Building a place for spiritual community

Michele Marr

As long ago as 1987, when Peter Haynes interviewed to become rector of

St. Michael and All Angels, members of the Corona del Mar congregation

told him the church needed Sunday school classrooms.

Fourteen years later, on March 25, Haynes helped parish members

celebrate the completion of their new parish center for the first time. A

grand opening celebration will be held next weekend during Easter

festivities.

“We now have beautiful classrooms,” said Teri Corbet, minister of

religious education. “We met in them for the first time last week.”

From the time the congregation formed in 1959, until its sanctuary on

Pacific View Drive was completed in 1968, worshipers met in various

rented rooms. A church office and a small parish hall were built

kitty-cornered to the sanctuary in 1976.

For Sunday school, kids assembled in “one long alcove, an open area

with a lot tables,” Corbet explained. “We put our group of little ones at

little tables in the same room as our teenagers.”

Acoustics and cramped space made it difficult to teach from more than

one lesson plan at a time and, Corbet lamented, “You just can’t have one

lesson that works for both a 3-year-old and a 10-year-old.”

The congregation’s steady growth continued to make a difficult

situation worse.

“And, while our parish membership increased by 5% last year,” Senior

Warden John Turner spelled out, “our church school population increased

by 30%.”

Like other thriving coastal county churches and synagogues in recent

years -- including Temple Bat Yahm, Presbyterian Church of the Covenant,

Mariners Church and Our Lady Queen of Angels -- St. Michael and All

Angels faced the challenge of expanding its campus in a county where

construction costs run high and real estate is expensive and scarce.

The parish was fortunate to have enough property to spread out on. To

help them develop a feasible building plan they hired Rengel & Co.

Architects of Tustin and asked consultants at Holliman & Associates in

Harrisburg, Penn., to provide them with a feasibility study.

In the fall of 1999, the 598-member parish began the quest to raise

$950,000: the estimated costs for an 8600 square foot expansion project

dubbed “Building Our Faith.”

“Virtually every member of the parish contributed,” said Turner, who

chaired the capital campaign. By January of 2000, members had put close

to $1.1 million into the building fund.

Ware & Malcomb Architects, Inc. of Irvine joined the project to help

develop the interior. The parish, then the city, approved the final

plans.

On the last Sunday in August, Haynes stood with his congregation as

they broke ground for the structure that soon would provide them with

classrooms, a nursery, a youth chapel and much, much more.

Scarcely seven months later, parish members have a new parish center.

Classrooms are color-coded -- the doors are blue, red, yellow --

rather than numbered to make it easy for children of all ages to find

their rooms.

With assigned rooms and somewhere to leave materials, teachers can now

use lesson plans with projects that extend over more than one Sunday.

“And, we can get noisy!” Corbet adds. “The kids are tickled pink.”

The nursery is lively with primary colors and four times larger than

the one it replaced.

“Parents were delighted. There were many ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ when the

doors opened,” beamed Kim Turner, herself the mother of three

preschoolers. “You should have seen the size of the old room.”

In addition to the long-awaited classrooms and nursery, the new center

houses a half dozen other much-needed facilities. Spacious administration

offices give staff the elbowroom they have never had, and room to grow.

Meeting rooms are available to the parish’s many programs. A large room,

now christened “chill room” by an improvised butcher paper and marker

sign, is a gathering place for teens.

An informal coffee and lunch room opens onto the church’s courtyard

and barbecue, making after-worship refreshments easier to serve. An

enormous hall, designed to double as both basketball and volleyball

courts, adjoins a commercially equipped kitchen. A large pass-through

window makes the hall a place to hold banquets and other gala events.

“We expect these new facilities to become a resource for the

community, too,” Haynes said. “In time, they will be available for group

meetings, sports leagues and youth groups.”

Residents of the local community are invited to be special guests of

the church on April 15, when it hosts festivities, including a tour of

the new Parish Center, following both the 8 and 10 a.m. worship services.

The Rt. Rev. Robert M. Anderson, assistant bishop in the Episcopal

diocese of Los Angeles, will visit the parish and will perform the 10

a.m. communion.

Refreshments befitting the occasion will be served after each service

and an Easter egg hunt featuring nonperishable eggs will be held in the

Parish Center at 11:30 a.m.

The congregation will complete its threefold sequence of celebration

on St. Michael’s Day, Sept. 30, in honor of their patron saint. The

center will then be blessed and dedicated by a bishop from the Diocese of

Los Angeles.

“It is now our great responsibility to use this beautiful new building

to reach out to our community,” Turner said, “and to do the work God

wants us to do.”

FYI

What: Easter Celebration of New Parish Center

When: 8 and 10 a.m. April 15 Where: St. Michael and All Angels, 3233 Pacific View Drive, at

Marguerite, Corona del Mar

Phone: (949) 644-0463