RELIGION / JOHN DART : Reunited Church to Hold Service for Late Pastor Who Caused Split

In 1982, many members of the United Community Church of Glendale, unhappy with the ministerial leadership of the conservative radio commentator who founded it, left to form their own congregation.

Although the minister, William Steuart McBirnie, resigned from the church four years later due to financial and health problems, the two congregations remained apart until last year, when they voted overwhelmingly to reunite at the Glendale church.

So, when McBirnie, 75, died June 21 at his Newport Beach home, the question was whether a memorial service would be held at the church he built and pastored for 25 years.

“In a very real sense, we thought it was the Christian thing to do,” said Jerry Davis, United Community’s present co-pastor who was also pastor of the breakaway congregation for more than a dozen years.

The memorial service, scheduled for 3 p.m. Sunday, is being organized by a former McBirnie associate, Robert Grant, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based American Freedom Coalition which promoted legislation for a national Parents’ Day signed into law last year.

“Dr. McBirnie is primarily remembered for the good he did: Bible teaching, his ‘Voice of Americanism’ radio program and the buildings he built--about $10 million worth of property here,” Davis said.

“We never had any hard feelings. The church division was essentially over who should be running the church, the senior minister or the church members,” Davis said in an interview Friday.

The internal church struggle in 1982 lasted only about six weeks, he said. “In those days, people felt it was better to leave than to fight,” said Davis.

Among those who left were church members who had loaned McBirnie money between 1972 and 1980 to finance construction projects. More than two dozen filed suit in 1984 to recoup their losses from McBirnie, who claimed he was bankrupt and had no assets.

The courts found against McBirnie, saying that some funds were left in his various organizations.

Walter Kendall of Glendale, the principal plaintiff in the suit, has returned with the breakaway congregation as a deacon of the reunited church.

“Our objection with the church was McBirnie and he is gone, so rejoining the church itself was not a problem,” Kendall said Friday. “Our argument was over his handling of the money.”

Kendall said he did not object to the church hosting a memorial service because Christianity teaches forgiveness and because the service was being put together by an ex-colleague of McBirnie’s, not the church leaders.

McBirnie came to California after resigning from a 10-year pastorate of Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio, where the San Antonio Express reported in 1959 that he had confessed to his church that he had become improperly involved with a female member of the church. The newspaper said McBirnie remarried in New Mexico the day after he resigned the pulpit and one week after his divorce became final.

That part of the minister’s past surfaced six years after McBirnie started the United Community Church of Glendale, during an internal quarrel in the congregation.

Despite the intermittent church divisions over money and personalities, the conservative Protestant congregation grew to a peak membership of about 1,000 in the late 1970s.

In 1968, McBirnie founded the California Graduate School of Theology, endearing himself to dozens of evangelical and conservative mainline pastors who obtained doctoral degrees from the school in much less time than was required by established seminaries. Seminary-based critics called the school a diploma mill.

In 1976, McBirnie formed a short-lived Interfaith Committee Against Blasphemy, which included the Rev. E.V. Hill, a prominent black pastor in Los Angeles, and Father Michael Manning, a Catholic television evangelist, in order to criticize unconventional movies about Jesus, such as “The Passover Plot.”

McBirnie gained visibility in conservative Republican circles for his daily “Voice of Americanism” radio commentary, begun in 1962. As late as 1987, McBirnie announced that he would add a weekly radio program for Europe and the Soviet Union.

“If we can reach the right listeners with facts about communism now denied to them,” he said shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, “we can ignite a new intellectual revolution which could slow the march of communism in a generation’s time.”

But a year later, McBirnie issued a desperate appeal for funds, saying that the sex scandal surrounding evangelist Jimmy Swaggart had seriously curtailed donations to his radio program.

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Robert Grant, an associate minister at the church in the 1970s, said McBirnie had been in failing health for the past five years following a heart attack, although as recently as January of this year McBirnie was teaching a Bible class at Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim.

Meanwhile, back in Glendale in the winter of 1993-94, the breakaway congregation led by Pastor Jerry Davis, which had taken the name Christ Evangelical Free Church, and United Community Church, which hired Jack Dabner as its pastor, renewed contact.

Dabner, known for the controversial anti-abortion film, “The Silent Scream,” gave Davis a telephone call.

“We met, appointed committees from both churches to meet and within three months we decided to reunite,” Davis said. “We had about 130 members and they had about 100 when we came together at Easter last year, and now we have about 300 members because we’re growing.”

Noting that Glendale’s demographic composition is changing, Davis said that an Armenian congregation is part of the church and that the church’s goal is to become a multicultural congregation.

“There are not many churches that can repair an old split,” Davis said. “The ‘United’ in our church name never meant anything before, but now it does.”