A.M.E. Church Is a Voice in South County ‘Wilderness’ : Religion: An unlikely ministry above an Irvine bowling alley helps unify a small and dispersed African American community.

One floor removed from the rumble of bowling balls and the crack of tenpins lies the quaint little chapel of Irvine Lanes.

No steeple marks the church of Christ Our Redeemer African Methodist Episcopal, which also lacks a public sign or even a listing in the phone book. Yet its windowless, second-story sanctuary is filled with a young flock singing “We Shall Overcome” while struggling to ignore the occasional faint scent of sweat socks and old beer.

Just a year ago, this infant congregation had dwindled to the size of the original apostles, a chorus of voices so faint that the forlorn music made the church pianist want to weep.

Then came a preacher from Los Angeles with a mission to build up the lone black church in the sprawling southern suburbs of Orange County, where the scattered and isolated African American population had long ago lost its heart and center in Santa Ana.

“Even though we’re meeting in a bowling alley,” observed the new church pastor, the Rev. Douglas M. Patterson Sr., “we’re still in a place of worship. We have our prayer and we realize God can come to us in any place.”

God may find them anywhere, but this is the only place among tranquil suburban neighborhoods and grassy office parks where black church members can glance around the room, see others like themselves, and greet each other without introduction as “Sister” or “Brother.”

Here they are the majority at the Christ Our Redeemer church, which has managed to flourish despite the unheavenly ambience of bowling balls and strikes, a history of internal dissension and meager resources, and the difficulties of reaching out to a small, widely dispersed black population.

When they walk past the bowlers on the first floor and climb the flight of stairs to Redeemer’s door, they leave behind a suburban world that is occasionally lonely, often friendly and sometimes hostile to the 42,000 black residents who make up a little more than 2% of Orange County’s population.

“I came from a big Los Angeles church where we had some 10,000 members, three services a day,” Patterson said. “Then I come here about a year ago to Orange County, to a church where there are 12 people, no piano and no choir.”

Two centuries ago, Richard Allen, the original founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, launched the worldwide denomination from a Philadelphia blacksmith’s shop with an anvil for an altar.

So, too, has Patterson improvised, with taped music and a donated piano, borrowed chairs and a portable communion rail, fund-raisers and charity appeals featuring his own “spiritual father,” his former ministerial boss.

Occasionally, Patterson will slip in his sermons, referring to the hymnals stored in “your pews”--actually padded chairs. But like Patterson, members overlook these earthly matters of style, ignoring the fact that their church’s most distinctive architectural feature is fluorescent lights instead of arched stained glass.

Somehow Patterson’s steady baritone singing voice and generous ration of hugs seemed to transform a bowling alley conference room into a community for a people searching for haven. His comforting words made awkward newcomers relax.

“You are at home here,” he said, stretching both hands toward two strangers. “You are ours. You are from here.”

At the 11 a.m. Sunday service, Patterson bounded into the conference room with a bright orange kente cloth hanging loosely against his black robes and a crisp white handkerchief in his hand. His smile never wavered as he intoned the words of the National Negro Hymn, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” urging the nearly 40 worshipers to extend a handshake in greeting to their seatmates.

More often they embraced.

Historically, the A.M.E. network has provided shelter for the black community since the original church, Mother Bethel, was a northern way station for slaves seeking escape in the caves and basements of the Underground Railroad. Noted black historian and educator W.E.B. DuBois once called the African Methodist Episcopal churches “by longest odds the vastest and most remarkable product of American Negro civilisation.”

Vanessa Ashford Bussey, a recent Irvine transplant whose family boasts three generations of South Carolina A.M.E. ministers, offers a one-word description: family.

“When I found the church in Irvine, I was so happy, being a traditional Southerner,” said Bussey, 35. “The warmth of the church made a big difference. For one thing, it let me know there were more African Americans in the area. I had seen some here and there, but scattered. Just worshiping made a difference to be among other African Americans. It gives you a sense of belonging. I found African American friends.”

Many church members had made a Sunday habit of commuting to black churches in Santa Ana, Long Beach, Los Angeles or San Diego until they found Irvine Lanes through friends or community advertisements in the Black Orange calender. New church member Karen Mizell would drop off her two daughters at a church with a white congregation near their Irvine home. But she always politely declined invitations to attend.

“That church is great,” she said, “but I couldn’t bring myself to go. I’ve never gone to white churches. I don’t know if that should make a difference, but it does.”

A West Virginia native, Mizell grew up in the Baptist church with the rituals and gospel music that for centuries have provided a spiritual and cultural anchor for black worshipers. When she moved to Southern California from West Virginia four years ago, she immediately started searching for her community.

“It was kind of hard,” Mizell remembered. “The first thing I wanted to do was to go to the black side of town. And my brother laughed at me. He said there’s no such thing. It was like I had to get a shot. I had to be around my people.”

In the 11-story office building where she works as a contract administrator in the Koll Center, there are only three other black employees. They immediately connected, “holding on to each other,” as Mizell puts it. Her daughters have mostly white friends because there are few black students in their school. And so the girls immediately noticed color when they entered the doors of Christ Our Redeemer church.

“They said, ‘Mom, there’s no white people,’ ” Mizell remembered. “And I said, ‘It’s because it’s a black church.’ And they asked me, ‘What’s a black church?’ ”

The roots of Christ Our Redeemer date back to 1991 when another A.M.E. minister, Linda Parker, started meeting on the campus of UC Irvine with black students seeking a church. That meeting quickly grew into a spiritual community of some 75 regulars who moved from a campus building to the conference room above the Irvine Lanes.

Then came a period of internal strife and dissension that even today diplomatic members blame on a variety of vague difficulties: “personality clashes,” problems with administration, the sex of the founding minister, a debate over the size and goals of the church.

By late summer of 1992, the church had dwindled to a loyal core of 12 whose resolve to stay together was as hard as a bowling ball. For nearly four months they worshiped together without a minister.

“I think that a number of judgments were made that did not work out and the result was a personality clash,” said A.M.E. Bishop Vinton Randolph Anderson, who presides over the church’s Fifth District, which includes Irvine. “People also didn’t have a great amount of stock in a room above a bowling alley. So they scattered. Had it been a church with its own building, they may not have deserted.”

So Anderson shifted Patterson, a former associate minister at the prominent First A.M.E. church of Los Angeles, to Irvine to make sure the black church kept its stake in South County.

Slowly, the church regenerated by worshipers of twos and threes, partly with the inspiration of Patterson’s energetic preaching and partly with the gentle prodding of existing members who personally call every new visitor to invite them back. If the new visitors lack transportation, the members pick them up.

Lately, the congregation has been cautiously considering the notion of moving to a real church, perhaps sharing quarters with a Seventh-day Adventist church where members hold services on Saturdays. The price of Irvine real estate is so high that Patterson estimates it could cost from $1.5 million to $3 million to actually buy a church.

In the meantime, the congregation of Christ Our Redeemer will continue to share praying space with bowling balls.

“After all,” noted the bishop, “most of us forget that our mothers and fathers began their churches in their homes, in their dining rooms, in their living rooms. That’s where the churches really began.”