Displaced Church to Finally Get a Residence

A church that was relocated to temporary facilities a decade ago by the city, sparking a lawsuit involving the constitutional separation of church and state, has received approval to build a permanent home.

The City Council’s action allows the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel to build a sanctuary, child-care facility and nine apartments on 1.3 acres at North Brea Boulevard and Ash Street.

“I’ve been looking forward to this moment for 9 1/2 years,” said the Rev. Lauren Wood, who founded the church in 1950.

The church’s original Imperial Highway property was acquired in 1986 by the city’s Redevelopment Agency as part of an effort to remake Brea’s aging downtown area.

The church bought another property, the former Nazarene Church on Birch Street, but the city later expanded its redevelopment boundaries and acquired that land as well. That purchase cost the city about $3.5 million, officials said, and was crucial to the downtown redevelopment.

In 1992, the city condemned a property at 109 N. Brea Blvd. with the intention of giving it, along with an adjacent parcel of agency-owned land, to the Foursquare Church. But the landowner, an inventor who worked in a warehouse on the site, sued the city, alleging it took his property illegally and seeking more money.

In the meantime, the church was relocated again, to a prefabricated building down the street.

The inventor’s lawsuit reached Superior Court in 1994, when Judge Leonard Goldstein found that city officials may have violated the constitutional separation of church and state when they seized the property.

Goldstein ordered that city officials start negotiations from scratch.

The city is currently trying to reach a settlement with the owner, Michael Kunec. If a settlement is reached, city officials said, the church will have the option of building on Kunec’s 9,500-square-foot parcel.