4 Years After Quake, Church is Resurrected

It was a dramatic image of damage in the days after the 1994 Northridge earthquake: the collapsed ceiling, shattered wood and lights strewn across the pews at St. James Presbyterian Church in Tarzana.

“You don’t want to see this,” Jim Dodds had warned his wife, Joanne, the church’s business manager, when he looked through the church’s front doors that Jan. 17 morning.

But four years of tough decisions and anxiety end Sundaywith the first service in a new, contemporary-style church for the congregation’s nearly 300 members.

The church is easy to spot along Ventura Boulevard.

“It’s sandwiched between two fast-food restaurants,” said Joanne Dodds, repeating a common quip at St. James.

Hardly a soul there is unhappy, however, with a McDonald’s on one side and a Carl’s Jr. on the other.

The church would have been unable to rebuild without selling part of its valuable boulevard frontage last year to Carl’s Jr., Dodds said.

More than a million dollars of the $1.5-million cost to rebuild came from the sale of land to the burger purveyor, said church member Paul Carlson, a retired bank building project manager who oversaw the church’s new construction.

For months after the quake, church leaders sought engineering estimates on repairing the cracked walls and ceiling, but the projected figures kept rising. “It was approaching a million dollars to repair the old building,” Carlson said.

The idea of demolition was difficult for some members who were there in 1960 when the old, high-ceilinged church with seating for 900 was built, said Carlson.

“There was some real soul-searching and a couple of long meetings, but there is no second-guessing now about making the wrong decision,” he added.

At 10 a.m. Sunday, bagpiper Lynn Bauer will lead congregants from the church’s fellowship hall, where they have been holding services for three years, into the new sanctuary, which has pews arranged in a semicircle to accommodate 320 worshipers.

“There is an excitement here that I have not experienced at other churches,” said the Rev. Don Maddox, who became the new pastor in May after interim pulpit posts in the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere.

Maddox was most recently the pastor of the Church of the Valley in Apple Valley, the Presbyterian congregation of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Maddox will attend Roy’s funeral today ) as a friend of the family. “Roy and Dale were members there for some 30 years, and they took part every year in a Christmas Eve service,” Maddox said.

The senior pastor and the associate pastor of St. James at the time of the earthquake left those positions in mid-1995 for posts out of state. Senior Pastor Ken Baker said at the time that he had already spent too many pastorates in time-consuming building projects to want to do so again.

Another minister filled in as an interim pastor until Maddox accepted the position as permanent pastor.

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Despite the uncertainty over pastoral leadership, the congregation was optimistic--even paying for a billboard for several months on Ventura Boulevard that pictured a variety of church members under the words “Real People, Real Faith.”

As it turned out, the church could sell the 120-by-260-foot parcel on the boulevard and still have room for a smaller sanctuary and adequate parking. An unused grass-and-dirt area to the rear of the property--”our back 40,” as Dodds called it--suddenly became useful for new parking spaces.

Church membership was 339 when the quake hit and is 285 now, Dodds said. “But this is an older congregation which has lost a lot who retired, moved away or died,” she said, adding that little of the drop came from disaffection.

“People feel this is the beginning of a new era,” she said. “I have a feeling that Sunday’s going to bring some tears of joy.”