Founded in 1943 as an Unity church, by the 1960s our church had become Unitarian, and later Unitarian Universalist. This is a remarkable change that recapitulates in miniature the history of our faith. The physical legacy of who we were as well as the ability to re-invent ourselves in response to changing times and needs, are part of our spiritual inheritance.

            Back in May, I read a story in The New York Times.  The reporter is Michael Levenson.

            The story is about a Presbyterian church called St. Paul’s in West Philadelphia, originally built in 1901.

            The article didn’t go into details about the church history, but I can imagine it follows a familiar story.  A congregation, thriving at the turn of the last century, built a gorgeous church in the gothic revival style.  The church flourished through the early decades of the twentieth century.  Happy families raised their children, helped each other through hard times, prayed for the young men who went off to war, got angry at each other, made up again, passed a budget every year, said goodbye to one beloved minister and welcomed another.

Gradually, the neighborhood changed.  The larger American culture changed.  The church began to lose members.  It became harder and harder to keep up repairs on their impressive, but aging building.  Presbyterian churches everywhere were in decline.  It was just no longer possible for the remaining members to keep the church going.  And the beautiful building, which had once been a symbol of their success, now was a financial drain and a symbol of their decline.

            So they did the right thing.

            In 1972, they sold the building.  The article didn’t say whether the church closed completely, or the remaining members simply moved to a smaller, more affordable, and more appropriate worship space.  I suspect the later.

            The St. Paul Presbyterian church sold the 1901 building to the Hickman Temple AME Church.  And then, after 50 years, last summer, the Hickman Temple AME church sold the building again, to a non-denominational, Pentecostal style church called, “Emmanuel Christian Center.”  The Emmanuel Christian Center wanted the space for their 400 member congregation.  But the dilapidated building, 120 years old, was in bad shape, and in sore need of modernization for the needs of contemporary worship and the youth center the new congregation planned to open for the neighborhood.

            Opening up the dark, gothic style space to new use meant getting rid of the old wooden pews, and some doors, and a couple of windows high up on the wall completely covered in more than a century worth of grime.  The new owners of Emmanuel Christian Center called in a demolition team.  And the demo team invited a salvager to buy anything that might be useful.  And the salvager called a friend of his, an antiques dealer.

            Now by antiques dealer, I don’t mean, Louis Quatorze furniture, I mean the kind of Antiques dealer you see on the side of every country road, selling broken dishes, old copies of LIFE magazine, and stamped metal advertising signs.  But the guy, Paul Brown, went down to the church and bought a couple of pews, and a couple of wooden doors, and both of the grime-covered windows, paying $6,000 for the lot.  He paid additional money for some workers and scaffolding to remove the windows.  He said he bought them because they were big, and round, and had some purple in them.  He thought somebody might want them.

            With the windows out of the church, he packed them in moving blankets, loaded them in the back of his Chevy, and drove them to an auction house to be appraised, still not knowing what he had bought.

            You know how this story goes, don’t you?  You’re waiting for the price tag.

            Well the windows did turn out to be original work from Tiffany studios.

            And in May they were sold at auction for $100,000.  Each.

            The article didn’t say how much Paul Brown got for the old wooden pews and doors, but the windows turned out to be a pretty good find.

            Paul Brown didn’t know what he bought.

            The pastor of the Emmanuel Christian Center didn’t know what he sold.

            The pastor of the Hickman Temple AME church says that he didn’t know, either.

            I wonder, who was the last person who knew that high up in the sanctuary of the old St. Paul’s Presbyterian church, those two grime-covered rose windows, each eight-feet in diameter, had been designed by Tiffany studios in 1904?

            Can you imagine the pride of the congregation when those windows were delivered to their new church?

            Can you imagine the bake sales and dimes collected to purchase those windows, and the one large gift, let us guess, that a family gave in honor of their older brother who died in the Civil War?

            Can you imagine the care with which those windows were installed?  And the ceremony when they were unveiled?  The light streaming through the purple leaded-glass for the first time.  The poem written for the occasion recited by the proud poet.  The anthem from the choir?  The dedication pronounced by the minister?

            And how those windows were enjoyed over the decades!  And how their beauty excited weary spirits!  And how the color, comforted those who sorrowed as the world and the church passed through the First World War, and the flu epidemic, and the decade of the Great Depression?

            And how, at some point, the windows gathered dirt.  And there wasn’t the will, or the wealth, to hire someone to clean them.  And as they lost their gleam, they also lost their ability to thrill.  And people paid less, and less, attention.

            And “our Tiffany windows” as they used to call them, became a story only some old congregational historian continued to tell, while the newer folks humored her, and then descended to a piece of trivia that no one really believed, and then a legend, which the decrepit condition of the windows themselves proved false.

            We’re looking at our church’s history this month, as we celebrate our 80^th anniversary.  

            And this story from the church in West Philly is a story about what can happen when a church becomes disconnected from its history.  It’s a story about why history needs to be told, and re-told, and respected.  It’s a story about the gifts our history wants to give to us, and the warnings our history has for us too.  It’s a reminder that being members of a church means being stewards of the whole story of the church, not just this generation, or the coming generation we’re giving our church to, but the previous generations who gave their church to us.

            All of that is us.  All of that is ours, if we remember it.

            Our church had their first worship service on October 3, 1943.  No Tiffany windows lit that service, unfortunately.  We met in a rented storefront at 12236 Ventura Blvd., now the home of a jewelry store near Art’s Deli and Licorice Pizza.

            We worshipped there for two years.

            As our second anniversary approached, the congregation received the news that our rent would be going up, now that World War II had ended.  We had been paying $75 a month.

            So the congregation found a place to worship temporarily, with the First Christian Church at Moorpark and Colfax, the site of the North Hollywood Interfaith Food Pantry that we collect food for every Sunday.  We paid them a rent of $50 a month, while we worked to build a church of our own.

            The congregation found a vacant lot, here at 12355 Moorpark, and bought it for $10 down.

            The congregation worked fast.  Professional contractors worked during the day.  Church members worked in the evenings.  Three months later, the church held its Christmas Eve, 1945 service in this sanctuary, still unfinished, but sufficient for the pride and the candlelight of the new congregation.

            Imagine the optimism of a new church with the war ended and the future boundless.

            The original church was only this rectangular sanctuary.  The RE classrooms came later.  The Fellowship Hall, which was originally the Youth Chapel, and the upstairs rooms were added in 1959.

            The original land purchased was only the property for the church building.  In 1951, the church bought two additional lots to the east of the church.  In the 1970s we sold the lot where the apartment building is now in order to pay off the debt.

            When I arrived here in 1996, the minister’s office was in that back corner.  In 2000, the congregation tore out that office to make room for the two bathrooms, along with remodeling the kitchen.  The minister’s office was moved to the room on the second floor behind the sanctuary, which had formerly been a hang-out space for the teen group.

            But the church has gone through more than physical changes in our history.  The church also went through theological changes.

            As I said last week, our congregation was founded as a member of the Unity denomination, one of the denominations of the New Thought movement that emerged from the Transcendentalist theology of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had himself been a Unitarian minister, though not very comfortably.  Emerson had been ordained in 1829 and served a church in Boston for just three years.  After that, he occasionally served as a guest preacher, until in 1836 when he founded the Transcendentalist Club and moved away from denominational religion entirely.

            So being founded as a Unity church in 1943 put us somewhat in the line of the Unitarian faith, but the Unity churches were much more heavily attached to the person of Jesus, and the Bible as scripture, and prayer as healing and other kinds of supernatural beliefs than were the Unitarians, especially the Unitarianism of the mid-20^th century which by that time had become fiercely rational and Humanist.

            So our first minister, Herb Schneider, whose name is on our Fellowship Hall, was a Unity minister and our congregation was founded as the Christ Memorial Unity Church.  But there must have been some prickliness in that denominational connection right from the start.

            By 1953, 10 years after our founding, Rev. Schneider had decided that the Unity faith was too constraining for his spirit.  He worked out with his congregation that he would resign from the Unity ministry, and the congregation would disaffiliate from the Unity denomination.  Like Unitarian churches, every Unity church is independent, so it isn’t particularly difficult to disaffiliate from the parent denomination.  And then, as the non-denominational Christ Memorial Church (without the Unity) our congregation re-hired Herb Schneider as our non-denominational minister.

In 1958, Rev. Schneider inquired to the American Unitarian Association about getting credentials as a Unitarian minister.  The Unitarians asked him to do further training so he began on a course of self-study with the Starr King School for the Ministry.  In 1964 he was granted Unitarian fellowship, but that was also the year, suffering from Alzheimers, that Rev. Schneider resigned from our church:  a pastorate of 21 years.  He died at the Camarillo State Hospital in 1967.

In the meantime, our congregation itself had become Unitarian in 1960.

But, at the same time, the American Unitarian Association had been negotiating a merger with the Universalist Church of America, a merger which occurred in 1961.  Every church being independent there was no requirement that we adopt the Universalist name, just because the UUA had, so were the Unitarian Church of Studio City until 1978 when we added Universalist to our name.

So hear how this story goes.

Our church was a Christian church first, but a New Thought Christian church a little out of step with the more orthodox versions of Christianity.  And then we were a Unitarian Church.  And then, 45 years ago, we became a Unitarian Universalist church.

This mirrors, exactly, the history of our faith.

Our Unitarian Universalist faith was a Christian faith initially, with theologians like Arius and Origen preaching a version of Christianity a little out of step with the more orthodox Bishops of early Christianity.  And then, fifteen hundred years later in Renaissance Italy we claimed the name Unitarian and began a gradual split from Christianity.  And then, in 1961 the Unitarians merged with the Universalists to become the Unitarian Universalist faith we hold today.

Both those histories reflect a faith, and an institution, congregation, and clergy, who were able to move and bend as the world around them changed.  As we evolved, we stayed connected to a history that flowed like a stream into new territories constantly being opened by a constantly changing world, rather than a faith bound to a stubborn past like a rock.

We flexed, and explored, and adapted.  We tried something new.  Our minister went back to school.  We remodeled our building.  We changed our name, not once, but three times.  We created anew, as we needed to, again and again.

And so far, we’ve been able to stay current without forgetting where we came from.  We benefit from both our history’s gifts, and its warnings.  We’re ever new.  But we’re proudly old, too, as we celebrate our 80^th birthday.

After Paul Brown heard the news from the appraiser that those grimy windows were genuine Tiffany and might be worth a great deal of money, he went back to the pastor of the Emmanuel Christian Center and made a deal.  They agreed before the auction, that whatever they sold for, twenty-five percent would go to the church.

So light streams again through those windows, where-ever they are.  And in the church where they lived for 120 years, their legacy shines on a new era of worshippers and youth learning and growing together.

            “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change;” may we, “the heirs of all the ages” spin with the world into a future worthy of our past.