By Hank Jeannel

By 1994, Fort Ord, a U.S. Army post in California’s Monterey Bay, was decommissioned. The thriving community of Marina, whose residents included many military families and veterans, would forever change.

Epiphany Lutheran Church was “hanging by a string,” the Rev. Jon Perez said. “There were only five people left in the church when I arrived in ‘96. They were ‘die-hard’ Lutherans who were going to go down with the church.” Perez is an Episcopal priest who has served this joint Episcopal Lutheran Congregation—now called Epiphany Lutheran & Episcopal Church—for his entire ordained ministry.

During his discernment for holy orders in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, Perez was called back home to Monterey in 1995. His local church, All Saints Episcopal Church in Carmel, suggested that sending an Episcopalian to Epiphany might provide an opportunity to experiment with the fomenting full-communion agreement between The Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, an agreement which would be inaugurated just a few years later in 2001.

When Perez first arrived, not only was attendance low, but the church facility was also falling apart. There were rips in the carpet, and windows were painted over. “People were calling me to try to buy the place, because they thought it had been abandoned,” Perez said. His pitch was simple: turn Epiphany into the safest and most inclusive place in town.

Many in the church community were uncertain about having an Episcopalian as their spiritual leader. Some members, Perez said, hoped that The Episcopal Church would help them get back on their feet before they hired a new Lutheran pastor. Now, almost 30 years later, Perez never left and is set to retire as vicar in August. “The secret was that I was just there to love them. We started building trust.”

Perez and the community of worshippers at Epiphany worked to turn the church into a community gathering place, a homeless shelter at one point, and, to this day, the coordinator of one of the largest food distribution programs in Monterey County. “We became the open, inclusive church. We didn’t always agree, but we focused on our values. It became a safe place for the community to have meetings,” Perez said.

As the church’s ministries grew in vitality, so did its parishioners’ desire to invest in building repairs. Before long, the neighborhood around them was following suit. In the years that followed, retiring Silicon Valley workers began settling down in the area. Epiphany continues to grow amidst these changes. “One of our challenges is that we have outgrown our facility, but our church is in the perfect location. Good problems to have.”

Today, Epiphany is a joint Lutheran and Episcopal congregation, and many people who do not identify with either denomination call the church home. Perez told me that he benefits from the resources, theology, and traditions of both denominations. For Epiphany parishioners, their affiliation with Anglicanism and Lutheranism strengthens their worship and outreach life. “You have to ask the question, ‘Is what you can do together better than what you can do alone?’” Perez asserted. With the tools from both The Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Epiphany senses a greater ability to witness to the needs of its community. In response to all this work, the Marina Foundation is awarding its Lifetime of Service Award to Perez and his husband, Robert.

Though Perez is retiring, he hopes he has left Epiphany with “a complete set of Lego blocks.” He sees more and more opportunities for the town as it continues to change and grow.

“I hope people will really look at [Episcopal-Lutheran shared ministries] as being an opportunity for building a future rather than being a solution to a ‘dying church’ problem,” he said. “It’s never going to be perfect, but this is the emerging church.”