A Church Within a Church

It was a sunny if unseasonably chilly Sunday morning in Los Angeles, and members of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church were preparing for the 10:30 a.m. service. Relative newcomers to this particular sanctuary, they were still experimenting with where to place their processional cross.

St. Mark’s is a congregation but it is no longer a church, architecturally speaking; its building in Altadena was destroyed by the wildfires that descended on Los Angeles County in early January. The church’s rubble and charred remains are still visible from the street. St. Barnabas, a nearby Episcopal church, extended an invitation to St. Mark’s congregation after the fire to use their space on Sunday mornings, and on Jan. 19, St. Mark’s held its first Sunday service there.

In addition to losing their church, many St. Mark’s members have lost their own homes; others’ houses have been severely damaged. After setting up the sanctuary on this Sunday morning, altar guild member Ann Schofield-Osaki, who describes herself as a “cradle Episcopalian,” said she would not be sticking around for the service. Her house was scheduled to receive some much-needed smoke damage restoration. On her way out the door, she let everyone know that the county was offering free lead testing, due to concerns that the destruction caused by the wildfires released toxins into the soil.

Nonetheless, the members of St. Mark’s have not lost their community. It was “Low Sunday” when I visited, a traditional name for the anticlimax of the first Sunday after the pomp, ritual, and increased attendance of Easter Sunday. But on this Low Sunday, spirits were high.

Barnabas means “son of encouragement,” and “St. Be,” as it calls itself today, strives to live up to that name through various community-facing initiatives. The church has come a long way from its founding in the 1920s. At one time, St. Barnabas hosted a 7:30 a.m. communion service, Sunday school, and an 11 a.m. service, as well as a women’s auxiliary and a Boy Scout troop. That was in 1932. The church held its last traditional Sunday service in 2018, and by 2019, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles was approaching the LA Homeless Services Authority about repurposing the vacant building as a 12-family shelter. But in September of that same year, St. Barnabas was resurrected as St. Be, a diverse, multiuse community space that now hosts concerts, bilingual dinners, and Bible studies, and is also home to a preschool that meets in the sanctuary during the week, a community garden, and food distribution point. The hall next door on its property is also a meeting place for Nefesh, a progressive, transdenominational Jewish community.

St. Mark’s was able to move into St. Be’s sanctuary because St. Be no longer uses its sanctuary for Sunday services. In February 2024, St. Be shifted its Sunday evening dinner service to Thursdays to better accommodate its small congregation. Thursdays are now community days, consisting of gardening, food distribution, and, in the evening, a bilingual dinner, communion service, and Bible study. The preschoolers’ artwork hangs underneath the century-old church’s traditional stained-glass windows of saints and Biblical figures.

St. Be is the modern Episcopalian ethic made manifest: creative and flexible, progressive and accommodating, but mindful of its history, traditions, and aesthetic heritage. St. Mark’s Sunday service is a more traditional liturgy, although it does not use the flowery “Rite I” language with the thee’s and thou’s associated with the Episcopalian Church’s Anglican patrimony.

St. Be’s experimental approach to making Christian spirituality accessible appears to be rubbing off a bit on the St. Mark’s crowd. The presider this Sunday was Joseph Lane, a retired Episcopal priest who still conducts services for St. Mark’s. “This is giving us an opportunity to explore and experience and experiment with worship space and use of space as we look forward to a rebuild,” he said.

St. Mark’s congregation has been mobile before. Although the church initially sat in Pasadena, in the mid-20th century it moved to the more racially diverse Altadena. Lane attributes his parish’s particularly inclusive character to this history. Today, yet another shift in thinking is already evident. The folding chairs are not arranged in front-facing rows like the pews in the original building. The altar is still the focal point, but it is in the center of the room, and the chairs are arranged in a circle around it, providing more of a family dinner feel.

Parishioner David Key had also arrived early for preservice setup. He embodies the paradox at the heart of the American Episcopal Church: A Pete Seeger fan who wears his white hair in a ponytail, Key was dressed for church in a collared shirt and sweater vest. He told me he is the son of a church canon (a lay assistant to the clergy), and that he was born in 1945 in a hospital where his own grandfather was a founding member. He claims “Star-Spangled Banner” writer Francis Scott Key as a distant relation. Key said he misses the stained-glass windows in the old St. Mark’s church, which depicted social justice heroes of Christianity writ large, not just Anglicans or Episcopalians. The old windows included figures like Rosa Parks and Nazi dissenter Dietrich Bonhoeffer alongside depictions of Edward the Confessor and St. Augustine of Canterbury.

Once the flagship of the establishment “mainline” Protestant churches, the Episcopal Church retains its association with American elites even as its membership declines. The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., is an Episcopal church. It was the first place that Donald Trump and JD Vance attended church after the inauguration in January, although neither is Episcopalian. Just weeks prior, it was also the venue for the funeral of Jimmy Carter, himself a devout Southern Baptist. According to political science professor Ryan Burge’s analysis of the 2022 Cooperative Election Study data, Episcopalians still boast some of the highest levels of educational attainment and income relative to other U.S. denominations. Even so, the average age in the Episcopal Church today is 58, and membership has declined from nearly 2.5 million in the late 1980s to just under 1.4 million in 2023.

While this shrinkage may have been the cause of St. Be’s transformation from parish church to community hub, there was little sense of decline at St. Mark’s-at-St. Be on Low Sunday. More than one parishioner told me that the 200 folding chairs are occupied on a typical Sunday. On Easter Sunday, they were over capacity. Although an overwhelmingly white denomination at large, and even with much of the congregation away at a women’s retreat, the 30 or so St. Mark’s members gathered on Low Sunday were of various ages and multiracial.

The Episcopal Sunday service is a liturgy, meaning it is public worship that follows a specific format, with predetermined scriptural readings, prayers, and rituals. These prayers and readings follow the Book of Common Prayer, an English-language worship guide first written in the 16th century for the recently formed Church of England. The BCP has been updated over the centuries, and the Episcopal Church in the U.S. uses its own version today. There is room for modification, though. Lane was wearing splendid vestments he purchased in London, but it is hard to imagine Henry VIII’s Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, the BCP’s original author, donning an orange baseball cap during a sermon to tell a joke about the twin “orange terrors” of the wildfires and the Trump administration that he said are currently harrying their community.

Spontaneity bubbled up at another point in the service.

During the Sign of Peace, when the priest invites the congregants to turn to their neighbors and wish them peace, the greetings are mostly perfunctory, usually accompanied by tight smiles and quick handshakes. This Sunday, the St. Mark’s congregation hugged and got out of their seats to go check in with friends, and strangers approached me one after another to shake my hand.

Sitting next to me was parishioner Diane Simonson, who told me that the Peace lasts longer now than it did before the fire. “We have a lot of gratitude to be in this space,” she said.

The good feeling continued at the coffee hour afterward, where parishioners chatted outside and young people worked in the community garden.

Jill Bergeron is the junior warden of the vestry, a position she likens to vice president on a board of trustees. Bergeron said the community is in a holding pattern during this time of transition. They are still healing, and St. Mark’s rector (the priest in charge), is preparing to go on sabbatical. In August, when the rector returns, Bergeron said leadership can “regroup, reorganize, and focus our efforts” on questions like what services might look like in the future and what people will need “to feel whole” in the long term. For now, Bergeron said, the focus remains on “what can we provide to our congregation now in this space, so they have what they need physically, spiritually, emotionally.”

St. Mark’s is making the best of things in the meantime. Lane prepares for services in a sacristy that doubles as storage for the preschool. He thinks he may have found some wall space for a mirror over a couple of miniature plastic training potties. In a small cupboard, labels on shelves indicate which chalices, altar cloths, altar bread, and candles belong to which community, St. Be or St. Mark’s. This Sunday, a eucharistic minister, a lay person trained to hand out the communion bread, suited up beside Lane in a cassock on loan from a seminary colleague who reached out after the fire to see how he could help.

The fire broke out on the evening of Jan. 7, the day after Epiphany, the end of the liturgical Christmas season in the Episcopal Church. Every year, Lane hosts a large Epiphany party at his home, a charming early-20th-century bungalow with tremendous curb appeal, just minutes from St. Mark’s. When I first talked to him, he and his husband were staying at a friend’s house while their house was undergoing restoration and repairs due to smoke damage, a process called remediation. Lane estimated that around 50 St. Mark’s parishioners have lost their homes entirely, and that around three or four of those are what he calls “multigenerational losses,” in which elderly parents and their adult children both lost their homes.

Lane said he and his husband evacuated early the next morning, when a chance early wake-up alerted them to the fire department’s presence in the street urging residents to evacuate. They spent the next few hours with their two German shepherds and two cats in a restaurant parking lot until friends called to invited them to stay in their guest house. He said it was around mid-morning when he received an email from St. Mark’s rector that the church had been destroyed.

Conditions on the site were still considered hazardous when three parishioners visited the wreckage in the early days after the fire. They went through the rubble and retrieved some artifacts that are highly prized by Lane and the congregation. Among those salvaged items was the church’s bell.

In a Feb. 9 sermon on Psalm 138, Lane focused on a particular verse, “They will ring the ways of God, that great is the glory of God.” In the sermon, he recalled receiving the news that parishioners had saved the bell. “Did they save the clapper?” he recalls someone asking. “From the standpoint of percussive tonality, the clapper is as important as the bell itself,” Lane explained. A parishioner Lane describes as St. Mark’s “resident percussion professor” told him that the clapper is made from the same metal as the bell itself, “so if replaced, the bell will sound OK, but not the same.”

“OK, but not the same” was an apt descriptor for the mood at the time. “While I’m fully inclined to invoke 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich’s: ‘All will be well; all will be well; and all manner of things will be well,’” Lane said in his sermon, “I’m not quite ready to say we are well, at least not quite yet.”

Lane brought his audience’s attention to a second item salvaged from the fire, a brass vase. “With its scarring, it’s eerily beautiful. It should never be restored, but must be allowed to tell its story,” he said. Like the vase, when this chapter of St. Mark’s history is told, he said, “[the] patina will be much like that of this vase, muddled and beautiful.” That vase was on display again on the first Sunday after Easter, the blackened whorls on the base offset by fresh yellow and orange-red roses in full bloom reaching up out of the mouth.

Lane drove me around Altadena, where debris from destroyed homes and businesses sit next to intact, tidy homes. On Altadena Street, where St. Mark’s was located, the Christian Science church and reading room next door are pristine. He said he feels like there are “parallel universes” of haves and have-nots in the postfire reality. He is also disappointed in residents of LA proper, whom he feels have not taken much interest in the suffering of their neighbors who are still recovering from the fire.

The contrasts can be eerie. Cheerful flowers and lush green lawns surround skeletons of buildings or, in other cases, their cleared-away foundations. Lane said that in those places where the cleanup is complete, owners are free to rebuild their homes. But according to media reports, moving back may be either extremely expensive or even impossible in some cases. Insufficient insurance payouts, rising costs of building materials, and for older residents, a higher cost of living than when they purchased their home decades ago, all make rebuilding a daunting prospect for many.

“Altadena is not for sale” signs are almost as ubiquitous as Army Corps of Engineer signs in people’s yards. Many residents are angry at who they consider predatory land developers. Lane said some began making offers on properties almost immediately after the fires.

He acknowledged this very human attachment to places and things in his Feb. 9 homily: “The idea of a house [is not] quite the same as the sense of home. Similarly, the institution of the church is not quite the same as the community that gathers.” He observed that there is a truism in Christian circles that the church isn’t a building per se, so much as the people inside. But the Episcopal Church is a sacramental one that believes material items can have spiritual value. As parishioners gathered for the postservice coffee hour, Lane could be found disposing of the consecrated communion wine—in which Episcopalians understand Jesus Christ to be “‘really present’ in a special way,” according to the Church’s online glossary—not by simply pouring it down the sink, but returning it to the earth in the flower beds outside.

The St. Mark’s and St. Be communities are also really present to each other in a special way. According to St. Be Rector Jaime Edwards-Acton, St. Mark’s community members are actively participating in St. Be’s work, helping with painting and cleaning projects, and offering a spirit of camaraderie.

“It’s a blessing to us to have been able to offer space to them,” he said.