Chapel Needs Savior : Fearing Eviction, Congregation Hopes for Sympathetic Buyer
No matter that the Rev. Jurgen W. Bless is sometimes drowned out by the recorded oom-pah-pah music outside, by the dachshund races on the walkways or the beer garden revelers next door to his German church at Old World Village shopping center.
No matter, at Old World Community Church, where 70ish German widows share worn oak pews with German American couples in their 20s, where the outside distractions are a small price to pay for a sanctuary of their own. But these days, Bless and his congregants worry that their 16-year-old chapel soon will close, that they will no longer share Sunday afternoons together with homemade kasekuchen cheesecake and a round of German folk songs led by the deacon on an upright piano.
The Old World Lutheran chapel--the only German church in Orange County--is up for sale by its cash-strapped owners, the First German United Methodist Church of Eagle Rock. Congregants at the tiny chapel, which rents the building from the Methodists, have little hope of raising the $375,000 asking price to buy the church themselves.
“We feel like we’re sitting on a bomb that’s going to go off, and then we’re out on the streets,” said Bless, a native of Munich. The new owner “could be someone who says, ‘Get out, we want to put in a bar.’ ”
But Bless isn’t giving up hope.
Maybe he will write to Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bless mused; for him, to buy the chapel would be nothing. Or maybe no one will want to buy the chapel. The Baptists came to look the other day and then high-tailed it from the 8 1/2-acre Bavarian-themed center, which includes more than 50 restaurants and shops.
“For an ethnic church like ours, it’s great,” Bless said, strolling past the village’s Rathskeller pub, “but . . . they looked at the bar and said: ‘We can’t have this. We’re Baptists.’ ”
The 2,000-square-foot chapel was designed as a store, but after Bless led a Christmas Eve candlelight service there in 1978, the village owners changed their minds.
Bless had just finished a stint as a chaplain in Washington, D.C, and was headed home to Hamburg, Germany, when he stopped in Huntington Beach to see friends. He agreed to lead the candlelight service at the request of village merchants. The service was packed, and visitors raved about the German-language sermon.
“In my heart,” said Bless, “I knew something had to be done.”
He approached the village owners, who agreed to a permanent chapel. In the first months, only a few people came to Sunday services. To make ends meet, Bless sold insurance on the side.
Word spread, and these days, about 70 regulars attend the chapel’s services, and the basement is used by a German Bible study group and a Donau Schwaben folk dance group.
It would be a shame to see the chapel go, village merchants said, with its steeple and 1913 bell cast in Munich, soft fresco paintings of apostles and 300-year-old Baptismal font. On spring mornings, after spirited wedding services, it is not uncommon to see brides in dresses from white to red velvet running from the chapel with their shoes off, said Delores Bischof, whose family built the village in September 1978.
“It would be missed very much,” said Bischof, whose daughter was baptized in the church 16 years ago. “It definitely is part of our family. If that’s cut away, you take away a heart and soul.”
The owners put the chapel up for sale in October. Eight potential buyers--all churches--have expressed interest, but there are no takers so far, said George Goesele, chairman of the board of trustees of First German United Methodist Church.
Methodist officials say they bought the chapel from Old World Village in 1989 as a favor to Bless, who was afraid the landlord would sell the place to someone else. (There is no official connection between the Methodists and Bless’ evangelical Lutheran congregation.)
But now, the owners are trying to raise $3.5 million to build a new church of their own in Glendale.
“At that time [in 1989], we didn’t have monetary problems. . . . It was just out of love we helped them,” Goesele said. “Now, it comes to the point where we do need all the funds we can get.”
The owners will sell the chapel to the highest bidder, church or otherwise, Goesele said.
If the chapel closes, the next closest German church is First & St. Paul’s in Norwalk. But congregant Rosina Hauptmann, 64, said she does not want to leave her chapel.
Recently she stood in front of the congregation and read a poem to her children--the same one she read to her parents when she was confirmed 50 years ago in the Danube city of Linz, Austria.
“It’s very homey,” said Hauptmann. “It reminds you of the European ways, the way people used to be back home. It’s like a little German village.”
Congregant Rony Fischer, 62, wants the next generation to experience the warmth of a small village church, where the altar is decorated with rye bread and vegetables for the Erntedankfest fall harvest, and birthdays and anniversaries are celebrated.
“For one thing, I want to contribute to keep the language and the culture going,” said Fischer, a native of Bremerhaven, Germany, “and to introduce young people to it so they have an idea where their parents or grandparents came from.”
It’s not easy to keep young German Americans interested in the church, Bless said, but his 19-year-old son was the one who encouraged him to keep fighting for the church.
“We talked about the church situation, and Arnold [Schwarzenegger] came up. And you know, it’s not a bad idea to write to some of these people,” Bless said, chuckling at the silliness of the idea.
And then he added softly, more to himself: “I’m going to do it. We’ve talked about it long enough.”