FACING COMMUNITY FURY
How one decision about a church nursery school ignited a firestorm.
John and Pam Powell
April 1, 1990
Memorial Day weekend 1988, we hid our children across town out of concern for their safety. Saturday night we walked the perimeter of our house with flashlights in hand, checking for bombs. It wasn't a normal weekend of ministry.
What do you do when a situation gets out of hand, when you can hardly keep ahead of the press, when people accuse you of terrible motives and deeds? In tense situations, ministry takes on new dimensions. This is the story of what happened when one church's board of elders decided one Tuesday evening to redirect the church's nursery school.
Over a Nursery School?
Sherman Oaks Presbyterian Church is a moderate-sized congregation in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley, just over the hill from UCLA. The two of us had served the church as co-pastors for five years, seeing growth and other good signs.
The community of Sherman Oaks is upper-middle class, predominantly Jewish, and tied closely to the entertainment industry. Several television celebrities had placed children in our school. Michael Landon had had a child baptized in our church years ago.
When we arrived in Sherman Oaks, one of our concerns soon became the church's nursery school, served for the previous twenty-three years by the same director. It enjoyed a strong reputation in the community, with some eighty students and fifteen teachers. Yet for us, it was a source of increasing tension.
While constitutionally it remained an expression of the church (under the authority of our Session and on our grounds), its stance had drifted toward independence and even disdain for the church. Previous pastors had struggled with this situation, but no one had been able to deal effectively with it.
Pam's original goal-to build bridges between the church and school-was ...
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