On May 20, about to leave Xi’an in northwest China, I sat at breakfast checking email on my iPhone. The news: J. Jon Bruno, Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles, is selling the former St. James Church in Newport Beach, Calif., completed in 2002. St. James was the largest and most vibrant evangelical congregation in the Diocese of Los Angeles. Eight hundred members at least. Now, a developer will pay $15 million for the property and probably replace the church with townhouses.
Aghast at the sale of the church that was my spiritual home for a dozen years, I reread the Orange County Register report. Memories flooded back, as they flood back for members of the more than 100 Episcopal-to-Anglican congregations that have lost their buildings. I saw our beloved former rector, now Anglican Bishop David Anderson, talking with my father as he was dying. I saw myself in the group for mothers of young children, trying to figure out how to be a decent mom. I saw our son, David, in the Christmas pageant’s kindergarten angel choir, and coming home from the youth group’s winter sledding expeditions full of tales of how he almost hit a tree.
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