A New Beginning, a Solemn End : Shepherd of the Hills Is Reborn, While Church of the Ascension Is Laid to Rest

Leaders of an Episcopal church in Tujunga, down to 21 members who are “burned out” trying to keep the congregation financially afloat, have administered last rites to their parish.

Formed in 1914 and believed to be the oldest church in the Sunland-Tujunga area, the Church of the Ascension was an active, 300-member parish in the late 1950s. The church moved into a new building then, and its drama group was headed by Bill Scott, the late actor best known as the voice of the cartoon moose Bullwinkle.

But as membership dwindled in the late 1980s, the parish went without a full-time rector. In a last-ditch effort to revive the parish, the Rev. Wendy Watson, a bilingual priest, was hired in January, 1990, to increase the church’s community services to the poor in the neighborhood.

A group of mothers meets regularly there for parenting classes, and a drug and alcohol abuse program has sought to help local teen-agers.

However, the effort was “too little, too late,” according to Watson, who said the remaining parishioners “are burned out. Not once, but over and over.”

The church’s problems stem partly from a poor location on Mountair Avenue, a residential side street, but the Sunland-Tujunga area has also changed from a largely white, middle-class neighborhood to one with a substantial, Spanish-speaking immigrant population.

John Fortman, whose family has been in the church for 30 years, said the parish had no other choice but to close. A member of the church’s governing vestry, Fortman made the motion last July to shut down the church.

“We felt it would be best to use our financial and spiritual assets in another way to fulfill our Christian mission,” said Fortman, who is an insurance broker in Glendale.

About 200 former members and diocese officials showed up for the final Eucharist on Sunday. It was a bittersweet mix of reunions and remembrances. “Here we sit today at a requiem for Ascension parish,” Archdeacon Hartshorn Murphy told the crowd. “For everyone, there is a sense of prevailing numbness.”

“There’s quite a few people I haven’t seen in a long time,” said Walt Proudman, a member since 1946. “But it’s a sad day, really. It’s like a funeral.”

A slide show on the church’s history was presented in the parish hall during a party after the service.

Members are expected to transfer either to St. Luke’s of the Mountains, two miles away in La Crescenta, or to other Valley parishes. Watson has applied for a doctoral program at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

Assets of the Church of the Ascension will be turned over to the Los Angeles Episcopal Diocese for disposition. If the buyer of the property is not another church, the 12 stained glass windows will be removed and saved for use elsewhere.

Murphy, a diocesan official who was consulted on the closing, told the diocesan newspaper, Episcopal News, that there is a lesson for other churches in Ascension’s slow death: “I heard repeatedly that the church truly died 25 to 30 years ago and has been living on the ‘artificial respiration’ of memories, habit and cultural class identity. There are at least a dozen parishes walking blindly in their footsteps . . . today.”