Show of Faith

Amid signs of revitalized church life, millions of Christians in Southern California celebrated Easter in sunrise rites and packed Sunday services.

Outdoor sunrise services, most of them beneath overcast skies, ranged from the venerable events atop craggy Mt. Rubidoux in Riverside County and Mt. McGroarty in Sunland-Tujunga to a special service on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Constitution at the San Diego Naval Air Station, with the commander of the Naval Air Forces Pacific reading Scripture.

The big numbers, as always, were in church pews. Despite adding extra morning services, the most popular morning worship hours found many parishes straining fire code regulations.

“There is so much energy that comes from all these people being together in one room,” said Gina Maurie, 32, of Corona del Mar, at a church service on the UC Irvine campus. “I just can’t think of anywhere else where I’d rather be.”

One San Fernando Valley priest remarked, “Officially, we can seat 1,300 parishioners, but it’s standing-room-only at three of our five Masses.”

More than Christmas, Easter--also called Resurrection Sunday--is the defining holy day for churchgoers because Christianity asserts that Jesus was raised by God from the dead in the Gospel-told drama in 1st century Jerusalem. That belief in turn, church doctrine says, means that Christians also ultimately conquer death.

“If the resurrection is not true, we’re wasting our time here,” the Rev. Dudley Rutherford told 4,000 worshipers at Shepherd of the Hills Church in Porter Ranch. They assembled under a huge white tent that most recently was used at last week’s Oscar ceremony.

Shepherd of the Hills was not the only evangelical church taking an unusual step to accommodate large followings. Nearly 9,000 people attended two services of the Mariner’s South Coast Church at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center, which is larger than the nondenominational congregation’s building in Newport Beach.

Taking note of the suicides of Heaven’s Gate cult members in Rancho Santa Fe last week, the Rev. Kenton Beshore commented on contrasting religious views of the afterlife.

“It’s so sad those 39 people ended their lives to live with aliens,” he said. “Heaven for us isn’t going to live with aliens. It’s to live with our family, our friends, our home in heaven.”

In a similar move to a larger facility, Inglewood’s Faithful Central Missionary Baptist Church and South Central Los Angeles’ Greater Bethany Community Church drew an estimated 7,000 people to a joint service at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Organizers said Faithful Central has grown from 350 members in 1993 to 4,200; in the same period, Greater Bethany has grown from 1,300 members to 4,500.

Although church success stories are celebrated and failing congregations tend to be overlooked, researchers say that recent statistics show an overall upswing nationwide.

“The escalation of interest in religion and spirituality has brought about a significant influx of adults back to the church,” said pollster George Barna of Oxnard, who specializes in national religion surveys.

Average weekly church attendance measured in January was 43%, compared to 37% in 1996, a figure Barna said was the lowest point in 15 years. He said another rising figure is the 43% of respondents he calls “born again” Christians because they say they have an ongoing commitment to Jesus as personal savior and believe they will go to heaven as a result. The biggest increase in churchgoing was among Catholics--from 22% two years ago to 31% this year, he said.

On Saturday night, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony stood in front of a blazing outdoor grill on the steps of a Granada Hills church, at the start an Easter vigil service that took place at countless Catholic and Episcopal churches.

“May the light of Christ rise in glory,” intoned Mahony as he lit a tall candle from the fire, then proceeded into St. John Baptist de la Salle Catholic Church.

Halfway through the vigil service before 1,100 parishioners, Mahony put on sandals and stepped into a shallow pool near the altar to baptize his adult niece-in-law, Amy Mahony. As she knelt in the water, Mahony poured a pitcher of water over her shoulder-length hair.

The partial immersion ceremony is now favored by Catholicism over sprinkling the heads of Catholic converts who have never been baptized. Moments later, Amy Mahony, nearly overcome with emotion, said, “I am overjoyed, I feel clean and like a new person, and very happy.”

On Sunday, the bilingual Mahony celebrated Mass in Spanish at 8 a.m. in St. Alphonsus parish in East Los Angeles, then in English three hours later at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Monterey Park.

More than 1,000 Latino Protestants packed a Spanish-language Easter sunrise service indoors at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale, now an annual event of the Hispanic Baptist Churches of the Southwest. The program included a new light-and-sound presentation of Jan Styka’s huge mural, “The Crucifixion,” narrated in Spanish.

Another sunrise service held indoors--for the third consecutive year--was the annual Hollywood Bowl Easter service. Intermittent renovations at the Bowl moved the service into the Hollywood Women’s Club. The 75th anniversary service will be held next year in the Bowl, said Norma Foster, producer of the event.

Though the temperature was mild, most sunrise service aficionados who arrived before dawn were greeted by overcast skies.

At 2,000-foot Mt. McGroarty near Sunland, participants could see only a bit of sunshine pushing under the cloud cover through Big Tujunga Canyon. Nearly 500 adults, kids and dogs on leashes rode in vans driven by Kiwanis Club members up a winding dirt road that longtime sunrise service volunteer Sandy Miller had smoothed out the previous day with a bulldozer.

At Mt. McGroarty’s 72nd annual service, the first woman pastor to deliver its sermon talked about Mary Magdalene, the first person to whom the resurrected Jesus appeared, according to the Gospels.

Mary Magdalene was weeping over Jesus’ crucifixion and the subsequent apparent theft of his body from the tomb, said the Rev. Janet Winslow, pastor of Shadow Hills Presbyterian Church of Sunland.

“She was weeping over a world where loveless power always seems to beat the life out of powerless love,” she said.

Yet, Winslow said, “When God does a new thing, when God brings forth life out of death, God chooses the unexpected one,” in this case, a woman to be the bearer of the Easter message.

“Easter is an opportunity to let go of old assumptions and accept a new reality--to give up the expected for the unexpected,” she said.

At the joint church service in the Los Angeles Convention Center, Bishop Kenneth C. Ulmer of Faithful Central Missionary Baptist Church also preached about Mary Magdalene, weaving into his sermon such contemporary issues as drug abuse and single parenthood.

As Audrey Sampson, a 28-year-old teacher at Washington Elementary School in Lynwood, looked at the preacher on the 20-foot television screen inside the convention center hall, she said she would use this Easter as a time to reassess her life.

“Easter coincides with spring and it’s a time of rebirth,” Sampson said. “A time to look at myself, start new and look at the directions I want to take.”

Times staff writer John Gonzales and correspondent Lori Haycox contributed to this article.