Building a Church One Soul at a Time

Ask Southern Californians to name an African Methodist Episcopal church, and a certain one usually comes to mind. First AME in Los Angeles went platinum eight years ago when it led Los Angeles from crisis to recovery after the riots of 1992. Everybody knew its name.

The church’s enterprising pastor, the Rev. Cecil Murray, set the goals. Then he called on Mark Whitlock, a financier and a member of the congregation, to help make them happen. Whitlock surprised even himself by giving up his vice president’s job at Chicago Title Insurance Co. to take charge of First AME’s neighborhood redevelopment program.

Within weeks, signs of new growth sprouted near the church in South-Central L.A. Abandoned apartments and offices were under reconstruction. The Walt Disney Co., Wells Fargo and Arco were funding First AME’s urban projects. Whitlock’s operating budget soared to $31 million.

To see Whitlock in action is to understand. Runaway vigor makes his eyes light up. His short, curly beard comes and goes, a reflection of his attraction to constant change. He is more likely to conduct interviews from a car phone than an immobile office, or from a hotel room in a distant city at the end of a seven-day workweek.

When he took the job as president of FAME, First AME’s economic renewal office, Whitlock was a corporate dynamo looking for a good cause. But something bigger got hold of him. Four years ago, at 41, he was ordained a minister of the church. Now, he is Pastor Whitlock, leading prayers and preaching to his own congregation at Christ Our Redeemer church in Irvine.

Early indications are that this AME won’t fit the mold of the church’s 200-year-old tradition marked by lace-trimmed vestments and velvet pews. The church was founded by Richard Allen, an African American minister in the United Methodist church who opposed that denomination’s policies favoring slavery and racial segregation. In 1816, the new church was formally named African Methodist Episcopal and has remained a separate denomination.

*

While Christ Our Redeemer AME is part of that tradition formed by and for African Americans, Whitlock’s congregation shifts the boundaries with its 25% Anglo, Asian and Latino makeup.

“I was at the South Coast Plaza shopping mall handing out information about the church, trying to reach African Americans,” Whitlock recalled. It was two years ago; he was new to the church at the time. “But I’d only see one, maybe, every five minutes.” The black population of Orange County is a scant 2%. Christ Our Redeemer is one of two AME churches in the area. (The other is Johnson Chapel in Santa Ana.) “I said to myself, ‘Why am I limiting God’s message to African Americans?’ I started passing out fliers to everybody.”

His mentor, the Rev. Murray, approved. They talk on Monday mornings. “People now are hungry for the spirit,” Murray said. “They are asking, ‘How do I find something to live for?’ It crosses cultural, racial and economic lines. Mark is able to speak universally, not just to one race.”

Wanda Claro-Woodruff, 48, and her 10-year-old son, Brendan, were among the few Anglos in the church one recent Sunday. All but four of the 70 worshipers that morning were African American, including Whitlock’s wife, Mia, a corporate lawyer who leads the choir, his mother, Evelyn, who heads the church’s finance committee, and his sons, Mark, 14, and Devin, 12. Most weeks, Claro-Woodruff said, the ethnic mix is much higher.

She found Christ Our Redeemer when she was “church shopping” with her son. They had been to Catholic, nondenominational Christian and Jewish Orthodox congregations. “During his service, Rev. Whitlock said that anybody who wanted to join should come down to the front,” she recalled. “I had no intention, but Brendan said, ‘Mom, let’s go.’ At the time, I didn’t know what AME meant. It still hasn’t entered his consciousness that, some Sundays, he’s the only Caucasian there.”

Christian churches should play down their denominations, their differences, Whitlock believes. His own worship style slides from AME formal to meeting-tent emotional, with people coming down to the front of the church to tell their stories and let the pastor pray over them. A video screen above the lectern lights a map of the Holy Land during sermons--an academic touch that goes with the decor. Members of the congregation meet in a lecture hall on the UC Irvine campus with no plans to move until they can afford their own building. Whitlock arranged the long-term loan with the school’s Interfaith Center; he is the AME chaplain on campus.

There are about 150 members now, 145 more than there were his first day. From the time Christ Our Redeemer was founded in 1991 until Whitlock arrived in 1998, the congregation had seen six pastors come and go, and the meeting place had changed six times.

Whitlock described the arrangement as a marketing challenge. Still, it was better than the bowling alley the congregation had left behind.

“They had no place to worship, they were $12,000 in debt, they were not a happy group,” he recalled. He feels he wasn’t much help. “I preached and they looked at me as if to say, ‘What are you talking about?’ They had been bruised. I realized ministry is, first of all, how you love and take care of people. Not how you preach.”

Some members were ready to check out. “I was planning to make my exit,” said Joyce Boykin Bailey, a doctor who joined the church eight years ago. “Pastor Whitlock phoned me before the service and said, ‘I’m your new pastor.’ I dragged myself to service, late, thinking, ‘Big deal.’ As soon as he saw me, he said, ‘Hi, Joyce.’ I thought that was pretty good.

“All of a sudden, I woke up,” she said. “This is a vibrant, sophisticated person who is very progressive in his ways and good at networking.” He won their hearts by getting them a table at the annual Christmas party of 100 Black Men, a mentoring group of African American community leaders. “I almost passed out,” Boykin Bailey said. “He got one of his business contacts to sponsor a table for our church.”

*

Whitlock’s ease with high finance puts an unusual slant on the church’s outreach programs. He teaches a class in financial planning for children and adults. In one session, he showed preteens how to read a stock market report.

“Without a strong financial base, you won’t survive,” he later explained. He was talking on his cell phone, driving from First AME, where he continues as president of FAME, to Irvine for his Wednesday-night Bible study class. “We must teach prosperity, and the Bible outlines it. Jesus talked about finances, every sixth word it seems. King David, King Solomon, they were financially very successful. Money isn’t the root of all evil. Love of money is.”

Sixteen years ago, Whitlock’s wife saw all of this coming. Their first date ended at her house. Mia served spaghetti, Mark prayed over it. “I told Mark he was running from his calling,” she said. “What is happening in his life now is a natural evolution.”

Still, she admitted, “I had no idea of the impact it would have on the family.” They all spend Saturday nights making the lecture hall look more like a church by bringing in flowers, banners and a sound system for the musicians. Sunday after service, they have to take it all down. “Sometimes on Monday I come to work just to rest,” she said.

If Mia Whitlock saw her husband’s future 16 years ago, Ricky Grundy sees it now. Grundy, music director for the famed Andre Crouch Gospel Choir in Los Angeles, is now directing the music at Whitlock’s church as well. They have been friends for 20 years. “What Mark goes after, he gets,” Grundy said. The church bulletin announces plans to start construction on a new building in 2005. Grundy said it will be sooner. “Two years, tops, he’ll be right where he wants to be. Growing a congregation, getting the finances together, establishing the church.”

Whitlock’s own plan is even more of a challenge. “We are preparing souls for their entrance into heaven,” he said. “Our goal is to make heaven crowded.”

Mary Rourke can be reached at mary.rourke@latimes.com.