RELIGION / JOHN DART : Merger of 2 Churches Would Create Vast Protestant Flock

The ranch-motif Shepherd of the Hills Church, saddled with a large debt and led by a pastor itching to retire, is hoping to get hitched to another evangelical congregation in the north San Fernando Valley--which would create one of the largest Protestant churches in the area.

Pastor Jess Moody of Shepherd of the Hills, who will turn 70 in August, first proposed a merger last month to the large Church at Rocky Peak in Chatsworth. But negotiations fell through for several reasons, not least because Shepherd of the Hills still owes millions for construction of its spacious facility in 1991.

Undaunted, the Texas-reared Moody immediately looked down the road apiece to another growing congregation cramped for space--Hillcrest Christian Church in Granada Hills. Its members were told of the Shepherd of the Hills proposal at services last weekend.

The Rev. Dudley Rutherford, 37, senior pastor of Hillcrest Christian, said this week that he favors the merger although he said the final decision would be up to the congregation.

“In my heart, I believe this is God opening up a door,” said Rutherford.

A merger of the two churches, which are 2 1/2 miles apart on Rinaldi Street, would bring together a potential combined Sunday attendance of nearly 2,400 worshipers. (The merged congregation and the comparably sized Church at Rocky Peak would rank as the two largest Protestant churches in the West Valley--although still smaller than two mega-churches in the East Valley, Van Nuys’ Church on the Way and Grace Community Church in Sun Valley.)

“I think chances are very good for a merger,” said Moody, who said that he hopes that he can bow out as pastor after a transition period and do some teaching during retirement.

Since Rutherford was named Hillcrest’s pastor in 1987, growth has been a mixed blessing for the congregation, which also has a 500-student school (kindergarten through eighth grade) on its four-acre property.

“In each of the last five years we have averaged 27% growth,” he said. But the church, which seats only 300 to 350 comfortably, has been forced to hold four services, two Saturday night and two Sunday morning, in order to accommodate 1,100 people each weekend, he said.

“We must continue to pray that God provides a larger facility,” the minister wrote in Hillcrest’s church bulletin on May 5.

In an interview, however, Rutherford conceded that Shepherd of the Hills’ “debt is very scary. We have not gotten to the point where we see how the numbers fit together.”

The 66,000-square-foot Shepherd of the Hills Church, visible from the Simi Valley Freeway, was built for $6.6 million, but Moody bitterly attributed $3.5 million of that to the unexpected cost of fees and other requirements by the city of Los Angeles. The congregation still owes about $7 million, including interest, he said.

The financial requirements of a merger were too much for the Church at Rocky Peak, said its pastor, the Rev. David Miller. The bank holding the mortgage on Shepherd of the Hills wanted the Church at Rocky Peak to sell its 70 acres in the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley and use the money to help repay the debt, Miller said.

“We wanted to maintain two campuses,” said Miller, who said that his growing church attracts up to 3,000 adults and children to services and Sunday school each weekend. Twenty years hence, he said, even the 13 acres at Shepherd of the Hills might be too small.

A merger between the Church at Rocky Peak and Shepherd of the Hills would have been a dramatic reunion. Both congregations have their roots in the First Baptist Church of Van Nuys, where Moody succeeded the Rev. Harold Fickett as pastor in 1976.

When Moody tried to introduce a series of changes, nearly 300 dissidents broke away to form Faith Evangelical Church. Fickett, who had left Van Nuys to take a college administrative position in 1975, later returned to the Valley to lead the breakaway church.

Moody, who previously pastored a large Southern Baptist Church in West Palm Beach, Fla., failed to persuade his congregation to affiliate with the Southern Baptists in 1978 although the church did do so two years later. In that struggle and during attempts to sell the Van Nuys property and relocate to the Chatsworth area, Van Nuys First continued to lose some disaffected members.

After Pastor Jack Hayford’s Church on the Way bought the Van Nuys First Baptist property in 1987, Moody’s congregation changed its name to Shepherd of the Hills while it met in temporary quarters. Meanwhile, Faith Evangelical, with Miller as a new pastor, was renamed Church at Rocky Peak, after its hillside site on Santa Susana Road.

Miller said that the proposed reunification of the two churches did not founder on old animosities. If anything, Miller said, “the older people were excited about reunifying and the younger people were more concerned about getting into a real financial mess.”

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Lay leaders of the Church at Rocky Peak also had other problems with the proposal, including the desire of Moody’s church to continue sending mission money to the Southern Baptists and thereby being identified with that denomination, Miller said.

Moody and Rutherford said they foresee little difficulty over religious identity because, in practice, they de-emphasize any sectarian links. A combined congregation would probably divide its missionary contributions between the Southern Baptist Convention and the North American Christian Convention, a fellowship of independent Christian churches to which Hillcrest belongs.

Rutherford said a merger would require Hillcrest to lease its present church sanctuary to some other church for the money that would bring, while his congregation would join Moody’s flock at the Porter Ranch site.

“If the merger happens, it would not bother me to adopt the name ‘Shepherd of the Hills,’ ” Rutherford said. “It’s a great name for a church.”