The Mystery of the Signs

Every city has its mysteries. You can live in a city for many years and then turn a corner one day and find yourself confronted with the unexpected. Somehow, some way, the urban equation has shifted.

A movie theater has become a bookstore. People wearing turbans have settled into an old karate studio. A neon glow begins appearing in the window of an abandoned warehouse.

You wonder, who plugged in the neon? What are the turban wearers doing? Is this good news or bad?

You’re intrigued, but you don’t know answers. And that’s what makes cities interesting. It’s why people stay in spite of the muck and mire. The suburbs have nothing to match it.

For much of its history, Los Angeles posed few such mysteries because, essentially, it was suburban. But as the city has grown older and more bedraggled, its mysteries have increased. The silver lining of our urban decay.

Recently, one of the most beguiling mysteries has presented itself near downtown. Nothing monumental, just an intriguing twist, a suggestion of some unexplained shift in the way we live.

The situation appeared in the guise of two signs. The first was mounted on the roof of the old Queen of Angels Hospital in Echo Park. The other was painted on the former home of the Metropolitan Water District.

Both Queen of Angels and the MWD headquarters had stood for a while as derelicts, abandoned by their original inhabitants. They were sad, decayed white elephants surrounded by poor neighborhoods. It seemed possible that no one would want them. That is, until the signs appeared.

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The first sign, on top of the hospital, said, “Los Angeles International Church.”

The sign on the MWD building was written in Korean. Underneath it the English translation read, “Holy Hill Community Church.”

There’s nothing new about churches appearing in poor neighborhoods, of course. But these churches sprang up in huge edifices. The MWD complex amounted to more than 200,000 square feet of office space. Queen of Angels occupied almost half a million square feet.

What’s more, both properties divided their space into hundreds of small rooms. Tiny spaces designed for patients or bureaucrats. Long hallways with many doors on either side.

Why would any church want such properties? In the old days, say 10 years ago, churches seemed to want large spaces that could serve as sanctuaries for Sunday services, for training unions and Sunday schools.

Those churches wouldn’t want, and couldn’t use, cookie-cutter offices where no more than 10 adults can sit at one time. Or nurse stations on each floor. Or one secretarial space per three bureaucratic spaces. Or X-ray rooms.

And it’s not as if the properties had been given away. Though the purchase prices were low compared to those of buildings in better neighborhoods, they still amounted to heavy investments by the churches involved.

The MWD headquarters fetched $8 million. Queen of Angels brought $3.9 million.

And thus the mystery. Had the church elders made monumental mistakes in property selection? Or did these churches represent a new breed, something that bore no resemblance to churches of the past?

The answer starts to reveal itself when you walk toward the pastor’s office on what used to be the eighth floor of Queen of Angels. The pastor’s name is Matthew Barnett. For the record, he is 24 years old.

Along this corridor, virtually every room has a sign on the door.

One sign reads, “El Evangelista.”

The next one reads, “Jumaa Task Force.”

The next one, “Urban Bible Training Center.”

On and on the signs go, and the message is clear: This church functions like nothing the Baptists or Methodists ever dreamed up. Each sign represents a small organization, affiliated with the church, that has found a home here.

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Pastor Barnett himself is a scrubbed, sunny young man who speaks with the lightheartedness of one convinced that the future looks swell. Here’s how he describes the first time he set foot in the abandoned hospital:

“The floors were filthy, the lights weren’t working, graffiti was all over. The place was a mess. Then it occurred to me that this had been a hospital where people were healed. And I started thinking that we could do that again. We could heal people’s souls and their bodies.”

“This dream began of providing tutors for poor kids in school, of a kitchen where we could feed hungry people, of giving gang members a safe place to come and talk. . . .”

You get the point. Barnett saw his church as an umbrella for dozens of programs that would, in effect, replace many of the fading-away governmental efforts. And, at the same time, offer the church a chance to proselytize.

The young Barnett and his Los Angeles International Church did not arrive unequipped. He is the son of the Rev. Tommy Barnett, the pastor of Phoenix First Assembly of God, a hugely successful church and one of the wealthiest in the nation. The elder Barnett had dispatched his son to start an inner-city mission in Los Angeles and provided a bankroll of millions to accomplish it.

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This description may conjure up memories of Tony Alamo and the like, but the results suggest otherwise, thus far. More than a thousand people per day are being fed at the old hospital. More than 400 former alcoholics and drug addicts have been given places to live within its walls. Altogether, more than 180 different programs operate under the church’s umbrella.

Michael Mata, an associate professor at the Claremont School of Theology, says Barnett’s kind of operation does, indeed, represent a new way of thinking about the church’s role.

“They are not thinking in terms of a membership that comes to Sunday service and leaves a contribution,” says Mata. “They think in very practical terms of providing for specific needs of people who are sometimes desperate. They want to get a return on every square foot of the space they control. The phrase they use is ‘ministry opportunity.’ ”

Thus, it didn’t really matter that the Queen of Angels building offered only a small chapel for Sunday services. At present, at least, Sunday services are not really the point at Los Angeles International.

The old MWD headquarters also lacked a proper sanctuary. The Korean congregation there currently holds its services in the old boardroom. In contrast to L.A. International, the Holy Hill Community Church operates in serenity. But its goals are much the same.

“People are amazed that we bought this facility for our church,” says Sung Jong Shin, the pastor. “Frankly, it is too big for us right now. The reason we came here is because we see the church as a place that feeds the needs of the community, and soon it will fill up with those needs.”

The Holy Hill group has been handicapped by language differences. The congregation largely speaks Korean, and its neighbors largely speak Spanish. And the financial strain of maintaining the huge facility has forced the congregation into money-saving measures, like shutting off three of every four lights in hallways and offices.

But the dream remains, one that is remarkably similar to the dream of L.A. International. “We are not only interested in our church and its members,” says Shin. “We think constantly about filling our rooms with day care, with drug treatment centers. Next to that, the church is secondary.”

So there you have it. The signs hanging from the old, abandoned institutions signify a new kind of church rising from the ruins of the city. Practical, experimental churches that require not sanctuaries, but many rooms where many tasks can be accomplished.

The churches are still very new. They may help save their neighborhoods. Or they may flame out. We can only wait to see the end of that mystery.