Church Is Right Up Their Alley : Black Congregation Flourishes in Irvine Despite Sharing Location With Bowlers

IRVINE —  One floor removed from the rumble of bowling balls and the crack of tenpins lies the quaint, little chapel of Irvine Lanes.

No steeple marks the Church of Christ Our Redeemer AME, which also lacks a public sign or a listing in the telephone book. Yet its windowless, second-story sacristy is filled with a young flock singing “We Shall Overcome” while struggling to ignore the occasional faint scent of sweat socks and old beer.

Just a year ago, this congregation had dwindled to the size of the original apostles, a chorus of voices so faint that the forlorn music made the church pianist want to weep.

Then came a preacher from Los Angeles with a mission to build up the lone black church in the sprawling southern suburbs of Orange County, which has a small, dispersed African American population.

“Even though we’re meeting in a bowling alley,” said the new church pastor, the Rev. Douglas M. Patterson Sr., “we’re still in a place of worship. We have our prayer and we realize God can come to us in any place.”

God may find them anywhere, but this is the only place among tranquil suburban neighborhoods and grassy office parks where black church members can glance around the room and see themselves in the majority, greeting each other without introduction as “Sister” or “Brother.”

The Church of Christ Our Redeemer has managed to flourish despite the unheavenly ambience of the bowling alley, a history of internal dissension and meager resources.

When the worshipers walk past the bowlers on the first floor and climb to Redeemer’s door, they leave behind a suburban world that is occasionally lonely, often friendly and sometimes hostile to the 42,000 black residents who make up a little more than 2% of Orange County’s population.

“I came from a big Los Angeles church where we had some 10,000 members, three services a day,” Patterson said. “Then I come here about a year ago to Orange County, to a church where there are 12 people, no piano and no choir.”

Two centuries ago, Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, launched the worldwide denomination from a Philadelphia blacksmith’s shop with an anvil for an altar.

So, too, has Patterson improvised with taped music and a donated piano, borrowed chairs and a portable communion rail.

Occasionally, Patterson will slip in his sermons, referring to the hymnals stored in “your pews”--actually padded chairs. Like Patterson, members overlook these earthly matters of style, ignoring the fact that their church’s most distinctive architectural feature is fluorescent lights instead of arched stained glass.

Somehow, Patterson’s steady baritone singing voice and generous ration of hugs seem to transform the bowling alley conference room. “You are at home here,” he said, stretching both hands toward two strangers. “You are ours. You are from here.”

At a recent 11 a.m. Sunday service, Patterson bounded into the room with a bright orange kente cloth hanging loosely against his black robes and a crisp white handkerchief in his hand. His smile never wavered as he intoned the words of the national Negro anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” urging the nearly 40 worshipers to extend a handshake in greeting their seatmates.

More often, they embraced.

Historically, the AME network has provided shelter for the black community since the original church, Mother Bethel, was a northern way station for slaves seeking escape on the Underground Railroad.

Vanessa Ashford Bussey, a recent Irvine transplant whose family boasts three generations of South Carolina AME ministers, offers a one-word description of the church: family.

“When I found the church in Irvine I was so happy, being a traditional Southerner,” said Bussey, 35. “The warmth of the church made a big difference. For one thing, it let me know there were more African Americans in the area. I had seen some here and there, but scattered. . . . It gives you a sense of belonging. I found African American friends.”

Many church members had made a Sunday habit of commuting to black churches in Santa Ana, Long Beach, Los Angeles or San Diego until they found Irvine Lanes through friends or community advertisements. New church member Karen Mizell would drop off her two daughters at a church with a predominantly white congregation near their Irvine home, but she always politely declined invitations to attend.

“That church is great,” she said, “but I couldn’t bring myself to go. I’ve never gone to white churches. I don’t know if that should make a difference but it does.”

A West Virginia native, Mizell grew up in the Baptist church with the rituals and gospel music that for centuries have provided a spiritual and cultural anchor for black worshipers. When she moved to Southern California from West Virginia four years ago she started searching for her community.

“It was kind of hard,” Mizell said. “The first thing I wanted to do was to go to the black side of town. And my brother laughed at me. He said there’s no such thing. It was like I had to get a shot. I had to be around my people.”

Her daughters have mostly white friends because there are few black students in their school. When the girls entered the Christ Our Redeemer church, “they said, ‘Mom, there’s no white people,’ ” Mizell recalled. “And I said: ‘It’s because it’s a black church.’ And they asked me: ‘What’s a black church?’ ”

The roots of Christ Our Redeemer date back to 1991 when another AME minister, Linda Parker, started meeting on the campus of UC Irvine. That grew into a spiritual community of about 75 regulars who moved from a campus building to the conference room above the Irvine Lanes.

Then came a period of internal strife, problems with administration and a debate over the size and goals of the church.

By the late summer of 1992, the church had dwindled to a loyal 12. For nearly four months they worshiped without a minister.

“I think that a number of judgments were made that did not work out and the result was a personality clash,” said AME Bishop Vinton Randolph Anderson, who presides over the 5th District that includes Irvine. “People also didn’t have a great amount of stock in a room above a bowling alley. So they scattered.”

So Anderson shifted Patterson, a former associate minister at the prominent First AME Church of Los Angeles, to Irvine to make sure the church kept its stake in southern Orange County.

Lately, the congregation has been cautiously considering the notion of moving, perhaps sharing quarters with a Seventh-day Adventist church where members hold services on Saturday.

In the meantime, the congregation of Christ Our Redeemer will continue to share praying space with bowling balls.

“After all,” noted the bishop, “most of us forget that our mothers and fathers began their churches in their homes, in their dining rooms, in their living rooms. That’s where the churches really began.”