St. Paul Lutheran Church sits on a quiet corner of Excelsior Avenue and Woodruff in Oakland's Glenview neighborhood, a low-slung sanctuary with a long history of singing, protesting, and opening its doors. The congregation that first met in downtown Oakland in 1886 has become one of the most progressive Lutheran communities in Northern California: a Reconciling in Christ church that names two commitments that shape its life, being "radically inclusive" and being "radically compassionate," with a strong music program, active hunger and racial justice work, and ministry partnerships reaching as far as Tanzania.
From a Swedish Mission in Downtown Oakland to Glenview
St. Paul Swedish Lutheran Church began on December 19, 1886, when thirteen people gathered for the first service in downtown Oakland. In its early decades the congregation sponsored new Lutheran churches across the East Bay and founded Salem Lutheran Nursing Home. Membership peaked at 1,109 in 1959. The congregation moved from downtown to Oakland's Glenview neighborhood in the 1940s, with the current sanctuary opening in 1949.
The community took a decisive turn in the 1970s and 1980s. Ethiopian, Vietnamese, and Cambodian refugees were sponsored beginning in 1975, and Wednesday Supper and Education launched in 1978 and has continued in various forms ever since. In 1982 the Rev. Ross Merkel took the call as pastor. A member named Alma Morten, writing for the Swedish-American periodical Vestkusten in 1986, summed up that season this way: "As we at St. Paul's honor our Swedish heritage, we look forward to a beginning - another 100 years."
Pastor Merkel and a core group of members pushed the congregation toward AIDS hospice care, refugee sponsorship, and the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people in every aspect of congregational life. In 1983 St. Paul became one of the first Lutheran congregations in the United States to join the Reconciling in Christ (RIC) program. After the ELCA defrocked Merkel in 1994 for being in a relationship with another man, the members chose to retain him as their pastor. The Sierra Pacific Synod council unanimously approved his reinstatement to the ELCA clergy roster in 2009, alongside the reception of two pastors who had served St. Paul as interns and been extraordinarily ordained through Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries.
Today St. Paul is led by Senior Pastor Holly McHale-Larsen, who arrived in fall 2019, supported by Vicar John M. Brett. The community that now includes children, retirees, and working professionals often describes itself as "a church of activists, scholars, and musicians."
Sunday Worship at Ten
Worship begins at 10 a.m. on Sundays and typically runs sixty to seventy-five minutes. The sanctuary sits at the corner of Excelsior Avenue and Woodruff; visitors enter through the back, where bulletins and a red hymnal await in each pew. St. Paul has no dress code. Worship is traditional in shape with a wide variety of music drawn from the main hymnal, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, plus a deep collection of supplementary hymnals gathered by Music Director Derek Sup. Six different liturgies move through the church year alongside music from many countries and cultures.
Communion is offered every Sunday with both wine and grape juice, and the table is open to everyone, "from babies to centenarians." Parents decide when their children are ready to receive. A weekly offering is received, though guests are explicitly told there is no pressure or obligation to give. About fifteen minutes into the service a Children's Message draws kids to the front of the sanctuary; afterwards they head upstairs to Sunday School and return in time for communion. After the dismissal the postlude often keeps lingering listeners in the pews, and Coffee Hour follows in the fellowship hall as "an extension of worship."
All services stream live on the St. Paul Lutheran Church Oakland Facebook page, and recordings are archived on the church's YouTube channel.
Music: A Defining Identity
If worship is the heart of St. Paul, music runs close to its calling. Music Director Derek Sup leads the Chancel Choir, the handbell choir, the children's choir Joyful Noise!, and a deep bench of guest instrumentalists. The sanctuary has heard electric guitar, mandolin, harp, saxophone, oboe, organ and piano duets, and brass and bells alongside the choir, and many members lead worship through their own instrumental and vocal gifts.
The Chancel Choir sings for nearly every service outside of a summer break and has taken on ambitious works by Vierne, Britten, Bach, Rutter, and Durufle, often collaborating with string and brass players from across the Bay Area. During the pandemic the choir held weekly rehearsals on Zoom and stitched together virtual performances of Handel and Mozart that remain on the YouTube channel. Joyful Noise!, founded in 1988 and now in its second generation under the leadership of Elenka and Christian Refsell, has had more than a hundred child singers over its lifetime; the 2018 thirtieth-anniversary gathering drew many former members back to St. Paul.
The handbell choir added young ringers in 2019, after two children walked up after a Christmas Eve service to try the bells. The same spirit drives the Free Key Choir, a hundred-voice community choir Sup co-founded with mostly twenty-to-thirty-year-olds from the DIY Bay Area music scene, and the Glenview Classical Series, a monthly concert series launched in 2018 and co-curated with cellist and composer Lewis Patzner, which has programmed Beethoven violin sonatas, Bach, twentieth-century avant-garde, and new music from local composers.
Children, Youth, and the East Bay Lutheran Parish
The congregation welcomes all children unconditionally and has structured itself around that promise. The upstairs floor of the church education building holds a nursery for children from birth to age two or three, an open year-round space staffed during the 10 a.m. service; a preschool classroom for ages three through five; and the Spark Sunday classroom for elementary-aged children during the school year. Sunday School runs 9:30 to 10 a.m. during the school year. The program uses Sparkhouse curriculum, shared with the Wednesday evening children's program.
On Wednesday evenings, when the program is in session, families gather at 6 p.m. for dinner in the fellowship hall, with Christian Education for kids from 6:45 to 7:30 p.m. The Wednesday evening program now meets monthly. Older children and teens join the East Bay Lutheran Parish Youth Program (EBLYP), coordinated by the Rev. Craig Minich across five Lutheran congregations: St. Paul, Resurrection, Trinity Oakland, United, and Trinity Alameda. Four age-tiered groups make up EBLYP, with a Family Ministry Group for preschool through second grade, the G.E.T. ("God's Elementary People Together") for grades two through five, M.Y.L.K. (Middle Youth Lutheran Kids) for middle schoolers, and S.N.L. (Sunday Night Live) for high schoolers. Activities include trips to regional and national youth gatherings, community service projects, ice-skating and indoor rock climbing, family campouts, and BASE Camp (Bible Adventure Summer Enrichment) each summer.
Seasonal programs round out the year with a Christmas pageant, a pancake breakfast, a visit from Martin Luther, Parents Night Out, intergenerational game nights, and Vacation Bible School. Pastor Holly walks families through baptisms, first communions, and confirmations as children grow, and parents are trusted to decide when their child is ready to take communion.
Wednesday Evenings and Adult Learning
The Wednesday Night Program hosts a prepared meal in the fellowship hall at 6 p.m. and a program from 6:45 to 7:30 p.m. on monthly meeting dates. Past topics have included Death and Dying with death doula Airalee Studley, Immigration and the Bible led by a former vicar, the Enneagram with Jacinta Sutphin, Marian Apparitions with Pastor Holly, and a series called "Thriving Beyond Covid." Earlier programs screened documentaries such as One Voice: The Story of the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir and Inocente, and brought in outside speakers on homelessness, hunger, and housing.
A long-running Book Club has met on Wednesdays almost every week since December 2019, beginning with Pastor Lenny Duncan's Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S. In 2020 the group pivoted to virtual meetings and worked through Barbara Brown Taylor's Learning to Walk in the Dark, Diana Butler Bass's Christianity for the Rest of Us, and then, in the months after the murder of George Floyd, an extended reading list on African American experience: The Color of Law, Walking with the Wind, The Vanishing Half, Passing, and High Price. Recent reads have included David Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee and Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.
On Thursday evenings at 7:30, retired Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary professor Gary Pence leads the Theological Think Tank, a weekly open-ended conversation with no curriculum and no conclusions. Past topics have included the Bible, predestination, atonement theories, Eastern Orthodoxy, physician-assisted suicide, and the theology of hymns in the hymnal. Once a year the women of the congregation organize a fall retreat at a retreat center in the Bay Area.
Hunger Ministries and Local Outreach
The Hunger Committee at St. Paul was formed in 2006 at Pastor Merkel's request and coordinates the congregation's local food efforts. Volunteers staff one of Mercy Brown Bag's seventeen Alameda County distribution sites twice a month, sorting and packing grocery bags for low-income seniors. During the pandemic the church opened its fellowship hall so that Mercy Brown Bag could pack grocery bags in a socially distant space; the program expanded to deliver food directly to more than a thousand seniors at home.
At St. Mary's Center in West Oakland, the only dedicated senior center in Northern California, St. Paul volunteers used to prepare a monthly meal for residents, then shifted their support when the center pivoted to food distribution. Members now host a drive-up food collection on the second and fourth Fridays of the month from 1 to 2 p.m. at the church. The congregation also fundraises for Safeway gift cards through its Alternative Christmas program and helps to support ELCA World Hunger, Bread for the World, and the Alameda County Community Food Bank.
Beyond hunger work, the congregation's Outreach Committee runs the church's annual Children's Halloween Party and haunted house, a spring Yard Sale, an Animal Blessing, and a busy booth schedule that includes Castro Valley Pride, Oakland Pride, Oaktoberfest, and the Laurel Street Fair. St. Paul serves as a polling place on Election Days, with coffee and cookies for neighbors waiting to vote, and takes an annual summer theater outing to Woodminster. Hospitality hosts an annual Swedish Smorgasbord, a Christmas Pancake Breakfast with the East Bay Lutheran Youth, and a summer family picnic, and the church's longtime cooks, Tim Carlon and Mitchell Hughes, also delivered homemade meals to members during the pandemic.
The Welcome Table: Racial Justice at St. Paul
Since the summer of 2020 a group of members has been meeting under what is now the name The Welcome Table: Racial Justice Task Force, named for the Civil Rights anthem. The task force's first action was to remove the hooded white robes from the sanctuary after recognizing that they shared imagery with the Ku Klux Klan, and the Worship, Art and Music Committee continues to review other symbols in the building.
Two cohorts have completed the Just Faith program, "Faith and Racial Equity" in fall 2020 and "Faith and Racial Healing" in summer 2021, and a wider series of bias and inclusion trainings is being planned for church leadership. Meetings are held on the first Tuesday of the month at 7 p.m. and are open to anyone who wants to join.
Full Welcome of LGBTQIA+ Lutherans
St. Paul has been a Reconciling in Christ congregation since 1983 and is one of the first Lutheran churches in the country to carry that designation. The congregation's LGBTQIA+ Task Force continues the work that began in the 1980s, hosting coffee hours to support organizations such as Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries and the Bay Area Gay Prom, marching in Castro Valley Pride and Oakland Pride, and sponsoring educational events for the wider parish. The task force is currently revisiting the expanded commitments of the Reconciling in Christ program to consider what comes next.
Farther Afield: Tanzania, LWR, and the Wider Church
The Tanzania Task Force has been in relationship with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania since the mid-1980s and currently partners with four ministries. Three are in the Arusha Diocese: the Maasae Girls Lutheran Secondary School, which educates young women from pastoral communities and is supported by St. Paul scholarships; the Arusha Lutheran Medical Center, which serves AIDS orphans and other vulnerable patients; and Plaster House, where children from distant parts of the country stay after surgery. The fourth, Nkoaranga Secondary School in the foothills of Mount Meru, was started in 1987 "under a tree" and now serves 325 students. St. Paul has also supported projects of former ELCA missionaries Sam and Cindy Wolff in Dar es Salaam and has funded scholarships for Tanzanian headmasters working toward advanced degrees.
On the wider map, St. Paul belongs to the Sierra Pacific Synod, one of the ELCA's sixty-five synods, and connects with Lutheran Social Services of Northern California, Lutheran World Relief, ELCA World Hunger, Bread for the World, Reconciling Works, the Lutheran Office of Public Policy in California, and the Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries roster. Closer to home, the Fairmont Hospital Task Force has visited residents of Alameda County's long-term care hospital in San Leandro since 1987, now in its thirty-fourth year of bringing light refreshments, conversation, prayer, and song to a hundred or more patients. The East Bay Lutheran Ministry to Nursing Homes, supported by five Lutheran congregations in Alameda County, offers weekly worship and pastoral care to more than four hundred residents and staff across four facilities, with St. Paul holding a special relationship with Fruitvale Healthcare Center.
Life's Big Events and the Endowment
St. Paul hosts baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and holds a columbarium on its grounds. Pastor Holly welcomes inquiries from members and from the wider community. The St. Paul Endowment Fund, founded in 1997, has provided more than one hundred grants worth over fifty thousand dollars toward church programs, college books for students, banners and altar linens, commissioned music, summer camp, building materials for Rebuilding Together, and support for the East Bay Lutheran Parish.
Practical Notes for a First Visit
St. Paul Lutheran Church is at 1658 Excelsior Avenue, Oakland, CA 94602, on the corner of Woodruff and Excelsior in the Glenview neighborhood. Sunday worship begins at 10 a.m., followed by Coffee Hour in the fellowship hall. There is no dress code and no pressure to give; communion is open to everyone. Street parking is generally available within a couple of blocks, though there is no church parking lot. Children are welcome to stay in the sanctuary throughout worship, and a Children's Message and Sunday School are offered for those who would like to participate. Online giving is available through Breeze. Visitors are welcome to introduce themselves to the pastor or to the church office at 510-530-6333.