In Search of Growth
For the Rev. Guy Leemhuis, vicar of St. Luke’s of the Mountains in La Crescenta, California, leaning into a message of love means blending an Episcopal ethos with a handful of new and unexplored traditions. For Leemhuis and his leadership team, there is a willingness to do what hasn’t been done before and be present to the community around them.
As a result, St. Luke’s has experienced explosive growth since Leemhuis took the part-time role in 2024. With weekly attendance averaging 80 to 100 at the start of 2024, steady growth resulted in an average of 212 less than three months later.
Leemhuis cites music and food justice as the biggest drivers of the growth.
“Music is huge. In an effort to offer both Episcopal and non-Episcopal music, we’re not a big organ-playing church. Instead, we sing just a little bit of everything. We’ve got lots of Southern gospel and bluegrass, but we’ve also expanded our musical offerings to include salsa and urban contemporary gospel music,” he told The Living Church. During services, texts are projected onto screens and printed in bulletins to meet the various needs and desires of different members.
But music is not limited to Sunday mornings alone. When local musicians, who play for the mission, prompted St. Luke’s to host free community concerts throughout the year, it offered 16-person flute concerts, Sacred Resistance music concerts, and Saddler Sessions, featuring salsa and kumbaya music. The music drew hundreds of people through the doors of the church, many of whom would have not otherwise been found there.
The sentiment is similar with the various branches of the food justice program. What started out with feeding seven families a week, on average, has grown to include feeding over 100 families in need, every single week. The Rev. Deacon Dina Fulgoni helps coordinate the church’s ministries of justice.
“You have to be willing to work with other people and not always reinvent the wheel,” Leemhuis said. “You have to be willing to collaborate with other groups.”
After identifying families eligible for the food program, the church began to work with various distributors and like-minded organizations to provide families with fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy goods, and herbs from a community garden. By identifying those who were food-sensitive or vulnerable because of their immigration status, the growing mission met an immediate need in Crescenta Valley.
The church is located in La Crescenta, and borders a number of other cities in the Diocese of Los Angeles. Crescenta Valley is rich with racial and cultural diversity, including large pockets of Korean, Armenian, European American, Latino, and African American communities.
Although St. Luke’s primarily serves a population of Latino, Black, and white churchgoers, when the priest in charge gazes upon the faces of the young people present at his church, “they are all the colors: Black, Latino, pan-Asian, including East Indian, Chinese, and Korean, and white.” It’s critical to him that the mission pay attention to and ultimately reflect the demographics of the surrounding community.
In more ways than one, the desire to reflect Crescenta Valley ultimately gives Father Leemhuis hope. Just as the church recently started working with a young man who’s helping launch a third space for young adults, complete with non-religious events that promote “no alcohol, no smoking, no xenophobia, and no hate,” Generation Z has responded by showing up in droves, with over 100 twenty-somethings attending one event. Likewise, a number of families have started to call St. Luke’s home. Even if they don’t come every single Sunday, these families continue to walk through her red doors regularly, once or twice a month.
Many people have started coming to the church because they see it as a place of love. Groups like Indivisible, a grassroots movement that stands against authoritarianism, meets at St. Luke’s regularly. Additional growth has happened through a growing online community, with regular streaming of bilingual services on YouTube and other social media. Livestreaming has proven beneficial for immigrant families who are afraid to come to church because of ICE raids in greater Los Angeles.
Although St. Luke’s feels the effects of mass deportations, Leemhuis remains undeterred in proclaiming a message of welcome.
“We are unapologetically evangelical Episcopalians in that we unabashedly let people know that all of God’s children are welcome,” he says, further applauding how lay leadership actively proclaims a message about Jesus’ response to immigrants, women, and LGBT persons.
“I have the privilege of saying I’m one of the leaders, but thanks to their leadership, the love church has it going on all day, every day,” Leemhuis said. To him, the lay leadership is what priests dream of: they have ownership and are deeply engaged in both the practical and spiritual work of the church.
For Leemhuis—a bisexual African American person with a disability who also works as a civil rights attorney—loving neighbors, offering hospitality, and creating safe spaces is exactly what the church should be doing.
Cara Meredith, a freelance writer and postulant for holy orders in the Diocese of California, lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
