by Rev. Catie Coots, East District Change Manager
photo from Community UMC of Pacific Palisades
The fires are still burning as I write this. We don’t know yet the totality of our losses. But we know we have lost two of our churches. The buildings of Altadena UMC and Community UMC of Pacific Palisades are reduced to rubble, but the legacy lives on, especially as members of the two communities vow to rebuild. Altadena has an important story to tell, but Community UMC has a story that is close to my heart, that has been forgotten by residents of Pacific Palisades and by our Annual Conference, and it’s actually a story that began with members of the Annual Conference.
On Monday, October 10 of 1921, the Southern California Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church adopted the report of the Pacific Palisades Association (PPA), and approved the Articles of Incorporation and By Laws. The action was tied to the work of the Sierra Chautauqua Association, which had formed in 1917, by ministers and lay members of our conference, who began camp meetings based on the Chautauqua movement of New York, which focused on education, concerts, and religious and social activities for Methodist families.
The PPA had a larger vision and by 1922 you can find advertisements for 3000 home sites in the Pacific Palisades, which was going to be a Christian Community of Homes “where the mountains meet the sea.” It might have caught your attention when the street named Chautauqua was mentioned, but you probably wouldn’t know that when the Alphabet streets are mentioned in the news, they are streets named after Methodist Bishops and Missionaries: Albright, Bashford, Carey, Drummond, Embury, Fiske, Galloway, Hartzell, Iliff, and Kagawa. There’s Whitfield and McKendree too. The PPA purchased 1100 acres of land. They started a grammar school that was part of the LA school district. Their report to the Annual Conference cited an intention to build a home for the aged. They also wanted to build a site where the annual conference could always meet. By 1925, they reported starting a golf course, and their progress on plans to build a permanent auditorium for the conference. It was a huge, and expensive vision, that in the early years went quite well, but with the crash of 1929, the financing became too difficult to complete their vision. The church was built, and it did have a large Fellowship Hall; across the street was the Palisades Elementary school. They started a preschool which became cherished by the community. Baptisms, Bible Studies, Youth gatherings, UMW, all the things we cherish in our churches were offered to the community of Pacific Palisades. By God’s grace, that will continue.
One last thing to hold on to: the street on which the church was built was named Via de la Paz, following the vision for being a people who promoted peace to the world and tied to where Chautauqua meetings were 1st held in the Palisades Foothills, which they called: Peace Mountain.
