Jose is one of those rare sights in the Santa Clarita Valley: an authentic street preacher.

Yes, Santa Clarita may be one of the most churched-out communities in the nation (just browse the CHU section of the phone book), but for a community of nearly 250,000, our street preacher-to-resident ratio is stunningly low.

Oh sure, everyone knows the Bicycling Mormons. They’re practically a fixture in the Santa Clarita Valley (it must be a pretty plum assignment for Missionary Training Center recruits to be sent to Mormon-friendly SCV) and you can find them anywhere.

But authentic, bible-thumping evangelical street preachers? They’re a rarity in the SCV, and I understand why. It’s a tough assignment: to be an effective street preacher, you need people. And to get that, you need a community that people walk around in. But no one walks in the SCV and we abhor going anywhere without our cars, so the market for street preachers has been and remains depressed in the 913xx. That’s why veteran SCV street preachers like Tony Miano use bullhorns to reach SCVers safely cocooned in their cars, or unThinkSCV altogether and head to more density-friendly places like San Fernando or Santa Monica.

But not Jose. He’s been hanging out in my neighborhood for over a month, struggling to find potential converts on our pristine sidewalks. He’s hard to miss with that Santa Claus beard, a wide straw hat, his dark black clothing, and his well-worn Bible, but whenever I see him, he is alone, sitting in the shade, looking around. And so I decided to do something out-of-character: I walked up to a strange looking man on the street and said hello.

In broken English, Jose told me that he’s 72 years young and lives and goes to church in Canyon Country.  His voice reminded me of the suave Latin gent in the Dos Equis commercials (The Most interesting man in the world), but the language barrier was too great, so I couldn’t ask him too many questions.

What does it mean for Newhall that we now have an elderly, bearded, Spanish-speaking street preacher wandering around, looking for lost souls (other than the fact that Vallarta has completely ruined us)? It just makes Newhall’s religious scene all the more spicy and interesting. Consider how diverse we are already:

OLPH is probably the most diverse church body in the SCV with masses in Spanish and English. Lots of Fillipinos and Koreans also attend OLPH.

Of course the Master’s College is also located here and its students are scattered all over (with some post grad students living on Walnut Street in Newhall). Placerita Canyon itself is filled with evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

If Christianity 2.0 is more your speed, there’s also a Mormon hall on Peachland and a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall on Newhall Avenue. For the old school, there’s  a Jewish Synagogue somewhere (I always see local Reformed Jews walking around Newhall on Shabat, but I never know where they’re going). We have a Unitarian Congregation and a liberal Episcopal church as well. And the Newhall Presbyterian Church is the oldest congregation in all of Santa Clarita.

And yes, we even have a small population of Muslims who worship at a community building in Old Town Newhall.

To this flavorful dish, I now add Jose, our resident Latin street preacher. The religious diversity is just another thing that makes Newhall the best community in the SCV.

Now, as I turned onto San Fernando Road and started heading south a few blocks to the Bike Shop there was a strangeness to the area. A lot of businesses had signage that was in Spanish; there was a store front church occupying an old bank building and there was a hodge-podge feeling to the place. It felt neither inviting nor relevant to the overall makeup of the Santa Clarita Valley.

Any business that has signage in any language other than English is basically saying that unless you speak our language we don’t want your business. I won’t go to a business like that because they have already let me know that I’m not welcome.

Well it didn’t take long for none other than Leon Worden to deliver a smack down to the Beacon blogger:

If you don’t like what’s happening in the City of Santa Clarita, if you want to change things here, if you want a voice in how this city is run, you know what you need to do. You have an open invitation.

Boom!

Worden is right and Bossert is not just wrong, he’s being completely unreasonable. Every other segment of the economy is at a standstill or barely inching along right now, yet Bossert expects  Gap, Pottery Barn and Urban Outfitters to open shop along Main Street?

Hello!?! We have 29% office vacancy rates in this town. Businesses have shuttered valley-wide! Entire cities in this country are dying, yet Bossert expects Newhall to be some model of economy vitality? Gimme a break.

Another thing: if you want a disconcerting experience, try visiting West Side shopping centers where there are actually store fronts with like, Asian characters on them.

What’s that about? We’re in America jack, you don’t speak that smack here!

I stand by my praise for the City, the Redevelopment Agency and the Old Town Newhall Association. What they’ve done in Newhall is remarkable. The decision to re-route traffic onto Railroad was the right one; we’re finallybuilding a truly pedestrian-friendly area, and that’s huge. And it’s only going to get better when the library is built. This is an exciting time for Newhall. I can’t wait to see what happens in the next five years.

Dave stop trashing my neighborhood and the hard-working people who have remade it. Many of us enjoy the stores and restaurants with Spanish signage. I’ll take my mismatched, funky and scrappy Newhall over the beige bore that is Stevenson Ranch and the awful, hazardousValencia Marketplace any day of the week.

Moving on….

I like Fred Butler. He represents a constituency in the SCV we hardly ever hear from: Master’s College students and alum. Like their CalArts colleagues, TMC students live in the SCV for a few years, get trained and “equipped” or what have you, then depart to start new lives.

Apparently that’s not the case with Fred. Unlike the TMC guy I interviewed a few years ago, Fred seems to be hanging around, and he’s getting more and more involved in the SCV commentariat by posting comments here and full SCV-centric blog posts at his own site.

Well he recently took issue with our treatment of the Mayors Prayer Breakfast:

My neighborhood progressives have been getting riled up the past few weeks.

A mayor’s prayer breakfast is going to be held in our community and this is a breach of 1st amendment protocol. Hysterical accusations of theocratic thuggery have been leveled against those evangelical TEA party supporters who are attempting to meddle with the fabric of our free society.

Fred, you’re new to the scene, so let me clue you in.

The problem is this: if this Breakfast is about praying for the good of the city, state, and nation as well as the wisdom and justness of our leaders, then why does the Dunamis Group invite, year after year, the most controversial and political religious person they can find?

In 2008 it was Ralph Drollinger, a man who lead a ministry in Sacramento and was noted for his anti-Catholic views and his comments that women belong in the home. This year is barely better: Rick Green’s entire online portfolio is focused on conservative political activism first, faith second.

Is there no difference to you Fred between private faith and public policy? Aren’t you uncomfortable with these cats who say they’re Christians, but make their living agitating for political change? Is there a difference between a Ralph Reed or Pat Robertson and a John MacArthur? Why can’t we have more of the latter and less of the former? Why can’t a Prayer Breakfast for our City be, *gasp*, more inclusive?

There are Jewish people in this town you know. In leadership positions even. I know, crazy right?

There are also Mormons who consider themselves to be Christian (but some of their fellow Christians would likely dispute that in private). Then, of course there are “Others,” like me, who don’t really pray but are constantly sending good vibrations to Valencia Blvd, Sacramento and DC.

Understand, I don’t want to be too hard on KHTS. After all, every get together in this town is about business networking, Christian, charity gala or otherwise.

But it’s nice to see the truth laid bare about the Mayors Prayer Breakfast for once. It’s not about creating a local theocracy as some on the left say, or praying for our leaders to be wise and just as the MPB’s supporters say.

It’s about business networking, Christian style!

Every person deserves the right to his or her good name, especially when they have been exonerated of one of the most heinous accusations that can be made against an individual today: sexual abuse of a young person.

That is why it is shocking that the Santa Clarita Signal Newspaper would choose to run a story April 7 concerning a single discredited allegation against an exemplary priest and future pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, Monsignor Richard Martini, without first putting in the extra effort to get all the facts.

…

Monsignor Martini was never removed from ministry and has never had another allegation made against him in 31 years as a priest.

Finally, the Signal owes Monsignor Martini and the Catholic Community an apology for implying that he was criminally charged with abuse. The story wrongly states that he “was never convicted of the allegation.” The fact is Monsignor Martini has never been charged with any crime whatsoever.

Ouch. Seeing your town’s newspaper called out like that is pretty disappointing. Hopefully the Signal will learn from this and improve. Here’s the original story.

On the other hand, can anyone blame parents for being a bit on-edge and suspicious of anything coming from the Catholic hierarchy lately? It’s not like the church has built up a reservoir of good-will and trust in its handling of sex abuse cases; quite the opposite in fact.

What Happens if Weste loses next week? And is the surprise guest speaker a Pentecostal?

Now in the past I’ve cast a skeptical eye at the MPB, especially when they invited Ralph “Women Belong in the Kitchen!!1!!” Drollinger a few years ago.

But things have changed. And my heart has softened.

Alas, Santa Clarita is in indeed in a “time such as this.”  So, in lieu of the City’s forthcoming PraySCV.com campaign, I’ve decided to write a prayer for my city.

O God! My God.

We are a troubled people Lord. For many seasons, you bestowed your grace and blessings on our people.Vehicles sold. Homes were raised, then sold. Money changed hands. Mighty ridgelines and Oak trees fell before the rumbling plow.

And lo, the people saw our bounty, and they came to us. Yay, Lord, they wanted to be us.

But Lord, you have forsaken us. In our present distress, we see empty dwellings,vacant businesses, and auto row is overgrown with weeds, as if in the wilderness.

Our river runs dry, our aqueduct is salted, and our hills burn with fire in the hot season.

Our people, once upright and blameless, now visit massage parlors and hire illegal aliens, oh Lord. And they greedily hoard their money instead of sharing it in our marketplace. Or they forsake us and shop in other communities, robbing the coin due to us.

Oh heavenly Father, restore us to our past glory. Shower Your prosperity and grace down upon us so that we might build a mighty empire of single family houses and vehicle-friendly strip malls from here to the sea, in Your name. Give us O Lord sales activity on Creekside, so that Your City coffers might be filled once again. Make real estate a worthy profession again, O Lord, so that we may fund many Charity balls with windfall profits. Make ostentation a virtue again, O God, that we might show off your generosity and favor with Hummer H2s and Porsche Cayennes. May our children, and our children’s children, enjoy a thousand promotion ceremonies, oh Lord. Protect us Father from high density developments, out-of-town developers, mass transit and Global Warming legislation.

Do not turn your face away from us O Lord. In our hour of need, hear our prayer.

Sincerely,

Santa Clarita

That can only mean one thing: It’s Holy Week in Santa Clarita. And the Signal must be chock-full of ads for the churches new and old in the SCV.

As if I needed any other confirmation, on several Paseo bridges in North Valencia, the Pentecostal Church on the Way (they will ALWAYS be the old Mann Theater, my teenage haunt, to me) had hung these banners:

Now if you’ve read my blog for awhile, you know I’m a lapsed Catholic who flirts with atheism but mostly commits to the least troublesome view on religion: agnosticism. As such, my first reaction to the bunny ad above was to raise funds to hang a smart ass ad with sentiments similar to this t-shirt:

But lately, I’ve felt the tug of Church, of community, of having something to do on Sunday beside the Farmer’s Market (don’t get me wrong, I love the farmer’s market). Part of the draw, I suspect, is that the institutes of the Catholic church (its sacraments, rituals and especially the calendar) provided order and structure to me as a boy, and it’s something I miss. Of course there’s a longer list of things I don’t miss about the church, but that’s another matter.

I sometimes feel that to really understand Santa Clarita, you have to go where Santa Claritans go, and that, by and large, is church on Sundays. I’m guessing here, but probably 60%+ of our residents attend church weekly, which would be double the rate of weekly church attendance in California according to the Pew Survey.

This is born out anecdotally by the fact that the only businesses that sprout up more often in Santa Clarita than churches is massage parlors. Christians even have a term for it, they call it “church planting” and you’ll see evidence of this in school MPRs, strip malls, and other public places throughout town.

One of the things I have been slow to realize is how big a factor local churches play in originating and spreading news. It’s probably no coincidence that the anonymous person behind the massage parlor letter targeted churches first. News travels fast on Sundays (and other days of the week).

It’s a whole side of life in Santa Clarita that I’m largely unfamiliar with.

]]> http://scvtalk.com/2010/03/29/holy-week-in-santa-clarita/feed/ 42 http://scvtalk.com/2009/10/04/abortion-protest-in-newhall/ http://scvtalk.com/2009/10/04/abortion-protest-in-newhall/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:27:45 +0000 Jeff http://scvtalk.com/?p=353 Continue reading →]]> Santa Clarita is a pretty homogenous place. We don’t see a lot of protests around here except during campaign season. That’s what made it surprising to me to see about 50-100 people lined up at all four corners of Lyons Ave & Orchard Village Road protesting abortion today.

As the tagline of this blog reads, I’m a pretty liberal guy. But abortion is one of those issues that makes even a liberal like me uneasy. I see the points from both sides of the debate and usually fall inline with the Clinton-era triangulation that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”

So while I can understand why these folks are protesting, I’m a little confused about why they’re protesting here. Santa Clarita, after all, doesn’t offer any abortion services as far as I know (hell, we only have one hospital for 250,000 people), and I imagine if you polled residents, the town would be heavily pro-life. Isn’t protesting abortion in Newhall a little like preaching to the choir?

That question lead me on an internet search. I Googled “abortion santa clarita” and stumbled across this posted on Yahoo Answers:

I want to know if  the hospital [Henry Mayo] offers that service [abortion]
Due to the fact that my friend is 12 years old and pregnant.
I am not a troll, haha.
Sadly,
Im dead serious.
She got preggo from a 9th grader, she is in 6th grade.

So if someone could please help me, I am not old enough to drive,
and we can’t get parental consent from her mother.
Her mom is strongly religious,
and would want to kick her to the curb.

The guy is being a jerk and claims the baby isnt his,
even though he is the only possible father…

If someone could please help me,
as to talk him into the fact that he is the only father, and to help me make him understand that would be great too..

Also, how many weeks does someone have to be before abortion.

*Btw, I know she is really young, I am quite disappointed, and angry that she is pregnant at 12 myself, so please, no harsh comments.

Thankyou.

This was posted on Yahoo Answers nine months ago (I know, the irony) and there’s no way to tell if it’s true or false or whatnot. But is it plausible this could happen in Santa Clarita? Sure.

I imagine if I were in such a situation, I’d first turn to the internet too. I might even type “abortion santa clarita,” the first result of which is the Santa Clarita Valley Pregnancy Center, a group that’s been open here in town as long as I can remember.

The SCV Pregnancy website is a fairly straight-forward site that offers various services, counseling and information for young women scared about pregnancy. It even has a tab on abortion in which the Center offers ‘advice’ on abortions and whether they cause pain, side effects, and mentions possible “serious problems”  during abortion if the young woman has an STD. Overall, it advises young women to come in, get tested, and talk about the matter before they make a decision.

There’s nothing explicitly religious in nature on the main website, which is probably why the Center enjoys broad support throughout town, including over five pages of PDFs, links, calendar events, and more on the City of Santa Clarita’s website. Its leader, Angela Bennett, is chair of something called the SCV Nonprofit Leader’s Council and in media posts about the organization, it is described simply as a place nervous young women can go to receive counseling about their pregnancy.

However, if you go to LifeSupporter.org, a “Project of the SCV Pregnancy Center,” you’ll find a website that reveals the other mission of the SCV Pregnancy Center:

We reach out with compassion to families experiencing unplanned pregnancies and help them to consider life affirming alternatives to the devastation of abortion. In all aspects of the ministry, we encourage Biblical principles of living in a loving and non-judgemental (sic) environment. Our trained staff and volunteers offer encouragement, education and hope through Jesus Christ to those who receive ministry.

In other words, the SCV Pregnancy Center is a religious organization -a ministry even- though they’re not entirely up-front about it.

Despite the subterfuge, I believe the Center does good work. As the quote from Yahoo above reveals (whether it’s true or false is largely beside the point), an unplanned pregnancy is just about the most earth-shattering thing that can happen to a young girl, her family, and the father. At the very least the folks at the SCV Pregnancy Center know how to deal with that situation and the overwhelming sense of “crisis” it entails.

And if their work happens to persuade a young girl that there is a different and better path toward resolving her pregnancy, then I think that goes along way toward making abortion “rare.” And that’s something I can get behind. Even if they get a little preachy.

So while I”m not quite there holding a sign up with the protesters on Lyons, I’m almost there with them in spirit.

Surely the diversity of the church market in Santa Clarita is impressive; the SCV Faith Index is at an all-time high and this whole subject is worthy of further study.

But verily I say unto you, the greatest of these churches is Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic church in Newhall.

Why?

For one weekend a year (just one, not too much, not too little), those Catholics in Newhall throw Puritan values to the wind and open up their grounds to the great unchurched masses (ha!) during their annual OLPH Barbecue FIESTAAAAA!

Oh sure, other churches have celebrations. As a teen, I once went to a dance at the Mormon stake center on McBean. And as a 20 something, I went to a Memorial Day picnic with an evangelical church and taught them how to use an Aerobie. I’ve been to yet other churches that celebrate with wine, and I even found another local church where the pastor smokes stogies and talks of TULIPs.

But only one SCV church allows all this to happen in one weekend -ON THE CHURCH GROUNDS- with thousands of fellow party goers.

And that’s OLPH.

Every year I’m drawn to the weekend carvinal atmosphere that injects just a bit of culture into Newhall. Beer & wine flow freely. American, Country and Mexican/Latin bands blast music throughout the evening. Children, giddy in anticipation, wait in line for the kitchy carney rides. Teens congregate and pretend the fiesta sucks though we all know they are having the time of their lives. Anglos mix in with Mexicans who mix in with Phillipinos and all are welcoming of the SCV’s newest demographic, the Koreans*. We all hang out, eat new foods, drink, dance and have a good time. Even the nuns have a smile on their face, which is no small task, believe me.

Anyway, it’s this weekend. And so if you want to swing by and see just about the only event that will get me within a few dozen feet of a church, stop by. Love, and do what you will said the great St. Augustine!

Details here.

* Oh sure, occasionally there have been arrests made during the Fiesta but, much like the Catholic Church itself, it’s just a few bad apples. You can’t let it taint the entire thing