Big Move Is in Store for Growing Thousand Oaks Congregation

Behind a plate glass window in a shopping plaza on Lindero Canyon Road, a charismatic Irishman calls a packed house of Catholics to worship.

They meet in a colorless storefront--stuck between an insurance office and a Pavilions supermarket--that offers few of the visual icons ritual-hungry Catholics have come to expect.

But Msgr. Peter O’Reilly has been so successful in attracting a flock that the congregation of St. Maximilian of Kolbe is about leap from storefront to a $7-million architectural edifice in eastern Thousand Oaks.

Come December, O’Reilly will lead his parishioners across the street, from a hole-in-the-wall for 300 to a soaring building that can seat 800.

Instead of threading their way through grocery baskets to get to church, St. Max parishioners will drive up a curved path to the Gathering Place, a pedestrian-only area featuring a maze designed to mimic the stop-and-start journey toward faith. Instead of dropping in at Pavilion’s for a quart of milk after Mass, they can linger for doughnuts and coffee in their own front yard.

Most of O’Reilly’s flock agree that their new home, with an office, meeting rooms, preschool center and eventually an auditorium, will provide much needed space for activities such as the parish’s youth group and is bound to draw more people than their humble storefront. However, some worry about the adjustment. “We’re so small now we know everyone,” says parish secretary Michelle Varley. “That’s going to be hard to duplicate.”

But Oak Park resident Leo Henggeler, chairman of St. Maximilian’s finance committee, thinks the new building will validate the parish. “Until you are actually in a building that is called a church, you’re not a church,” Henggeler said. “We’ll be right up there with the rest of them.”

O’Reilly admits that the hardest part of building the new church was asking for money. The land on which St. Maximilian of Kolbe church is now rising is paid for. Although the total tab, with pews, statuary and decorations will probably top out at $9 million, sharp-thinking diocesan officials forestalled the largest expense when they bought 5 1/2 acres for a new church almost 20 years ago, figuring that the Conejo Valley would take off.

But O’Reilly is luckier than some.

In communities where the population suddenly booms, high property values and building costs can affect how people worship. Storefront and warehouse space, once meant to be temporary, can be permanent.

The congregation of Westlake Lutheran Church meets in a warehouse on Townsgate Boulevard in Westlake, which Pastor Craig Beeker says has affected members’ expectations.

“These days, many children have no experiences with traditional church edifices,” Beeker said. Thus, as adults, they may not see the need to incur the expense of building a church.

His faith community once owned land for a church but sold it in favor of an ecumenical arrangement with the United Methodist Church in Westlake. When the congregations that worshiped at the church expanded, the best choice was to move to a warehouse and make it a church.

“Some of our people are very comfortable here,” Beeker said. “Right now we think that responsible stewardship is to rent the space we’re in.”

Three other congregations worship in warehouse space along Westlake’s ecclesiastical row, including the Westlake Church of Religious Science and a conservative Jewish community that rents not far from the Plug Nickel restaurant.

But Hank Mitchel, pastor of the Church of the Epiphany Episcopal church on Kanan Road east of St. Maximilian, sees value in traditional church structures.

“Church buildings--designated worship spaces--are an asset to a community,” Mitchel said. “They are a witness that there is something beyond everyday life.”

The congregation Mitchel now leads first gathered with the Lutherans at the Westlake Methodist Church, then at White Oaks Elementary School, then at the North Ranch Community Centre for eight years before building its own worship space.

Mitchel, who remembers balloons from other people’s Saturday night parties floating down on the congregation during Sunday services, sympathizes with St. Maximilian’s pastor. “The move to a church building will be a sea change. But it will also give the core group of parishioners, the ones who helped found the parish, a new sense of direction and purpose.”

Indeed, some of the old hands of the St. Maximilian community are apprehensive that new faces will change the feel of the congregation.

Jan Boespflug worries about losing the sense of family that began in the parish’s early years, when 500 refugees were spun off from overcrowded St. Jude’s Catholic Church in Agoura Hills.

Lorraine Pohlman, a member of the building and dedication committees for the new church, expresses concern about the strain on O’Reilly, who serves as parish administrator along with being the only priest for the church’s 1,200 families.

Will the peripatetic pastor with the engaging brogue still have time to keep up his tradition of visiting parishioners in their homes to offer aid in distress? Can he continue to make time for the newcomer dinners the parish hosts?

Others say they will miss the way the storefront church integrated worship into the rest of their lives, closing the gap between secular and spiritual.

“You could go over to Pavilions after Mass and see people you didn’t have a chance to talk to in church,” Henggeler said.

The people who will follow O’Reilly across the street in December first met for Mass at Oak Park Elementary School, setting up the portable altar each Sunday. “It was ‘have church, will travel,’ ” said Boespflug, who said the lack of a permanent place to worship or a permanent priest to guide them inspired a sense of family that went far beyond the usual feelings of community. “If someone didn’t come to Mass on Sunday, you missed them,” she said.

Boespflug remembers that many of the original parishioners worried that the move from the school to the shopping center would disrupt their fledgling group. “At first the storefront felt empty,” Boespflug said. “Then we began adding our banners and decorations. Now it feels like a church to me. We’ve been able to do everything we need to out of that space--baptisms, funerals. I wouldn’t have any qualms about staying there.”

St. Max’s itinerant tradition was upheld even after the parish moved to its storefront. Each year, to accommodate crowds at Christmas and Easter, all the worship items, from altar to candles and chalices, have been trekked three miles down the road to Medea Creek Middle School.

Being a spiritual beacon to the community doesn’t come cheap. So far, St. Maximilian’s has had two pledge campaigns and is counting on a loan from the Los Angeles Archdiocese, along with an influx of new members to add their dollars to the collection plate.

Henggeler says he has talked to people who could not visualize going to Mass in the same place they take their children for pizza or buy mouthwash. One newcomer said it was a good thing the parish was so far along in building its new worship space. “I wouldn’t be able to take this as long as some of these people have,” he said. “I need to be inside a church.”

O’Reilly admits it has sometimes been a hard go. “People told me they’d come after I built the church,” says the congenial monsignor. “I told I couldn’t build it if they didn’t come.” Other parishioners, many of them veterans of other church campaigns, balked at the idea of having to cough up more dollars for yet another structure.

But not Boespflug and her husband, Rich, who helped build a church, parish hall and chapel in their native Colorado and will still be paying off their pledge to St. Maximilian’s when they return there for retirement. Back in Colorado, they will have the opportunity to build still another church. “We feel so blessed to be part of the process,” Boespflug said. “I believe we were called to be part of church building.”

Easter marked the last pilgrimage St. Maximilian parishioners will make to Medea Creek school for Holy Week, this Pentecost the last the community will drape bolts of red cloth under the plastic shopping center sign that identifies O’Reilly’s storefront between the State Farm Insurance agency and a postal supply store.

But fellow cleric Mitchel warns that the loss of intimacy that some St. Maximilian parish members fear is real. No matter how friendly and outgoing old members might be toward the new, the feeling of the congregation is likely to change.

“Our congregation had never had a real home,” Mitchel said. “They were looking forward to having their own place so much that they didn’t realize intimacy would be lost. Not just the number of people, but the physical size of the place. They didn’t recognize this until many months later.”