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Publication Date: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 Cover story: Growing with grace -- The giant-sized Menlo Park Presbyterian Church tries to balance being a regional attraction and a good neighbor
Cover story: Growing with grace -- The giant-sized Menlo Park Presbyterian Church tries to balance being a regional attraction and a good neighbor
(March 09, 2005)
By Rebecca Wallace
Almanac Staff Writer
A hall has a singular hum when a show is imminent. Everyone is in a hurry. The lights flare and dim, while musicians cock their heads and coax their instruments into tune.
Tonight, all that happens, but the band members also pause to pray. They're reminding themselves to be humble, that their performance will not be for their own glory.
After all, this is no concert hall, but a house of God. It's Sunday evening at the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church at 950 Santa Cruz Ave., and a crowd is arriving for the weekly service held by the church's Sanctuary group for 20- and 30-somethings. Besides prayer and a sermon, the services include video presentations (tonight, a clip from "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart) and a rock band.
The pews fill quickly with people in jeans and skirts, flip-flops and boots. It's an impressive turnout, especially considering this is Super Bowl Sunday.
At the front door, Larry Wu, 26, passes out programs. He's also quick to dispense a jovial greeting, an answer to a question, a kind word to a newcomer.
"I'm on the hospitality team," he tells an observer. "It can be intimidating to walk in and see a group of 300 people."
You don't need to be on a football field to hang with a major player. Menlo Pres, as many call it, is a giant among Peninsula churches. It draws its 5,000 members from all over the Bay Area and beyond, and sends people on charity missions across the globe. Its calendar bursts with Bible BootCamp, self-discovery workshops, exercise classes and divorce support groups.
In the early 1970s, church membership was around 1,000. It plateaued a decade ago at around 5,000, because it simply can't get any bigger, church business manager Bill Frimel says. Sunday morning services pack the sanctuary to capacity, spilling over into a neighboring church building where folks sip coffee and watch a sermon on a video screen.
Yet youth groups continue to expand. The high school program has about 1,400 students, and the junior high, some 750. The Sanctuary program weighs in at "about 300 and growing," Mr. Frimel says. And not all of these people are church members, which boosts the numbers further.
Executive pastor T. Doug Ferguson, who co-leads the church with teaching pastor John Ortberg, says his "greatest distress" is when someone can't find a free seat at services.
But there are other growing pains, too. Parking is a perpetual problem, with vehicles overflowing onto city streets during popular events. And then there are the crowds.
Church officials say their members help downtown thrive by bringing in shoppers and diners, and certainly anyone at Peet's Coffee on a Sunday can guess where a good chunk of the sales-tax revenue is coming from. Some residents, though, say they feel overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.
Nearby resident Patricia Stone says she has no problems with the church itself, but sometimes finds it annoying to have to plan around its schedule.
"I try not to go out at a certain time when the church is letting out," she says. "There's just so many people there that it becomes difficult on Sunday mornings to use the downtown."
Breathing room
The chief pastors at Menlo Pres live in Menlo Park, as do most of the rest of the staff. This is their community church, their hometown hall of worship.
But they're very aware that any face in the pews could be from Half Moon Bay, Hayward, or even Gilroy.
"We have to balance being a regional and a local church," Mr. Ferguson says. That means expending a lot of energy in managing a large population and growth while still being a good neighbor.
Often, you have to find new places to put everyone -- places that won't cause a clamor.
During a recent interview, Mr. Frimel stands inside one of the latest strategies for handling growth: the soon-to-open new meeting room down the street at 700 Santa Cruz Ave.
Menlo Pres has gotten city approval to use the space on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and on Sunday mornings and evenings, which means more room for youth groups and service overflow crowds.
The building housed the popular Menlo Park Hardware for decades, and residents have clamored for its return since it closed in 2001. So the plan is to put a new Ace hardware store in the front 3,000 square feet of the 8,255-square-foot space, and use the back for a church meeting room.
The church has spent a "substantial" amount of money improving the space, says Mr. Frimel, pointing out new bathrooms, ceiling insulation and fire sprinklers. Fresh paint and new carpet perfume the air. The outside walls now are cream-colored with teal trim, and Mr. Frimel raises his hand to show where creeping figs will create "a nice green belt" by the back door.
The meeting room still has a whiff of the industrial, with casement windows and boxy heaters that look like robots' heads hanging from the ceiling. Mr. Frimel says that's intentional: "The kids wanted to keep the warehouse feel."
Ideally, he says, the room will open by mid-April.
Church members are thrilled at having more space to stretch out, and some residents think an old-fashioned gathering spot is a fine addition to a city center.
Others, though, think the building, smack in the middle of downtown, should be reserved solely for retail. Retail brings the city sales-tax revenue, fueling everything from road repair to police patrol.
Former planning commissioner Stu Soffer voted against the meeting-room plan last year before the City Council approved it. He shared the concerns about retail, but his decision wasn't cut-and-dried.
"You hate saying no to an institution that has so much support in the community while you're also trying to preserve and promote the downtown," he says.
The clincher for getting the meeting room approved may have been its evanescence. The council granted a permit for only five years; the hope is that the hardware store will thrive in that time and be able to grow into the back of 700 Santa Cruz as well.
Then Menlo Pres will again be looking for more space, which could mean seeking city permission to expand church buildings on University Drive.
In the meantime, Mr. Frimel says, the church wants to show its good faith, so to speak, by opening up the meeting room for broader use.
The room is permitted to host two special events per month, and one is already planned: the city's April design charrette, in which architects will brainstorm ideas for improving the downtown.
Church officials may also seek permission for other events. Mr. Frimel tosses a few ideas around: Kiwanis Club luncheons, Kepler's Books author readings, and a Taste of Menlo event for local restaurants.
"We're not going to charge anybody anything to use it," he says.
Other steps have been taken to make the room more community-friendly. One condition of approval was that the church would create a circulation plan to keep pickup and drop-off traffic flowing smoothly. The church also crafted a youth supervision plan to avoid loitering in the downtown, and the room's walls are soundproofed.
Souls in a crowd
During the Sunday evening service, the Sanctuary band is performing on stage, surrounded by candles.
"There is no one like You/There has never ever been anyone like You," the musicians sing. The lyrics play across enormous screens on both sides of the stage and on TV monitors on pillars throughout the church.
As the service continues, with speakers, prayer and more songs, people in the pews seem more and more moved by the music. A man mouths the words, his face rapturous. Near the stage, a woman stands silently, arms outstretched and palms up, as though waiting for the rain.
Not everyone can bare their souls in a crowd. So a few Sanctuary members sit in the back of the pews behind a dark curtain, ready to talk or pray with people one-on-one.
It's all part of making a connection in a large group. When dealing with a fast-growing church, you can open new rooms and enlarge buildings, but these are just logistics. You can't neglect the heart of the matter -- making sure churchgoers, particularly new ones, feel welcome and not lost in the throng.
"Community doesn't just happen to you. You have to say, 'I'm going to open up and connect with people,'" says Charley Scandlyn, 44, the pastor who runs Sanctuary and the middle and high school ministries. "If people feel like they're a number, they'll stop attending."
Whether chatting with a dizzying number of people or giving a folksy sermon, Mr. Scandlyn personifies "welcoming." In jeans and a casual button-down shirt, he sports a broad, easy smile. He's the kind of guy you'd cast as Curly in "Oklahoma!"
After working with the church for about 11 years, Mr. Scandlyn took over Sanctuary about two years ago. He quickly focused on one goal: taking the group out of its must-meet-your-future-spouse-here mode. People can be driven away by a "singles group," so he and others have been working to focus more on faith and fellowship, he says.
"We don't just treat them like 'pre-marrieds.' That tells them that they're incomplete," he says.
Darren Su, 31, who first became active at Menlo Pres as a student at Menlo-Atherton High School, says the effort has been successful.
When he returned from college to get involved with the young adult group, he recalls: "It was like a meat market. The moment a woman walked in the door she would get pounced on. We found that at the core the group needed to address a spiritual need -- people were coming for the wrong reasons."
The church hired new pastors and began concentrating more resources on Sanctuary, and the sermons improved, Mr. Su says.
Now, he says, "People can come here and feel safe."
Why so popular?
Another way the church tries to beat the numbers game is by holding small groups, where people meet in private homes to talk, connect and grow in their faith.
Church officials have placed a renewed emphasis on home groups for all adults since last fall, with about 4,000 adults meeting in homes. Groups are especially popular for Sanctuary because of the growth in the number of young churchgoers.
Sometimes the Sanctuary groups get so big that they have to split in two, says 28-year-old Rachell Holowaty, who's been coming to Sanctuary for four or five years.
In a home group she went to last year, she enjoyed the learning but favored the togetherness. "It's not so much the teaching, because we've been hearing it all our lives," she says. "It's the relationships."
The church often trains adult members to mentor young adult groups. "It gives them a sense of ownership in the ministry," pastor Ferguson says.
Clearly the church is doing something right. When asked why Menlo Pres is so popular, all the churchgoers interviewed for this article mentioned the feeling of community.
Ms. Holowaty also praises the efforts to help the needy locally and around the world. "It's such a basic calling to reach out to the poor," she says.
Recent church projects and missions have included building a volleyball court at an East Palo Alto school, working at an orphanage in Peru, and bringing hearing aids to rural China. Last year, the church sent members on 28 missions to different countries.
But when asked why Menlo Pres consistently draws crowds, Mr. Ferguson looks to its core: prayer.
"We've always made this a place where God's grace is proclaimed. It's not the electric guitars or the drum sets," he says. "Our message is something we've stuck with for a couple thousand years. It stays."
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