About St. Mark's Journey

 

   In the 1880s a small group of English expatriates settled in a little farming town a few miles north of the still-frontier city of Los Angeles. On Sunday mornings they gathered in the parlor of a farmhouse to worship in the style of the church they had left behind in England. Soon they were joined by other, American-born settlers, and their small English prayer services became an Episcopal mission. Over the next century the congregation of this tiny mission would grow with the city around them. They would suffer through internal divisions and controversies. They would see their church boom in the 1920s and flounder in the Great Depression. They would endure the sacrifices and anxieties of the Second World War and would rally to build a beautiful new church in the post-war years. They would lose their bearings in the tumultuous 1960s and would struggle to remain true to their faith when Christianity itself was evolving. Theirs is a unique story. Yet in many ways it is typical of the experience of countless other Christian communities living through this century of great change. Their history shows not only the experience of one church congregation, but it provides a prism through which the much larger events taking place in the world  around them can be viewed.