For Mission Founder, It’s Good to Be in a Bad Place : Outreach: The Rev. Philip Lance launched Pueblo Nuevo 2 1/2 years ago near crime-ridden MacArthur Park. Despite many obstacles, the chapel has become a ray of hope in one of L.A.’s grittiest neighborhoods.

The Rev. Philip Lance is out of place.

He is a world away from the gothic cloisters of great cathedrals, or his walled seminary in New York. Even the well-manicured Episcopal parishes of Los Angeles seem strangely distant.

Located in the gritty, crime-ridden MacArthur Park district, Lance’s storefront office and chapel look out on a tableau of human hope and despair.

Children skip gleefully up the sidewalk, oblivious to ominous-looking strangers. A man leaning aimlessly against a wall comes to an uneasy alert as an LAPD horse patrol approaches and passes by. The routine of the street resumes--stealthy exchanges of money from runner to dealer, from palm to palm, as fluid as water passing over rock. A woman with a lithe figure and an incongruently hardened face holds a dollar bill in her outstretched arm and waives it at passersby.

Yes, Philip Lance, “the padre,” is out of place--and right where he wants to be.

After 2 1/2 years leading the small Episcopal mission of Pueblo Nuevo, he has built up a congregation of 25 families and started two businesses that help support the chapel and provide a living to its members.

The successes, measured in changed lives and newfound hope, have been won in the face of riots, meager funds and initial skepticism from church leaders who wondered how this blue-eyed, decidedly Anglo priest from an old Pasadena family could possibly succeed. Lance said he has never had second thoughts about his mission.

“I really do believe that the place the church is needed most is in neighborhoods like this one,” Lance said. “Christians really are called to seek out the darkest corners and try to shed some light.”

This is not the light of pious thoughts or “I’ll pray for you” spirituality. If the Word is validated by a life lived, then Philip Lance is living among those that Jesus was said to love--the poor, the afflicted, the outcasts.

It is midmorning and the Padre, his light brown hair falling across his forehead and looking every inch a yuppie, is hard at work.

“Yes,” he tells someone on the telephone, “it depends when I can get gravel delivered, but probably tomorrow morning.” He is lining up another job for Pueblo Nuevo Enterprises, an employee-owned, profit-making property maintenance cooperative that grosses about $12,000 a month and employs nine members of the mission, five of them on a full-time basis. Its core customers are banks that contract with the cooperative to maintain property that has been repossessed.

Soon Lance is on the phone again, this time talking with the office of Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez. Lance is hoping the councilman will show up on a Saturday to listen to their plans for launching another business--this one called Business Incubator--that will require a city use permit.

The plan calls for a kind of indoor bazaar or swap meet where MacArthur Park residents can rent booths to sell their goods and earn a living.

When the time came, Hernandez did show up, and one of his aides, Jose Gardea, was upbeat. “Any time a group of people take the initiative to get together to work on a project of this kind, it’s always positive,” Gardea said.

The bazaar, scheduled to open this fall, is backed by the separate nonprofit Pueblo Nuevo Development Corp., which is controlled by members of Lance’s mission, who sit on the board of directors.

The mission, near 7th Street and Burlington Avenue, draws most of its $10,000 monthly income from a thrift store next door. The rest comes from donations from All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills ($1,000), the women of St. Cross Episcopal Church in Hermosa Beach ($125), and the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles ($360). The mission also enjoys enthusiastic backing from Bishop Frederick H. Borsch, and St. James Episcopal Church on Wilshire offers scholarships so that children of the mission can attend its day school.

Lance, 34, said he started the mission 2 1/2 years ago after he lost his position as associate rector at St. Athanasius Episcopal Church in Echo Park.

Because he was familiar with the central city area and speaks fluent Spanish, Lance said, he wanted to remain in the vicinity.

It wasn’t long before Lance was holding Eucharistic services in MacArthur Park and finding ways to support his fledging mission.

“I’m kind of an entrepreneur,” he said. “I have that ability to take risks.” His idea raised eyebrows at diocesan headquarters and among potential supporters at other parishes.

“I have to admit, it did seem like overwhelming odds,” Lance said. “How can you start a new Episcopal congregation? Usually you look for some land in the suburbs, raise $300,000 and look for 40 or 50 middle-class people,” he said with a grin.

There were unexpected problems. “How do you get someone to a job (requiring) a vacuum cleaner when they don’t have a car?” Another was the time that a recent immigrant was sent to a house-cleaning job. She had never seen an automatic dishwasher. She put regular soap in the machine. Before long, soap suds were everywhere.

The problem, he said, is a lack of education and joblessness that translates into powerlessness.

“I’m working on training leaders. It’s important to our organization for those here to become leaders of others,” he said.

Before the mission opened its own chapel, Lance held services wherever he could. The congregation was kicked out of the chapel at the headquarters of the Los Angeles Episcopal Diocese because an archdeacon happened by on a Sunday to discover that children were running wild throughout the three-story building.

“We had nowhere to go, so we landed in the park. We were homeless,” Lance said.

Despite the trials, he said, the priesthood is better than he had imagined. “It turned out much better, but differently,” he said. “Every year I feel more like a priest even though I’m doing less of what a priest traditionally does.”

For Lance, the rewards are the testimonies of changed lives. “When I came (to MacArthur Park),” one woman told The Times, “I felt very sad because I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know where to go or who to tell I didn’t have a job or anything to eat. You feel very much alone.”

For a time, she worked in a garment factory earning just $60 a week to help support herself and three children. Then she turned to selling broiled corn on the cob from a sidewalk stand--only to be told by police that such vending was illegal.

After affiliating with Pueblo Nuevo Mission, she said, she found a steady job through the mission’s efforts.

Lance told of another woman who came to the park one day expecting to attend a meeting about jobs. It turned out to be an outdoor Eucharist celebrated by Lance.

“She counts that as a turning point in her life and thinks in a very special way about the presentation of the Host,” Lance said. “I think . . . she perceived in that moment a community that might offer her something new and different--and a way out of a life she had fallen into where there was no escape from addiction, abuse, violence and lack of employment.”

Lance said he sometimes gets angry when he hears well-heeled Episcopalians asking what his mission is doing in MacArthur Park. “Isn’t that where all the drunks are?” he quoted one woman as asking.

Lance said there is a very definite place for traditional ministries. Suburban churches, he said, are extremely important.

“But I do get irritated sometimes when I hear week after week of sermons in suburban churches which are very much (aimed) at an individual, interior spirituality. That’s just the beginning of what being a Christian is about.