On my bike ride yesterday, I must have passed eight different churches while services were ending. At OLPH, Mass was so crowded that people were standing out on Lyons Ave with their Palm fronds. At Placerita Baptist, they were socializing in the parking lot in their Sunday best. The LDS ward in Sand Canyon was packed, as was the EV Free church there and even the two Jehovah’s Witnesses churches on my 30 mile route.
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.
Comments (42)