Sunday. “I wanted the congregation to have the stability that a denomination can give it,” said Wentworth. The pastor claimed that the property, situated not far from the Burbank Studios, is worth $4 million. He said the congregation had about 300 members when the idea was first raised two years ago; only 110 members have stayed with the church. “There are people who don’t want to belong to a denomination,” he said. The Rev. Eugene Kurtz, the U.S. general supervisor for the denomination, said that Foursquare churches number nearly 1,500.

DATES

Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, author of the poem “Babi Yar,” will speak at the Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) ceremony at 2 p.m. Sunday at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stalinist massacre of Jews at Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev. “His moving 1961 poem brought this tragedy to the attention of the whole world,” said Jack Salzberg, president of the sponsor, the Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles.

Andrew Bertie of Rome, the Grand Master of Roman Catholicism’s Knights of Malta, will visit Los Angeles today and Sunday--the first time the leader of that order has visited the city. Members of the order in the Los Angeles area, which includes many wealthy Catholics, donated more than $800,000 to local charities last year. Bertie, a member of the British aristocracy, will visit the Knights of Malta Free Clinic and meet with members Sunday at the California Club, a spokesman said.

A seminar comparing the Zen Buddhist monastic styles of Japanese, Korean and Chinese practitioners will be held next Saturday at the Zen Center of Los Angeles, 923 S. Normandie Ave. Robert Buswell Jr. of UCLA and T. Griffith Foulk of the University of Michigan will lead the daylong discussion, which will begin at 9 a.m. Registration fees range as high as $50.