The Last Prayers in Church : Earthquake: Worshipers slip into the sanctuary for a dusty goodby. Other congregations are waiting.

Demolition work has begun on the First Presbyterian Church of North Hollywood, the first house of worship in the San Fernando Valley to be torn down because of damage from January’s earthquake.

Several other local congregations, facing varying amounts of damage, are still trying to decide between repairing or rebuilding their churches.

Dust and debris filled the red-tagged Presbyterian church building as about 80 members of the congregation, led by the Rev. John Moody, slipped in Sunday morning for about 10 minutes of final prayers.

“We stood in a circle, and it was emotional,” Moody said.

The congregation has been holding services since the Jan. 17 Northridge temblor in its chapel or in the larger fellowship hall.

It is believed that the only other church structure razed to date because of quake damage was the First Christian (Disciples of Christ) Church in downtown Santa Monica. The congregation still meets in a chapel in an adjoining building, which has been enlarged to handle the usual Sunday attendance of about 50 people, said Pastor Charles Elswick.

The 70-year-old Santa Monica church building, which served as a weekday refuge for the homeless, “was in danger of collapsing so we began demolition in February,” said Elswick, who lives in Reseda. “The basement and subbasement haven’t been removed because we ran out of money.”

Many Catholic parishes in the Valley and to the south suffered extensive damage, but none had to be demolished, said Father Gregory Coiro, spokesman for the Los Angeles archdiocese. Mary Immaculate Church in Pacoima, for instance, still celebrates Mass in a tent outside, but Jeff Castillo, parish administrator, said that repairs and refurbishment of its church building should be complete by year’s end.

Members of La Trinidad Church in San Fernando, an Assemblies of God congregation, did the demolition work themselves on the badly damaged church structure, but the building was not razed. “The roof, the ground slab and some support beams were worth saving,” foreman David Laning said Thursday.

Some small congregations, such as Emerson Unitarian Church in Canoga Park, are leaning toward rebuilding but are still investigating all the costs.

“We did vote to try to put up a new building,” said Virginia Margerum, a former Emerson president. “This one, rebuilt after a fire gutted it in 1921, would take a lot of work to meet the new earthquake codes and handicap access (requirements). It would cost more to fix it up than to build something new.”

Another congregation, St. James Presbyterian Church in Tarzana, has raised more than $64,000 toward what church leaders thought was a goal of about a half million dollars for repairs. But new engineering assessments of the building--similar in construction to North Hollywood First Presbyterian--have increased the project’s cost to at least $700,000, according to the Rev. Carl Horton, associate pastor.

In the face of the increase, the congregation is considering tearing the building down and replacing it with a new one, Horton said.

The congregation led by Pastor Moody at First Presbyterian of North Hollywood had little choice.

The precast concrete church at the corner of Colfax Avenue and Addison Street, built in the early 1960s, was declared a public nuisance by building inspectors because of broken sections where the roof meets supporting columns.

“The building has been a joy and a pain,” said Moody, who has been pastor since 1984.

A few years after the building was constructed, a liberal-conservative split over theology erupted within the congregation and most conservative members went to the new Valley Presbyterian Church in North Hills.

“A small group was left behind to finish paying for the building, but they did burn the mortgage in 1990,” Moody said.

The congregation now faces the option of calling it quits or continuing in the small buildings on its property, he said.

“The only way we’re going to be able to rebuild is to sell the parking lot across the street and pull together our reserves,” he said.

“The denomination has been silent. All they can do is offer loans--at a higher rate than the Small Business Administration.”

After those gloomy remarks as demolition workers arrived early in the week, Moody added later that the congregation still has a lot of spirit. “They feel that the church is continuing even though the building is going down,” the pastor said.

In the meantime, Carrie Jones, director of the church’s preschool, had to tell parents of 45 children that the school was temporarily closed. Workers sealed doorways and windows and a large filtration machine was placed at a side doorway to suck out floating asbestos fibers and other potentially harmful airborne substances in the building. The preparation for actual demolition may take up to two weeks, said Tony Ruvalcaba, a superintendent on the job.

Because of the dust and dirt, a senior citizens’ center on the grounds was relocated for two months, Moody said.

And because the flowers outside the building were likely to be crushed during demolition, two members of Van Nuys Presbyterian Church dug up a half dozen plants and took them away for transplanting.