Garden Church

With Christmas carols in the air and shop windows filled with expensive luxuries, the holiday season can be especially painful for the poor, the hungry, the homeless. As a result, local churches have banded together to provide special services to the needy not only on Christmas, but year-round as well.

Twelve Garden Grove churches have formed a "Bread of Life" congregation to step up food contributions and emergency aid to the homeless and the hungry, whose numbers are growing because of tough economic times, officials said. The churches will distribute emergency assistance through Salvation Army and Lutheran Social Services offices that need food, money and volunteers to keep up with demand, officials said.

The City Council has denied the request of a local congregation to open a church in a business park, saying it would jeopardize the city's efforts to attract more businesses and expand its sales tax base. In a 4 to 1 vote Tuesday , the council rejected the recommendation of the Planning Commission, which in July voted to allow the Trinity Christian Fellowship to operate a church at the Cedar Grove business park on Garden Grove Boulevard.

The City Council has given a local congregation six months to move from an office building where it has held services for the past six years. The church was supposed to move from an office park near Harper Street and Westminster Avenue by the end of this week. The extension will give the church more time to look for a different location. "This is not what we want, but I'm grateful," said the Rev.

Officials of a Lutheran church this week asked the City Council to resolve a dispute involving a nearby Buddhist temple. The officials complained of noise and parking problems generated by the temple's large gatherings.

Dressed in a crisp black suit, the 86-year-old founder of the Crystal Cathedral sat in the downtown Los Angeles Bankruptcy Court on Thursday, hoping to get a final few million from the ministry that once carried his booming sermons to people around the world. The Rev. Robert H. Schuller was in court on the first day of what is expected to be a 10-day trial to settle the monetary claims that were made during the 2010 bankruptcy of the ministry, which is the home of "Hour of Power," its trademark television show.

Like assembly line workers beginning a shift, Father Wilfredo Benitez and the Rev. Preston Price exchanged quick hellos Friday and got to work. They greeted their commingled congregations, which were arriving for a reenactment of Jesus' climb, bearing a heavy wooden cross, up Mt. Calvary. "I got a layperson to carry the cross out of the church," Benitez said during a lull. "Good," replied Price, senior pastor of United Methodist Church in Garden Grove.

Debbie McCart's father and mother both died--10 years apart--within three days of Christmas. Since then, grief has been as much a part of her holiday as Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus. "When I hear my first Christmas carol is when I start to feel sad," she said. McCart, along with two dozen others, sought solace from their holiday depression at a somber but comforting "Blue Christmas" service in Garden Grove on Thursday evening.

Leaders of Orange County's bankrupt Crystal Cathedral backed away from talk of selling and called on congregants and "Hour of Power" television viewers to open their checkbooks to help erase more than $50 million in debt. The announcement that the architecturally rich Garden Grove campus is not for sale came during Sunday morning services and followed a vote Thursday by its board of directors. Last week the church reorganized the board, adding five members. In a statement, church founder Robert H. Schuller called the decision not to sell "unexpected" but applauded the effort.

The daughter of Crystal Cathedral founder Robert H. Schuller announced Thursday that she would conduct services for her own breakaway church in an Orange County movie theater, complete with popcorn and candy. Sheila Schuller Coleman, who inherited the Crystal Cathedral pulpit from her father, told congregants during Sunday's services that she was leaving the ministry her father founded and invited them to follow her to a new church. That church, it turns out, will be Theater 15 at the AMC multiplex at the Outlets at Orange.