A House Divided

The Rev. Bob Kelly of First Christian Church jokes that he’s learned not to take it personally when worshipers stand up in the middle of his sermons.

“They are pretty old--they can’t sit for too long,” said the soft-spoken pastor whose once-thriving congregation of 1,500-plus members has dwindled to a few dozen, mostly septuagenarians.

Today, the congregation can fill only a back room in First Christian’s sprawling complex on 17th Street near Santa Ana College.

The church’s main sanctuary, an 800-seat brick structure with soaring ceilings and stained-glass windows, has been given over to Primera Iglesia Cristiana Manantiales de Vida, a Spanish-speaking congregation that has tripled to about 230 members in three years. An adjacent chapel is home to the Vietnamese First Christian Church, which has 100 members and is growing.

Initially, the shrinking congregation hoped to take advantage of the city’s changing demographics by creating “a truly multiethnic congregation,” said Jim Smith, 72, who joined First Christian six years ago. “We planned a center for ethnic evangelism. . . . We had the vision that this would be the perfect campus. That’s what really attracted me.”

What developed instead were three congregations that share a common faith, name and address, but remain separated by powerful language and cultural barriers.

On any given Sunday across California and the nation, thousands of churches like First Christian have become common houses of worship for people with contrasting cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Call it the graying and partitioning of faith, especially in urban and mature suburban areas where formerly all-Anglo congregations are turning to other groups to fill their vacant pews, theologians and sociologists say.

Many rent their facilities to the newcomers. Others form partnerships with other congregations, sharing maintenance and property costs. Seldom do they worship together.

“Typically there is not a whole lot of interaction,” said R. Stephen Warner, a sociology professor at University of Illinois in Chicago who has studied multiple-congregation churches. “Neither side really wants it. Most prefer to worship with their own kind.”

Language a Barrier to Fuller Integration

Mainline Protestant churches in the United States over the last decade have experienced flat or declining membership among whites, but their minority ranks are thriving. Ethnic congregations now make up more than 18% of the Southern Baptist Convention’s 16 million members, and Korean Americans are the fastest-growing segment of the United Methodist Church.

“If they haven’t made the transition, the churches will die,” said Michael Maxson, president of the Southern California Evangelistic Assn., a local organization that helps “plant” new congregations in existing churches. “Our future is to understand that God is bringing people from all around the world. . . . We have to recognize that or have our churches close their doors.”

In the last eight years, the evangelical group has helped find homes for about 50 ethnic congregations in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Bernardino and Orange counties, often pairing them with existing white congregations. Five years ago, the group helped the Vietnamese congregation find its new quarters at Santa Ana’s First Christian.

But even as different groups converge to share worshiping space, true integration has been elusive. Language remains a major barrier.

“You’ve got to remember with immigrant groups, language is a big issue,” said Grace Dyrness, associate director at USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. “They are not necessarily averse to meeting with other groups but, at least for the first generation, you still find them in enclaves.”

Most experts predict the barriers will come down over time, as subsequent generations find a common language and begin to blend. But the pressing question for many existing churches is how to survive the transition without losing their core groups.

Some, such as the Crystal Cathedral, a 10,000-member Reform church in Garden Grove, are wealthy enough to serve their English-speaking members and translate the service into as many as a dozen languages, including Korean and Spanish, which are beamed via headphones to the faithful.

Southern California’s Catholic dioceses also offer multiple Masses in several languages, including English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Korean, depending on the makeup and needs of their parishes.

To the extent that such arrangements are adopted, congregations may have better chances of eventually integrating their varied ethnic ranks, experts say. But in space-sharing arrangements at many churches, the atmosphere is one of polite coexistence rather than a melting pot.

That was not what First Christian Church members had in mind when the century-old institution hit a crisis in the late 1980s, said Elwyn Buche, who served as First Christian’s pastor from 1992 to 1998.

‘Separate But Equal Entities’

After a decade of declining numbers and financial hardship, the congregation was divided over its future. Some members wanted to escape Santa Ana’s changing demographics and move the church to the still predominantly white southern end of the county. Others envisioned bringing in the new people settling in the city, which by 1990 had become 65% Latino.

“Change is inevitable, and you will either manage change or you will let change manage you,” said Buche, who was brought in to help manage the transition.

The idea was a hard sell. Many of the remaining members of the already diminished white congregation left. The last time the white congregation met for English services in the cavernous main sanctuary a couple of years ago, there were 29 worshipers.

“Their racial preferences outweighed their faith,” said Smith of those who left.

The rest reached out to other ethnic groups and experimented with multilingual services for a while. But differing worship styles and longer services turned some people off. First Christian continued to lose members.

“Those who remained didn’t have the resources, so they did the next best thing and gave it to the Hispanic church,” Smith said. “That is very unselfish.”

Under the current arrangement, the Spanish congregation manages the campus where all three congregations share office space. Each congregation handles its own operating expenses. The Vietnamese congregation and a budding Korean congregation that is not affiliated with First Christian make donations to the Latino church for the use of the chapel.

On a recent Sunday morning, the familiar sound of hymns mixed in church halls where restless Vietnamese and Latino children eyed each other coyly and made brief contacts.

After the morning services, the Vietnamese congregation filed out of the chapel and into the parking lot, where the white members who had just ended their services were starting their cars and heading home.

The Latino congregation gathered on a patio for a food fair to raise money for a gospel concert in October.

“We’ve looked at our congregations to this point as separate but equal entities,” said James Rydelski, 31, a lay minister and member of Primera Iglesia. “We are basically independent ministries that are co-habitating.”

Members of each of the congregations say they would like to do more together but, like shy strangers at a dance, they smile and nod courteously when they pass each other. They seldom engage.

Many young Vietnamese and Latino members of the churches are bilingual. The Spanish congregation even has an English-language Sunday school, but the Vietnamese congregation was unaware of it. When asked if the two congregations should at least have joint activities for their youth, Lynn Nguyen, whose father leads the Vietnamese congregation, said she did not think that would work.

“I think their Sunday school is in Spanish,” said Nguyen, 25. Moreover, “they have a different style; we have different customs and culture.”

One member of First Christian who would like to see more joint activities is Henry Rodriguez, 12. He joined the white church with his family when his younger brother was diagnosed with a brain tumor three years ago. His mother, Kathi Rodriguez, believes her youngest, Eric, 10, survived the ordeal thanks to the church.

“They were always there for us,” Kathi Rodriguez said. “I joined because of the people. They are so kind and warm. Just every time there was a crisis, they pulled together for us as a family.”

But she can’t fault Henry and Eric if they feel a little isolated on Sunday mornings. They are the youngest members of the white congregation, which has no other children as members. Their father is Mexican, their mother is of Italian and Jewish descent. They don’t speak Spanish.

“The Spanish kids learn in Spanish, and the Vietnamese kids learn in Vietnamese,” said Henry, who was baptized recently by the Rev. Kelly. Fitting in, the precociously faithful boy said, “is a big challenge.”