Bishop Committed to Her 400 Churches and Her Bike

When United Methodists broke ground for Casa Shalom, a 30-unit affordable-housing project in Pico Union on a recent Sunday afternoon, their bishop arrived for the ceremony on a bicycle from Pasadena, 13 miles away.

Quickly changing into clerical garb, Bishop Mary Ann Swenson blessed the ground at Pico Boulevard and New Hampshire Avenue where the apartments and a child-care center for 40 children will be built.

Swenson, 57, who in her capacity as bishop of the California-Pacific Conference oversees 400 United Methodist churches in Southern California, Hawaii, Guam and Saipan, is a committed environmentalist and social activist. Almost exclusively, she rides a bicycle everywhere or uses public transportation.

“When you ride the Red and Blue Line and city buses, you will see the people of Los Angeles in a way you don’t see when you’re in your car,” she said.

The United Methodist Church, with 8.2 million members, is the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination, after Southern Baptists. But like those of most mainline denominations, its membership has been declining -- by about 40,000 a year over the last decade. In the California-Pacific Conference, membership has decreased from 2,000 to 3,000 a year to about 95,000 a year now.

The bishop attributes the decline in church membership to a material wealth that makes people think they have no need for church, distractions from popular culture, and the church’s failure to reach out enough to new areas and new potential members. She uses her bicycle riding as a way to connect to people and bring them to the church.

Whether it’s to her office in Pasadena, a preaching engagement in South Los Angeles or visiting a church in Murietta, near San Diego, you can count on Swenson and her husband, Jeff, to arrive on their tandem bike, with a small Bible, a change of clothes and shoes tucked away in a bike trunk.

People are surprised when they learn that the bishop rides a bike everywhere.

In June, the Swensons -- she in a flowing, black evening dress and he in a tuxedo -- rode on their bicycle to the Crystal Ball, a fundraiser for the Methodist Hospital in Arcadia at the Santa Anita racetrack.

“It was kind of amazing to see the bishop ride up on a tandem bike and ready to go,” Arcadia Mayor Gary Kovacic said. “It’s not the image you have of a typical bishop.”

Elected a bishop in 1992, Swenson served for eight years in Denver, covering Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Montana.

She returned to Southern California in 2000, nearly three decades after completing her studies at the Claremont School of Theology, one of 14 United Methodist seminaries in the country. She earned her master’s and doctorate degrees in ministry at Claremont.

What struck her most after being away, she said, was the decline in the church’s influence.

“It’s sad that we were not able to keep up with the growth of the population in Southern California,” she said, because churches had not done enough to reach out to immigrants from other countries and those arriving from other states to replace aging members.

Nationally, 65% of United Methodist Church’s members are over 50, according to Larry Hygh Jr., director of communications for the California-Pacific Conference.

In the 1970s, 98 United Methodist churches in that region had more than 1,000 members each. Today, only six churches under Swenson’s jurisdiction have more than 1,000 members. According to Hygh, the California-Pacific Conference has closed 20 churches since 1990, merged 40 others into 20 and formed 21 new churches, including ones for Latino, Korean, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tongan and Samoan congregations.

Swenson visits parishes throughout her jurisdiction and has traveled to Africa, Vietnam, China and other parts of the world. She also is president of the national church’s General Council on Finance and Administration, which handles a $500-million-plus budget.

She sometimes spends a night with homeless people in shelters, marches on behalf of workers’ rights, and has spoken out on behalf of gays and lesbians.

In 1996, Swenson was one of 15 United Methodist bishops who signed a statement opposing the denomination’s proscription against gays and lesbians within the ministry.

“One of the things I want to do as bishop is to take the center to the edge and bring the edge to the center,” Swenson said, “and empower them and give new meaning and new life of possibilities to them.”

Using public transit and riding her bicycle help her keep in touch with “the edges.”

The Swensons always rode their bikes, but she became even more avid after the couple received a tandem bicycle as their 25th wedding anniversary gift Aug. 31, 1993.

Since then they have completed many tours, including a cross-country, 4,059-mile trip that took 58 days.

While she was growing up in Mississippi as an only child in a United Methodist home, Swenson felt a “sense of call to preach.” She would line up her dolls, grab her father’s Bible and a TV tray and then preach to the toys.

In the 1960s, a summer job as a youth director for the United Methodist Church took her to Tacoma, Wash. There, she met Jeff Swenson, a dairy farmer who had been drafted to serve in Vietnam and had returned home.

After a “whirlwind summer romance,” she went back to Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. He followed to court her. They married, then it was back to Tacoma, where she worked as youth director for a United Methodist church while he returned to school, earning a fine arts degree at the University of Puget Sound.

He put her through the seminary by working as a maintenance man and buildings superintendent on the campus.

Since then, Jeff Swenson has always been at her side in a supportive role, the bishop said.

When people ask him, “What do you do?” he answers: “I take care of the bishop.”

He is in charge of the Swenson household, including entertaining their many guests. They have no children.

Though they ride bikes and use public transportation to be good stewards of the environment and to be in touch with people, riding has yielded other benefits.

“It’s the only time in our lives when we are not interrupted with a lot of demands and requests on us,” the bishop said. “It’s a very special time -- one of the wonderful things about riding.”