Fearful of What’s Up Above : Church Worries It Would Lose Old-Fashioned Aura to Airport

When the F/A-18 Hornets thunder into the sky from nearby El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, the deafening roar of jet engines is actually reassuring to the Rev. Dennis Sherman of Irvine Community Church.

The Marine jets, Sherman notes, “never fly on Sunday,” whereas, if the base is ever converted to a commercial airport, the constant noise would spell disaster for his church.

Sherman, 47, is the pastor of Irvine’s first church, founded in 1932 for agricultural workers on the Irvine Ranch.

In an age of television evangelism and celebrity churches, the small, nondenominational congregation quietly focuses on a scholarly study of the Bible, examining it “book by book, verse by verse,” Sherman said. And churchgoers still sit on the stiff, wooden seats that were purchased from a defunct Santa Ana theater when the church was built in 1951.

“I’m certain a church can have a modern building and still have the old values,” Sherman says. “But people see this church and right away they think of the old values.”

Sunday services were first held in a two-room schoolhouse on Sand Canyon Drive, about two miles south of the church’s current location. In October, 1951, construction of the existing Spanish-style church was completed on land donated by James Irvine.

Surrounded by vegetable fields and rows of sycamore trees planted long ago to protect crops from the wind, the diminutive church is one of the few historic buildings left in a city that incorporated only 23 years ago.

But the entrance to the El Toro Marine base is less than a mile away, and in the wake of county voter approval of a commercial airport at the base there is concern.

“A commercial airport would have flights all the time and the traffic would be terrible,” said Sherman, pastor of the church since 1968. “It could make it impossible for the church to function at this location.”

Sherman worries that if the church is forced to move because of noise and traffic from a commercial airport at El Toro, the community will lose more than a building, it will lose the city’s last vestige of small-town America.

For many, the “Bible-teaching church” is a refuge from the upwardly mobile lifestyle of Irvine and surrounding communities. Every Sunday night, the congregation gathers together for a potluck supper after the evening service.

“With the larger churches, it was too impersonal,” says Irvine resident Cindy Lance, who attends Irvine Community Church with her husband, Mike, and their two children. “It’s more of a family unit here. If we’re missing from church on the weekend, we get a call from the assistant pastor, who says, ‘I hope you guys are OK.’ ”

Irvine Community Church was founded by the American Sunday School Union, later renamed American Missionary Fellowship.

The organization dates to the late 1700s when it sent missionaries to accompany pioneers on their way West after the Revolutionary War.

Sherman was a senior at Biola University in La Mirada when the American Sunday School Union asked him to conduct services for the Irvine church’s dwindling congregation. There were 12 people there on his first Sunday in September, 1968.

These days, about 125 of the congregation’s 200 members come to Sunday services on average.

The church will lose about 60 members, who are from the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, when the base closes in 1999.

John Neel, 48, assistant pastor, joined the church one year ago after retiring from a 29-year career in the Marine Corps. He began attending the Irvine Community Church while stationed at the El Toro Marine base and he is now studying for a master’s degree in specialized ministries at the Talbot Seminary in La Mirada.

Neel says part of the charm of the church is its relative anonymity, with its site on the outskirts of east Irvine.

“Sometimes I do wonder out of the 110,000 people who live in Irvine, how many know there’s something this old in their community?” Neel says. “We’ve all come to love this church--we’d hate to leave.”