Canoga Park : Unitarians Plan to Build New Church

Spirited by a $693,500 federal loan, Emerson Unitarian Church’s congregation is dreaming of the day when, like the mythical phoenix, their earthquake-devastated church will rise again.

The money, they say, has given wings to plans to build a new church to replace the 70-year-old building in Canoga Park that has been their home for a quarter-century. The structure, built in the classical Greek style, replaced another church that was gutted by fire in 1921.

The yellow-tagged building at 7304 Jordan Ave. will be torn down at the end of this month, said Kathy Challis, vice president of church’s board of trustees. The new building, she said, is scheduled to be completed next summer.

Since the Northridge earthquake, the 150-member congregation has been worshiping in a senior citizens center next door.

Canoga Park’s historical society had hoped the church could be saved, church members said, but that would have been too costly.

A twilight, candlelight vigil was held Sunday at the church. Challis said congregation members, as they encircled the building in lengthening shadows, were reminded of the past.

“It was moving,” she said. “We have been in the building since 1970, so a lot of our lives were caught up in it.”

The Canoga Park congregation, founded in 1956 as part of the Boston-based Unitarian Universalist Assn., has seen more than its share of bad luck, church members said. Before moving to Jordan Avenue, services were held around the corner on Owensmouth Avenue in another building, which was set on fire in the late 1960s by an arsonist who was never caught.

“We’re a liberal church, and we do a lot of pro-and-con forums” on social and political issues, Challis said. “And I guess somebody didn’t like our ‘con’ forums, and they came in and they took the minister’s sermons he had stacked, and they used them as a bonfire.”