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A Church’s Life, Death, and Resurrection NEW PURPOSE: Grace Lutheran Church held its last service on Sunday.
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BY M E L I N D A B U R N S
he 113-year-old Grace Lutheran Church in Santa Barbara, facing the inevitable after decades of declining membership, closed its doors forever last Sunday as a house of worship in the Lutheran faith, leaving its aging members, all 42 of them, unmoored but unshaken in their mission. Since the 1970s, the A-frame church at State Street had always been a place where a homeless person could get a blanket and a meal. Now, the congregation is bequeathing all of its land to help the poor — two acres’ worth $7.5 million in a major shopping mall. On one acre, the Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara plans to demolish Grace Lutheran and build Grace Village, a three-story structure with 60 rental apartments for low-income seniors, in accordance with the congregation’s last wishes. The remaining acre, which is under commercial lease, will generate about $100,000 yearly for the needy, church leaders said. “The way they’re using their property is extraordinarily admirable,” said the Reverend Mark Asman of Trinity Episcopal Church. “Numbers don’t always tell a story. I’d measure the size of their heart and say their heart is alive.” For Grace Lutheran members, the satisfaction of giving has been tempered by grief over the loss of a “church home.” They pondered their options for 10 years before voting last spring to proceed with closure. “This is extremely painful and even a little divisive,” said Barbara Wagner, who first started attending services at Grace Lutheran in the late 1970s with her husband, Martin Scharlemann. “It’s hard to imagine not having that church in our lives. They are the sweetest, most determined-to-do-good people I’ve ever met. “We’re going to enter a period of mourning — and then we’re going to look for a church that has lots of young people.” The Grace Lutheran property was purchased for $200,000 in 1956 when it was in farmland. Membership peaked at just under 200 in the 1960s and then dropped steadily, church leaders said, mirroring a 40-year decline in mainline Protestantism across the country. Beginning with the ’60s rebellion, scholars say, many young Americans shifted to less traditional,
more unscripted evangelical churches, or they dropped out of organized religion altogether. “Grace Lutheran is prototypical of the larger pattern,” said Wade Clark Roof, professor emeritus of religion and society at UCSB. “For a long time, mainline Protestant churches were a bridging institution, the center of the culture holding things together. But they were pushed aside. Oldstyle Protestants have been the ones who have suffered the most.” Sunday’s closing service at Grace Lutheran was old style in its formal hymns and scripted prayers, but the theme, taken from the Bible, was “Behold I am making all things new.” “This is not Grace Lutheran’s funeral but its transformation, its metamorphosis into something new and good and lifegiving,” Bishop R. Guy Erwin told the listeners, as many wiped away tears. The land for Grace Village is worth $5.5 million and represents the largest private gift in the history of the Housing Authority, said Rob Pearson, executive director. There are presently 1,500 elderly residents on the waiting list for public housing in Santa Barbara. Construction on Grace Village is expected to begin in mid-2016. Until then, the church building will continue to function as a food pantry and a meeting space for nonprofit groups, and Templo Calvario will hold services in Spanish there. The remaining acre of church land, now under lease to Vons and AC Fitness (a club in the old Strouds building) will be owned and administered by California Lutheran Homes, church leaders said. The lease revenues will go to Transition House, Habitat for Humanity, Lutheran World Relief, and a food pantry at Grace Village. Transition House was cofounded by Grace Lutheran, Trinity Episcopal, and a handful of other churches that took turns running monthly homeless shelters between 1984 and 1986 in their basements and fellowship halls. Congressmember Lois Capps, a longtime member of Grace Lutheran, recalls working as a nighttime proctor in those days. The church volunteers were named as Local Heroes by this newspaper in 1987. “It was a vibrant church,” Capps said. “There’s some sadness and poignancy in the closing, but it can be the sign of better ■ things to come.”
BY J E R R Y R O B E R T S CRUEL IRONY: The nation’s top climate-science denier has taken power over environmental policy in Congress — just as actual climate scientists have forecast California’s worst drought since the Middle Ages. Far more than a shortage of precipitation, the state’s fouryear drought represents the start of a 1,000-year event, new research shows, propelled by atmospheric warming caused by greenhouse-gas emissions. “The current California drought is exceptionally severe in the context of at least the last millennium,” concluded a recent study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The state’s drought is shaped not just by rain and snow scarcity but also by “record high temperatures,” noted two climatologists, who live in the real world. Back in the Beltway, however, James Inhofe (R-OK) last month assumed chairmanship of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where his evangelical Christian views on climate change now hold sway over efforts to reduce carbon emissions. “Climate is changing and climate has always changed and always will,” Senator Sooner promptly declared.“The hoax is that there are people who are so arrogant to think they are so powerful they can change climate. Man can’t change climate.” As policy makers from Santa Barbara to Sacramento earnestly seek ways and means to relieve California’s parched condition, Inhofe’s political ascendance highlights one broad obstacle to addressing the existential threats of climate change and drought. Sadly, it is but one of several baked-in, intractable impediments framing the crisis.
MEGA-DROUGHT: The latest scary report on California’s drought is based on historic measurements of tree rings, which grow narrowly in dry years and wider in wet ones. Similarly, a separate study, published last week in Science Advances, points to a looming “mega-drought” throughout the Southwest in this century, comparable to that which destroyed the Ancestral Pueblo culture. “Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America,” the authors wrote. “Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events … ” A real-time illustration of the problem: Rain drenched the state in December, and runoff temporarily boosted reservoir levels; however, because temperatures were warm, snow formed only at very high elevations, so there was little buildup of Sierra snowpack, the crucial source of sustained water supply. POPULATION: Environmentally conscious Californians so far are meeting the state’s goal of reducing overall water consumption by 20 percent by 2020. But the supply surplus produced by conservation independent.com
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Why Rain Is Not the Answer
still won’t meet forecast demand as population grows. That is the conclusion of an investigation by the Sacramento Bee, whose reporters surveyed 370 local agencies, then compared their demand forecasts to Department of Finance population projections. “The key to this is, our water sources don’t increase as population grows,” a Natural Resources Defense Council analyst told the newspaper. “If population is to grow, we need to figure out a way to do it with the same amount of water.” GEOGRAPHY: One fundamental fact has shaped California’s water wars: Most of the state’s water is in the north, while most of its people live in the south; most recently, for example, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and the Central Valley received less than an inch in early February, as up to a foot fell in northernmost counties. However, the war briefly halted in 2014, when Capitol pols forged a rare bipartisan agreement on Proposition , a $7 billion bond ballot measure. Voters bought it, 2 to 1. Alas, the mini-era of good feeling ended quickly. Committee hearings on how to spend the billions began last week, and the complex crosscurrents and bitter conflicts of water politics — fish versus farmers, conservation versus development, coastal versus inland — swiftly resurfaced. Notably, the California Water Alliance, representing Central Valley interests, attacked Save the Delta, an influential environmental group, over the need to build new, low-elevation reservoirs to collect and save more warm winter runoff. “Millions of Californians should be very concerned that some extremist groups and individuals are pushing to move storage project dollars away from the creation of new water storage,” the pro-ag group charged. “Voters need to know that they will not become victims of a bait-and-switch … ” As combat resumed, the State Water Resources Control Board was to convene this week for hearings on a range of possible anti-drought next steps, from greater rationing to more wastewater recycling. “Astronauts drink their own pee and have been for some time,” Chairperson Felicia Marcus noted at the last board meeting,“but here you’re drinking ■ someone else’s pee.” february 19, 2015
THE INDEPENDENt
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