Plans to Close Churches Pit Leaders Against Members : Religion: Some congregants feel their heritage is being destroyed. Battles center over granting landmark status.

When a Korean Methodist church here announced almost two years ago that it would close, many Korean-Americans responded as though a child were being kidnaped.

They deluged public officials with letters, announced plans to raise money to buy the church and launched a heated campaign to declare the whitewashed, tiled-roof building a historical landmark.

The battle, which has pitted the church against many prominent Korean-Americans, is similar to many that are taking place in cities across the country as religious leaders try to close churches that members have come to think of as their own: special places where they exchanged wedding vows, baptized their children and said final goodbys to loved ones who passed on.

The anguished fighting that has occurred in some Midwestern and Eastern urban centers is now shifting to California, where changing demographics are prompting several denominations to consider closing church doors, particularly in the Bay Area.

Faced with attempts to designate church buildings as landmarks to stave off demolition, attorneys for the denominations that own the property contend that constitutional guarantees of separation of church and state are at risk.

Earlier this year, Los Angeles’ Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other religious leaders won legislative passage of a state-wide moratorium that prevents cities from imposing landmark status on any religious properties in California next year without the owner’s permission.

“It’s open-hunting season on churches for a year,” said Los Angeles preservation attorney William Delvac, who helps church members try to save their cherished places of worship.

In Los Angeles, a historic Boyle Heights synagogue and a small Catholic mission near Downtown may face demolition, but Southern California has been spared wholesale closures of Catholic parishes because immigrants from Latin America and other Catholic regions are filling inner-city pews.

National experts on these church closure conflicts say they tend to involve Christian, mainline denominations, particularly Catholic churches. Because many Jews migrated from inner cities decades ago, older synagogues have already been demolished or sold to other religions.

But the moratorium on historic designations is disturbing to some. “It really could affect all groups,” said Stephen Sass, president of the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California, which wants to prevent demolition of the imposing, brick Breed Street shul, the Boyle Heights synagogue where the Yom Kippur scene from the 1927 movie “The Jazz Singer” was filmed.

Moves to close churches have embroiled such cities as Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City and Philadelphia in emotionally wrenching battles with church leaders facing declining membership and shrinking contributions.

“It seems like almost every major city has been affected,” said Robert Jaeger, co-director of Partners for Sacred Places, a national group that tries to find new uses for churches on the brink of closure. “It’s almost ubiquitous. Major dioceses that have not yet dealt with it will in the next few years.”

For the Korean-American community in San Francisco, the small, modest church in Chinatown--the oldest Korean church in the continental United States--is a symbol of ethnic heritage, a place where Koreans met to plot the independence of Korea from Japan, where immigrants exchanged tips on housing and jobs and sang Korean songs.

Korean-American supporters of saving the church refer to it as their “Plymouth Rock.” The congregation was established in 1904 and the church built in the 1930s.

Since the riots last year in Los Angeles, when many Korean businesses were attacked, the desire for a monument of their own has become more pressing for many Korean-Americans.

But the Korean pastor of the church wants to leave Chinatown and move to a larger building in the Sunset district, a more residential section where many Koreans now live.

Support for designating the old church a landmark has come from Korean-Americans across the country, including Los Angeles, but most of the newer immigrants who worship at the church support their pastor’s wish to move.

The local Methodist hierarchy has rallied behind the pastor’s plans to sell the church to a mortuary. Supporters of historic designation are bitter, in part over opposition from African-American Methodist leaders here.

“We respect what Martin Luther King did,” said Steven Soonkoo Hong, 53, secretary of the Korean-American Heritage Foundation, “and our history and our culture should be respected.”

But the Rev. Suk-Chong Yu, pastor of the church, said a bigger building is needed if the congregation is to grow. “Who will want to buy this property as a landmark?” the minister asked. “Half our congregation is over 60 and 70. Young couples with children, they don’t want to come. If we move to a bigger church with easier parking, they want to come.”

The hostile confrontation--both sides have accused the other of lies and greed--is likely to be overshadowed by the Catholic Church’s plans to consolidate several San Francisco parishes in the months ahead.

Collections at churches are down, the needs of the poor are up and many churches require expensive earthquake safety retrofitting--all reasons cited by San Francisco archdiocesan officials for studying which church properties to sell or lease.

“It’s so difficult for young families, once they get ready to settle down, to afford to buy a house here,” said George Wesolek, special projects coordinator for the Archdiocese of San Francisco. “A lot of Chinese also are coming into our city, and very few are Catholic or Christian, so that changes the demographics for the uses of our churches tremendously.”

The Oakland diocese recently fought off community attempts to save two Oakland churches that were damaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake. One has been demolished; the other is being dismantled.

The Catholic Church over the next couple of years will also be considering closure of parishes in counties near San Francisco.

“In the mainline denominations, particularly in the Catholic Church in the past five to six years, we have seen dioceses . . . concluding that they can no longer continue to support all of the churches,” said Diane Cohen, co-director of Partners for Sacred Places.

The Catholic Church, the largest single denomination in the country, and other long-established churches such as the United Methodists have been losing members since the mid-1960s, said Rev. Dean Kelley, counselor on religious liberty for the National Council of Churches. Smaller religions, such as the Mormons and Pentecostal faiths, have been gaining, he said.

While the Korean Methodist Church here was trying to fend off landmark status, the Catholic archdiocese was fighting a similar battle against designation of a church in North Beach, where Chinese are moving into once largely Italian neighborhoods.

After an emotional feud, the church relented to landmark designation, announcing that it will lease the building to a nonprofit group that cares for drug addicts and AIDS sufferers.

But the fights over the church unnerved religious leaders enough to lobby the California Legislature. At the request of an interfaith council here, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill to prevent localities from designating religious properties landmarks without the churches’ or synagogues’ permission.

The bill failed, but Brown won passage of a one-year moratorium on such designations. Church leaders and legislators in other states have tried unsuccessfully to adopt similar laws.

Brown’s amendment has set the stage for a major confrontation between religious denominations and preservationists next year.

Wesolek of the San Francisco archdiocese said a statewide coalition of religious leadership is forming to win passage next year of a permanent ban that would also limit other kinds of regulation of religious properties.

“The churches are not against preservation,” he said. “It’s more a question for us being able, since we are property-rich and cash-poor, of being able at a certain time to convert some of that (property) for ministries.”

Preservationists are considering a legal challenge of the moratorium, but no decision has been reached. “We were hoping a lot of churches wouldn’t find out about this,” said a preservation activist in Southern California.

Stephen Finn, an attorney for the San Francisco archdiocese, said California churches are in particularly difficult straits because of the costs of seismic retrofitting.

“People have no idea how hard it is to raise money now,” Finn said. “We are in the worst recession since the Depression in California. The governments are bankrupt and have cut down on all the social services. People deal with us like we are back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but the environment now is much different, much harsher.”

Finn contended that forcing a financially squeezed church to do earthquake retrofitting and then potentially reducing the property’s financial worth by declaring it a landmark violates religious liberty guarantees of the 1st Amendment.

“I think if you destroy somebody’s ability to practice religion, if you take away all the resources they have available to meet their pastoral and charitable callings, if that isn’t a violation of the 1st Amendment, I don’t know what is,” Finn said.

Churches have successfully persuaded state courts that preservation designations violated state constitutional religious liberty rights. But a federal court in New York held that such actions do not violate the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Supreme Court let the decision stand.

In Los Angeles, a small group of Latino Catholics is struggling to save Our Lady of Holy Rosary Mission near Downtown. Archdiocese officials say the mission could no longer be staffed and closed it a month ago, referring parishioners to nearby churches.

But at a city Cultural Heritage Commission meeting this month, former members of the church persuaded city officials to consider making the small, stucco building a historic-cultural monument. The hearing, in which many of the mission supporters spoke in Spanish, was emotional. One speaker wept.

The archdiocese is selling the church to the Los Angeles school district, which wants to build a school on the site. But Latinos, particularly Mexican-Americans, say it represents their history in Southern California.

“By tearing down this church,” said Jose Mendoza, organizer of the Committee to Save Our Lady of Holy Rosary Mission in the Name of God, “it’s like losing a mom. You become an orphan.”

The Korean community’s campaign to save their church in Chinatown received a major setback Nov. 4 when San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan vetoed an ordinance designating the church a landmark. Supporters of the designation say they will try to persuade the Board of Supervisors to override the veto, but they are one vote short.

“It is like destroying the Liberty Bell for us,” Hong said. “They are doing wrong. This is not a religious matter. This is our history.”