Permanent place of worship

Seabreeze Church beat the odds by surviving two decades and making it to its first permanent home. After a year of settling in to new digs, this Sunday the church plans to throw open its doors to the public and celebrate its success.

The Huntington Beach church is in its 20th year, having begun services at Rodgers Senior Center in 1988. Senior Pastor Bevan Unrau came onboard in 1990, straight out of seminary after a career running an advertising agency. He has watched the fledgling church grow from a regular attendance of 150 at the senior center, through years meeting on Sundays at Huntington Beach Central Library, and finally to its rebuilt campus on Gothard Street, where he says about 750 people show up every Sunday. And as of this Sunday, he said, it’s “ready to host guests.”

“It’s kind of a mystery to some extent,” Unrau said. “By the statistics, only about two out of every 10 churches that start up actually survive to Year 20. It’s even a higher failure rate than businesses.”

Unrau doesn’t know precisely what helped his church survive, but he has some ideas: the casual style the church affects, its contemporary approach to music, and a focus on messages that apply to everyday life.

“People come to parts of their lives where they really start asking the bigger questions,” he said.

The church’s spent more than a decade renting out auditorium space and growing its congregation at the library, he said. But in 2002, the space was clearly too small, Unrau said. After a year of looking for somewhere bigger to rent, church leadership decided to find somewhere permanent. That’s where the former Lindborg Racquet Club came into the picture.

“It was the largest space in H.B. where you could meet and have an adjacent room for Sunday school for the kids,” Unrau said.

What happened next was remarkable, he said: In just 100 days, the congregation managed to raise $1.6 million, enough to make the sale and secure loans for the rest.

“It was an amazing time,” Unrau said. “Some were taking equity out of their homes, some were cashing in a portion of their retirement, some were deciding not to get that second home in Big Bear. Some were selling cars, some were selling boats. I think we realized this was a pretty unusual opportunity and wanted to be a part of it.”

What does the now-rebuilt campus do for the church? It lets them handle more growth, but it also helps reach out to the community with youth sports and other programs, Unrau said.

“Only 10% or 12% of the population in Huntington Beach regularly attends [a] church,” he said. “To most people, it’s a nonentity in their minds. We want to do things that can really be of help and benefit to them. It might not make sense to a family to be at church every Sunday, but they really want to get their son or daughter involved in a great basketball program, so they start to get involved that way.”

MICHAEL ALEXANDER may be reached at (714) 966-4618 or at [email protected].