Church Highlight: St. Mark Presbyterian
by Courtney Ellis
Founded in 1962, St. Mark Presbyterian sits at the heart of Newport Beach. The church welcomed its first preschool students in 1978 and moved from its first location on the corner of Jamboree and Eastbluff-Ford Roads to its new location on San Joaquin Hills Road in 2007. St. Mark has enjoyed many years of faithful, fruitful ministry.
Mark Davis has been serving as the pastor and head of staff of St. Mark Presbyterian for the past eleven and a half years. With a vision to “act as God’s hands and voice” by being “a nurturing and welcoming spiritual home, embodying God’s inclusive love and compassion,” St. Mark is an integral part of the Presbytery of Los Ranchos.
I had the opportunity to interview Mark Davis to learn more about the gifts, challenges, and joys of this flourishing church.
Courtney Ellis: Mark Davis, thank you for the gift of this interview!
Mark Davis: You’re welcome, Courtney. Glad to talk to you.
Courtney: Here we are, nearing the end of May. What are you most looking forward to at St. Mark during the rest of this year?
Mark: My favorite Sunday of the year is always Pentecost Sunday. Maybe it goes back to growing up Pentecostal and having a new appreciation for it along the way, but the congregation… I beg them to wear red, and most of them do it (even the ones who are convinced they look awful in red).
Our worship commission comes up with a way of decorating the sanctuary so there’s some sort of visual impact they get when they walk in… and I think the message of Pentecost really does something very powerful for our congregation. I’m not going to pretend everyone has a well-developed pneumatology, the Holy Spirit is always that underdeveloped third leg of the trinity… and I have a lot of sympathy for some of the questions that we get in that regard.
But the whole idea that this early church, so soon after the death and resurrection of Christ and the ascension of Christ, so without the bodily presence of Christ, now is a church that’s just kind of consumed by the presence of Christ. I think people just love that notion. That we who are not there for the bodily presence can be consumed by the real presence. And of course, all the symbolic parts—you have fire, wind, the dove—they all kind of mean different things but taken together present a really powerful picture of what our life is together.
You add to it the diversity of languages and the quote from Joel about young and old, men and women… it really does seem to be the kind of celebration that says, all of us are part of something greater than any of us. Greater than any of us. And each of us is a part of something. All of that voluminous language of all and every and each… really communicates. The congregation seems to find a kind of energy there that lets me know people are tuning into the power of that day. So I’m looking forward to that. You know, Pentecost season goes on to Advent—it’s a little hard to keep that momentum quite that severe for six months!–but that’s the first thing.
Next, we’ve got a kind of new, renewed worship commission that’s really clued in on finding ways to ensure that, in each of the different seasons of the church, and the different seasons of life, we’re enabling people to have an authentic experience of the living Christ through worship. And that’s been fun, just hearing their reflections and particularly when it comes to [the question], what should we do in this season that will enable other people to taste and see this?
During the summer when our choir’s not in session, we take the space in front of the choir loft and put tables there and we call it “The Well” and the children stay in the space throughout the summer—allegedly quietly. We have some folks who tend to sit on the other side of the sanctuary during the summer. The kids are remarkably quiet for children during that time, but it’s not like they’re not in the room! That opens up some neat possibilities. There are some moments in the sermon I can get their attention and ask them a particular question or get them to do a particular thing. We can raise a theme during our Young Church time, then there’s something for them to engage with around the tables. It does open up a little more creativity, a little less rigidity in our structure because we just want to make sure that if we have children in the room they feel like they are able to be children and to be in the room. I like that part of the summer.
In the fall, there’s kind of a renewed energy when the choir comes back into session. We’re going to be doing a book study on the book, Disarming Leviathan, so I’ve been reading it and we have a couple of people in our Adult Ed group that have been reading it, and we were looking to get a special speaker coming in, someone who’s written a similar book, focusing on religious nationalism and some of the dangers therein.
Then, of course, when you get close to Advent, Advent becomes one of those special seasons. It’s hard to say what I’m looking forward to the most, what the church is looking forward to the most, but there is something about each season along the way that is particularly endearing and exciting for us.
Courtney: How long have you served at St. Mark?
Mark: 11.5 years.
Courtney: Do you feel like you’ve gotten your sea legs yet?
Mark: I do. You know, I feel like it takes about seven years before you really know a place. Before you’ve really built up trust with people so you can make the big decisions together.
Courtney: What are some of the challenges facing St. Mark today?
I’d say we’re still seeing the effects of Covid. That shouldn’t surprise us, for a community that thrives on being together, suddenly to be in a situation where being together could be deadly. We did all the adaptive change and pivoting and learning how to up our online game and fall in and out of love with Zoom like everyone else, and we learned a lot of great things from that. I get messages often, at least once a week if not more, from people that I didn’t have any idea was connecting with us at all, mentioning something about last week’s sermon or really excited to hear about so-and-so, and I’m like, “Where are you? Why didn’t you make yourself known from us?” Just yesterday I got a note from a woman who, I swear, I haven’t seen her in at least six years. The only reason I didn’t think she was dead is because she will occasionally like the church’s Facebook page, but it let me know that A) she’s reading everything we put out and B) she’s watching everything that we do.
Courtney: Gosh, this is so familiar. I ran into someone last week who was like, “Great sermon!” And internally I was wondering, “Who are you?”
Mark: Right?
Courtney: We want to take advantage of those new technologies, but it’s also worth asking when they are getting in the way of more tangible connections.
Mark: Our attendance still isn’t what it was before. Our Saturday service was always a smaller service—its’ intended to have a more intimate feel. But you know, when the Sunday service is running 80% of what it used to… it’s still a full room, I can feel that when I’m preaching, but when a smaller service is 80%, even when it was smaller to begin with, it feels really empty.
It’s a challenge for me with expectations of, when Covid was clearly in the rearview mirror, I thought we’d be back, in many ways, to what we were. We have some folks who discovered during that period that they can find electronic ways to kind of be in touch with the church and don’t really feel the need for more. And honestly, that affects me in two ways. One is I’m sure I have a rather sizable ego and I’m sure a lot of it is driven by ego… but you want to be here! This is the room where it happens. Get in here. But also, I miss people! I just miss them. It’s just not the same to get an occasional, you know, email or Facebook like or a text, and for them to say, “We’re keeping up!” That’s just not the same.
One of our elders moved to New York and she stayed on the Session because we were still meeting virtually, and she stayed on our community engagement commission because she was really good on it, and that group still meets virtually, so that part of her involvement didn’t change at all, but after about a year and a half when her term as elder was up, she said, “I feel like for my sake and my kids’ sake, I’ve got to find a local congregation because it’s just not the same.” And that was funny because one of her assignments with me was, ‘how do we help people who are engaged with us virtually to feel really engaged’? And I’m not sure we’ve really found it. So I think the long answer is that many of us have fallen into–I don’t mean this dismissively– we have begun using virtual tools a lot. But we haven’t figured out what that means for us in terms of community.
I think that’s one of our biggest challenges. I mean, financially we’re fine. We’ve got a burgeoning young adult group trying to form itself and all be in the same room at the same time, and we’ve got some really neat things like that going on. We’re all adjusting to the fact that when I was a kid, I was in church every single Sunday, and now regular attendance is once a month or so, and that makes it hard to do children and youth programming.
I also think I spend as much time, maybe intellectual energy, deconstructing bad Christianity as I do constructing good Christianity, and that is very, very tiring. But the very popular brand of Christianity here in Orange County, I just feel like they are so lacking in grace and the spirit of Christ that… we have church members who are almost at the point where they don’t want to be called Christian because of the associations with that term. I understand that. I think there was a point in my life where I let go of the term “evangelical,” which is unfair to some evangelicals and the spirit of evangelicalism, but man, I get it. That’s the challenge we have as a congregation. How do we boldly, proudly, meaningfully proclaim Christ and God’s grace when so much of the language of Christian faith has been co-opted by some particularly religious nationalism but bigotry generally? That’s a challenge our whole congregation feels together. That’s not a challenge between me and the congregation, we don’t have a lot of those. Our challenge is how we are called to be in the world.
L to R- Mark Davis, Julie Ingersoll, Diana Butler Bass, Lori Cesario Irving, Kristen Irving-Jordan, unnamed, Randall Balmer, Lisa Sharon Harper
Courtney: What do you want to celebrate that’s happened at St. Mark recently?
There’s something that happened here that was pretty unique, and I think was something to celebrate. One of our church members was involved in the making of a documentary called True Believer. It’s about a woman named Kristen Irving and her experience of navigating from an evangelical upbringing and it’s some really candid conversations she has, mostly with her mother. It goes back to her childhood and talks about the nascent form of Christian nationalism, like I remember so much: lining up for Vacation Bible School and we’d march down the aisle and say the pledge of allegiance to the American Flag and then the Christian flag and then the Bible. I see that now and think, “What in the heck were we doing?!” And then the Christian preschool, Christian school, some really interesting God and country stuff there. And then the blooming of Christian colleges that became significant players under Jerry Falwell and people like that.
The movie goes back into that deliberate movement toward the kind of Christian Nationalism we’re experiencing now. We showed that movie in our fellowship hall, not really built for movies, and we had Kristen Irving here and her mother and we also had a panel discussion which included Randall Balmer and Lisa Sharon Harper and Julie Ingersoll and Diana Butler Bass, we had those four people here, each of whom were interviewed as part of the documentary and very strong supporters of it. We had dinner together and then displayed the movie the next day. It’s always hard to watch a documentary followed by a panel discussion, but we were sold out and they were all fabulous thinkers when it comes to this stuff. That was a big event for us, not only in terms of those who could attend, since we had a limited number of tickets, but the reach that came out of it because we invited people in who were not part of St. Mark, people who could carry it out to all sorts of other places.
Courtney: That’s a star-studded panel!
Mark: It was. It was really great.
Courtney: This is the first church profile like this I’ve done for Los Ranchos, but I plan to end them all the same way. And that is by asking: how can we, the Presbytery of Los Ranchos, its pastors and elders and congregations, be praying for your church? How can we pray for St. Mark?
Mark: Thank you. Thank you for that. I just feel like you asked me, “Can we take up a collection for you?” and I want to say, “We’re doing just fine! We want to be the collectors!” Partly, I think my answer to that is I just want the Presbytery to pray with us for our new leadership, and, you know, kind of continued grace as we as a Presbytery continue this journey together.
Courtney: You’ve got it. Thank you for the gift of your time!
Mark: It was great to chat with you, Courtney.
Courtney Ellis, Associate Pastor at Presbyterian Church of the Master in Mission Viejo, is an author and storyteller. Courtney reports on the presbytery’s mission partnerships.
Courtney’s latest book is Looking Up: A Birders Guide to Hope Through Grief, published by InterVarsity Press.
