RELIGION : Drenched Church Seeks Deliverance : A neighboring Pasadena congregation lends a hand restoring floors and walls that were soaked by heavy rains last month.

Ravaged by recent rains, Deliverance Tabernacle Church is a wrinkled shell of its former self. The ragged, stained plywood floor is stripped of carpet. Mildew mars the sodden walls. The once-beautiful wood-beamed ceiling is warped and sagging.

Despite the ruin, the church’s pastor, Coy Turrentine, sees a beauty that transcends the devastated structure itself. After rains poured into the Northwest Pasadena church, the neighboring Lake Avenue Congregational Church offered to help.

“It’s brought the communities together in a great way,” Turrentine said. “The community is coming to see what they can do to help.”

The 250-member Deliverance Tabernacle and the 4,000-member Lake Avenue Congregational Church are members of a network of 50 churches known as Neighborhood Christian Partners, Turrentine said.

“We support each other spiritually, and I guess I’m looking for a physical support as well,” said Richard Tovo, a contractor and member of Lake Avenue who is soliciting donations of materials and labor to rebuild Deliverance Tabernacle.

The project will cost as much as $75,000, Tovo said, and take a crew of 20 about eight weeks to complete.

“The concept I’m working with is the old-fashioned idea of church,” Tovo said. “The church is not a building; the church is the people. When our country first settled, people got together to build each other’s houses and to put up churches as communities. That was long before contractors were invented.”

Turrentine started the church with five members in 1966. It was almost 10 years before they had gathered enough members and donations to begin building their own sanctuary, and another five before they finished.

Completed in 1980, Deliverance Tabernacle, was “a nice, comfortable sanctuary,” Turrentine said. “If I may say, it was small but beautiful.”

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During the first major storms in early January, Tabernacle’s roof leaked so badly that church leaders decided to make overdue roof repairs during the next respite from the rains. But they miscalculated how long they had until the storm. A new deluge began after they had dismantled the old roof but before they installed a new one.

“We did most of our re-roofing,” Turrentine said. “And it caught us by surprise. We didn’t expect it to rain so much.”

Throughout the storm, volunteers worked around the clock to keep the water out, Turrentine said. They draped a huge canvas tarpaulin over the roof, but midnight gales blew it off.

“After that, there was no way to keep the rains off, and it just drenched us,” he said.

Two neighboring churches--Lake Avenue and Community Baptist Church--have given Deliverance Tabernacle space for services several times a week. But attendance has fallen. Turrentine said members aren’t as comfortable at the host churches.