Church’s Mall Plan Angers Members : Newbury Park: Some Adventists say proposed development violates their own religious teachings.

A plan by the Seventh-day Adventist Church to build a 30-acre shopping mall and movie theater in Newbury Park has generated the usual complaints from neighbors concerned about increased traffic, noise, pollution and crime.

But it has also raised the hackles of some church members, who fear that the Adventists are violating their own religious teachings as they prepare development plans for Thousand Oaks officials to review this summer.

By negotiating with theater chains for a multiscreen theater on property that now houses the chapel, church leaders are ignoring their own admonitions that movies carry “Satan’s word,” Adventist Manijeh Fatollahi said.

Adventists also preach against doing business on Saturday and forbid consumption of alcohol, but the church’s development proposal includes a Price Club-type warehouse and other stores that would sell liquor and remain open through the weekend.

Church officials in charge of the project angrily refute accusations that they are abandoning religious principles for material gain.

Although they will shepherd the project through the Planning Commission and City Council over the next six months, the Adventists plan to sell the movie theater and perhaps the retail stores once the development gets under way, church leaders said.

The Adventists’ project would require an amendment to the city’s general plan and rezoning of the church’s property, a grassy, hilly 450-acre parcel north of Wendy Drive off the Ventura Freeway. The City Council has agreed to process the church’s applications quickly, and public hearings are tentatively scheduled for this fall.

Two years in the planning, the proposal calls for relocating the church’s aging school, chapel and senior citizen bungalows to the northern end of its campus, away from the industrial buildings, motels and fast-food restaurants of Newbury Park.

To fund that move, estimated to cost up to $30 million, church officials hope to build a 30-acre shopping and entertainment complex on the parcel where its buildings now stand. The development would cost from $50 million to $100 million and could open by Thanksgiving of 1994, project manager Dale Ortmann said.

While they intend to design the grounds and screen potential tenants as a form of quality control, the Adventists cannot impose their morals on business owners seeking to rent space in their mall, project architect Francisco A. Behr said.

Or, as church official Harold Reiner explained: “We worship on the Sabbath, but we don’t tell our neighbors what to do.”

But Fatollahi, a born-again Christian who converted to the Adventist faith in 1984, doesn’t buy those arguments.

Worried about how she will explain the project to her two young sons, Fatollahi denounced Adventist planners for failing to practice what they preach. She attends an Adventist Church in Los Angeles, but had planned to send her children to the Newbury Park branch’s school until she learned of the development.

“It’s like, when you go to church and pray, you’re religious and when you get out, you’re a regular person,” she said. “They want to do business but they don’t care about society.”

Yet many of Fatollahi’s neighbors, including some church members, applaud the development proposal.

“I’m glad people are bringing new jobs to the area, and it’s great if we can get people who are driving down the freeway to stop and spend money here,” Lance Winslow, president of The Car Wash Guys, said to a burst of applause at a recent public forum.

“If they keep it up well, it will be a real asset to the community,” added Marc Kernodle, a manufacturing operator at Amgen.

Although at least half of the 120 residents at the public forum reacted favorably to the development, many expressed sorrow that the Adventists plan to tear down an equestrian facility that has long stood in the neighborhood.

Fearful that their community’s rural atmosphere will be lost along with the stables, neighbors urged church leaders to relocate the equestrian center elsewhere on Adventist property.

“I moved to Newbury Park because of the open space,” said Marc Josephson, a marketing and advertising consultant who has lived in the neighborhood for two years. “I don’t want this type of project in my front yard.”