$6-Million Wilshire District Project : Church Deals for a New Headquarters

The United Church of Religious Science will start construction next month on a new international headquarters building in Los Angeles under a financial arrangement that church officials say could work as well for other urban land-owning religious bodies.

The $6-million structure, besides serving as the home base for more than 300 churches and study groups in 18 countries, will house a school of ministry, a visitor’s center and the editorial offices of Science of Mind, the 100,000-circulation monthly magazine published continuously since 1927.

The denomination was in the news recently when the Rev. Peggy Bassett, senior minister of the 3,000-member Huntington Beach Church of Religious Science, became the first woman to be elected president of the metaphysical body.

The United Church of Religious Science, which has a constituency of about 250,000, had outgrown its 53-year-old headquarters building, but wanted to make good use of its 2 1/2 acres of land at 6th Avenue in the Mid-Wilshire District.

Study’s Proposal

“What a study found was that it would be best to build apartments in the back, but we didn’t have the wherewithal to do that,” said Mark Shaw, chief executive officer of the church body.

As a result, the denomination sold the land for $3.5 million to a joint partnership it formed with IDM Corp., a Long Beach developer, and obtained a $6-million loan for construction. Shaw said the church may use all or some of the money from the land sale to help pay the loan.

The old headquarters building was recently torn down. When the new 56,000-square-foot building is completed in the fall of 1989, a portion of its office space will be leased to businesses, Shaw said.

Meanwhile, IDM will construct a $14-million apartment complex of 259 rental units near the headquarters building, Shaw said.

Parking structures will serve the United Church headquarters, the apartment complex and the nearby Founder’s Church of Religious Science. The domed white church, built in 1960, serves a congregation of 7,500.

Model for Others

Tom Willard of Irvine, a United Church trustee and a developer himself, described the cooperative venture as a model for “forward-looking churches.” More typically, Willard said, “church-owned land is sold to developers or developed exclusively for church usage by contractors hired for that purpose. To remain visible and accessible, a church must be integrated into its surroundings.”

Architect for the project is Gin Wong & Associates of Beverly Hills.

The headquarters building will contain the Ernest Holmes Memorial Library, named after the founder of the Religious Science movement. The 10,000-volume library is the third largest U.S. collection of metaphysical books and magazines, according to J. Gordon Melton, who teaches at the denomination’s school of ministry and heads the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara.

Not to be confused with Christian Science or the Church of Scientology, the United Church of Religious Science is part of the metaphysical “New Thought” movement that originated in the late 19th Century. Eclectic in religious beliefs, it also emphasizes positive thinking for health and success.

“Our spiritual philosophy,” Shaw said, “is that all people, made in the image of God, are forever one with Infinite Life. We also believe that whatever is true of God is true of everyone, and the qualities of God--harmony, peace, happiness, abundance--are the very qualities of all people.”