Church’s Colors Change With Times

The worshipers were on their feet, hands clapping to the rock ‘n’ roll-style gospel music. They raised their arms skyward as the choir cried “Hallelujah!” It was another Sunday service at Santa Ana’s Johnson Chapel AME Church, the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in Orange County.

But when Pastor Javier Suarez rose to start the service, the words “Bless those who are here” tumbled out in Spanish: “Bendiga a todo lo que estan aqui.”

Johnson Chapel is an experiment in colors. Adopting the motto “Two cultures, two congregations, one church,” it has added a service in Spanish for about 100 Latino parishioners. The head pastor overseeing the church, including its core congregation of about 315 blacks, is white.

Founded to serve a black membership, Johnson Chapel is changing along with the neighborhood around it. Santa Ana’s African American population has dropped 36% -- to about 5,000 -- in three decades while the city’s Latino population has exploded.

The changes at Johnson Chapel reflect a trend seen throughout the AME Church nationally. Many African American residents have scattered to the suburbs, to be replaced in many older urban neighborhoods by other rapidly growing minority groups -- prompting some AME churches to look for ways to broaden their appeal.

The need to attract other cultures isn’t unique to AME, but most denominations have had difficulty diversifying their congregations.

AME officials are determined to succeed.

“The church is always supposed to relate to its community,” said Bishop John Bryant, who heads the Fifth Episcopal District of 14 states west of the Mississippi River, plus Alaska. “In the past, you’d find that what churches tended to do, when the community changed, the church moved. That was unwise. That’s fostering our prejudices.”

Other AME churches have made significant progress in diversifying their congregations. The Bethel AME in Sparks, Nev., for example, successfully recruited Latinos to join the main congregation rather than establish a Spanish-language service.

In some cases the AME Church has recruited entire churches that were historically white. Immanuel Community Church of Long Beach, formerly a Baptist church, joined the denomination in October. Led by white pastor Jane Stormont Galloway, the congregation is two-thirds white.

‘Transcultural Ministry’

Galloway said the challenge of integrating a formerly white Baptist congregation into the AME style of worship -- lively music and liturgy sprinkled with ‘Amens’ from the congregation -- lay in “creating a transcultural ministry.”

Another predominantly white church, St. Paul Community AME in Bozeman, Mont., previously was a nondenominational church with a black pastor, the Rev. Denise Rogers.

With two major Native American reservations nearby, Rogers also hopes to attract tribe members to her church, and she plans to start an AME church in Missoula, Mont., to accommodate the nearby Blackfeet tribe. Members of the tribe and of other community groups have suggested that they want an AME church, Rogers said.

Johnson Chapel in Santa Ana launched a Spanish-language service eight years ago after Suarez approached the pastor at the time, the Rev. Timothy Tyler, about renting space for his Bible study group. Tyler saw the need for a Spanish-language ministry and asked Suarez to join the church. Suarez, a native of Santa Ana, became ordained in the AME Church and is now the Latino congregation’s pastor.

Johnson Chapel’s current pastor, Michael Barta, said adding the Latino congregation was necessary for the chapel to remain a viable institution. The area around Bristol and 2nd streets, where the 71-year-old church sits, no longer has the predominantly black population it oncehad.

“We’re happy to reach out to the African American people, but at the same time we have to be relevant to the immediate community,” Barta said. “The immediate community has changed. We have to change.”

“It was our call,” said Tyler, who now ministers to a St. Louis church. “We had to be as relevant to the people next door as to the people who were driving to church.”

Johnson Chapel, which owns two buildings on opposite corners of 2nd and Bristol, has its two services simultaneously on Sundays. The predominantly black group meets in the newer of the two buildings, the one with a steeple, and the Latino group meets in the other one for its Spanish service.

‘Like a Family’

Suarez, the church’s Latino pastor, said the new congregation has integrated well into Johnson Chapel. “We’re like a family, just different colors,” he said. “We consider ourselves one church but do things separately because of different cultures.... They don’t ask us to stop being Hispanics because we belong to a black church.”

Nationally, the AME, founded by black Methodists in the late 18th century to escape the racism they encountered in white churches, has long seen itself as open to all.

But in Santa Ana, some congregants who were accustomed to worshiping alongside their own kind initially weren’t as welcoming, Tyler acknowledged.

“The only friction was that we had to deal with territorial things,” Tyler said. “We had to get used to being together, but the congregation was able to overcome that.”

Said African American church member Jacqueline Brown, 41: “It’s added a special flavor to our church, having the Hispanic congregation, having the predominantly black congregation, and [a pastor who is] Caucasian. That’s pretty unusual.”

Church officials say it takes certain kinds of people and congregations to be models for progress, and Barta at Johnson Chapel is a good example, church officials believe. He is one of only two active white pastors in AME’s western district.

“Rev. Barta ... loves people and is what we would hope the Christian church would be: colorblind,” said Bishop Carolyn Tyler Guidry, former presiding elder of the AME’s Los Angeles-Pasadena region.

Barta, 50, is a looming figure with white hair and glasses. He grew up in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles, graduated from Dorsey High School and was ordained in the Baptist church. He was associate pastor at a Los Angeles County Baptist church for three years before becoming disenchanted with the church after a racial dispute, he said.

He was ordained into the AME in 1988 and spent eight years at First AME in Indio before becoming pastor of Quinn AME Church in Moreno Valley. In 2001, he was assigned to Johnson Chapel.

Guidry said church leaders believed that Johnson Chapel was ready for a non-black pastor. “They’re open, loving people,” she said of the congregation. “They received him; they have worked with him wonderfully well.”

Nelson Fowlkes, 69, a lay member of the congregation, said that at first some parishioners had concerns. Some wondered: “ ‘How can he be an AME? He doesn’t know what we’ve gone through as a people, our history,’ ” Fowlkes said. “Since he’s of a different ethnic group, our whole denomination thought this was going to be a challenge, but everyone’s come around to accept him as our pastor.”