By PAUL HUGHES, Contributor
This is a story about Main Place. Not the mall. The church.
Or rather, the business.
The Main Place in Tustin owns five businesses, is starting a sixth, and is about to sell its 3-acre Red Hill Avenue home for $7 million, prompting the church to find a new home.
Senior Pastor Rich Mathisrud isn’t put out.
“We start churches,” he said. “That’s what we do.”
Mathisrud founded,or planted, in Christian parlance,Main Place 18 years ago as an offshoot of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest.
Saddleback, started by Rick Warren, is a megachurch with thousands of members. Saddleback has upward of 20,000 attendees any given weekend.
The Main Place is smaller. It starts little offshoot churches all over the place.
“We want to start 20 churches in 20 years,” Mathisrud said.
The church seeks smaller, neighborhood places, with room for about 200 members.
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Tustin church: set to sell for $7 million to become assisted living home |
“The first year was 2000,” he said. “So far we’ve started six.”
The seventh is planned in Los Angeles. Others are in Irvine, Orange, Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Tijuana.
As The Main Place starts churches, it also starts businesses. It has six of those, too:
n Carden Heights Academy, an elementary school in Orange.
n A thrift store, bookstore and antique store, all in Tustin.
n The Curtain Call Dinner Theater along the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway in Tustin.
n The Village Theater in Orange.
The church also has what it calls the “20/20 Vision Training Center,” which sounds like an eye doctor but actually refers to the 20 churches envisioned in its 20-year plan.
The Main Place got its name after some of its first services were held at Westfield MainPlace, the Santa Ana mall. The church has mingled evangelism and economics from the start.
Mathisrud sees both as part of his task.
“Businesses show the community we’re really interested in being part of the neighborhood,” he said. “We’re out there offering services. It’s social enterprise.”
Profits from the businesses help start new churches and support Inside-Out Men’s Home in Santa Ana, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center.
The center is one of The Main Place’s earliest efforts as a church, started soon after Mathisrud began holding services in the theaters at Main Place mall in 1988.
The home has 12 beds. Men who have abused drugs or alcohol can stay at the home for a year while they find work and get back on their feet.
Running businesses also lets the church offer jobs to residents. One of the “graduates” of the Inside-Out program ended up buying one of The Main Place’s first businesses.
Mike Ferrin started by working at Color Tech Carpet Restoration in Santa Ana.
The church bought it from the previous owner when he moved. Seven years later, in 2004, Ferrin bought it from the church.
Ferrin has “three employees and a couple of trucks,” he said.
Last year, Color Tech did some $200,000 in business. Ferrin pastors the church The Main Place started in Garden Grove. It’s in the “high-crime, low-income area” Ferrin said he is from.
“I used to pick up drugs in that neighborhood,” he said.
Mathisrud said he started the businesses to offset the cost of running Inside-Out.
“This is Orange County,” he said. “We have to feed them, and give them jobs. We needed to do something to give these men every tool possible. We minister unto the least of these.”
Dinner Theater
The gospel is Mathisrud’s passion. But it’s the businesses that set The Main Place apart.
A church with an elementary school isn’t so odd. And many have rummage sales or thrift stores.
But a dinner theater?
The Main Place bought the former Elizabeth Howard Curtain Call Dinner Theater from founder and owner Elizabeth Howard about a year ago.
“For years I’d call Elizabeth Howard and ask if I could have a church service there,” Mathisrud said. “A of couple years ago I asked for a gospel brunch on Sunday morning.”
She declined again, he said.
So he told her, “If you ever want to sell, let us know.”
Howard had run the theater for 25 years.
“It was time (for her) to retire,” Mathisrud said.
Tustin City Manager Bill Huston said the buy prompted some talk about a church buying a theater.
“People wanted to know, ‘Will they still sell alcohol?’ ‘What types of shows will they do?'” Huston said.
It doesn’t matter to the city, he said.
“They bought it and they can do what they want,” Huston said.
The theater has been a regional draw and a Tustin tradition, he said.
The city “would like to see that continue,” he said.
Since buying the theater, the church has staged shows from “Annie Get Your Gun” to “No, No Nanette.” It even did the covertly sexual “Grease” and now is running “Fiddler on the Roof.”
And, no, it doesn’t serve booze.
The closest it’s come to a religious production is “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The theater holds open auditions for actors, Mathisrud said.
With the theater, The Main Place finally got its Easter gospel brunch, he said.
Mathisrud’s latest venture is The Village Theater and Church in Orange.
The Village, built in the 1960s as The Villa Theater, still has a kitschy 1960s sign on Tustin Avenue. Most recently it’d been a movie house.
The church signed a 10-year lease when the most recent movie house went bust.
Now he’s spending “a couple hundred thousand” dollars renovating the inside, returning it from three theaters to one and applying for city approval to hold Sunday services.
“It’s a different use with different characteristics,” said Ed Knight, assistant planning director for Orange. “The issue is the parking.”
The reworked Village is set to hold about 400 people. Work should finish in January.
The church eventually wants to do live theater there. That could require another permit, Knight said.
Dave Valentine of Valentine Realty, whose family co-owns the building and the land, was glad to hear about the plan.
“We wanted to see if we could find someone who would operate it as a theater,” he said. “So they came along, and it seemed to make sense for what we were trying to do, and what they were trying to do.”
At both Curtain Call and The Village, Mathisrud plans to continue Broadway shows, and add religious productions.
It’s another melding of the sacred and secular, or, as Mathisrud puts it, Broadway and biblical.
The church already is active in the area around The Village. It runs kids clubs at apartment complexes near the theater, Mathisrud said.
Curtain Call has been successful, and so The Village can be too, Mathisrud contends. He said he’s thinking about starting a third theater in Pomona.
The church is a nonprofit, of course, but the businesses, “are meant to run at a profit,” he said.
“It just takes time,” Mathisrud said.
So how are they doing?
The businesses make money, according to Mathisrud.
Building Sale
The church’s biggest business move still is in the works.
American Senior Living, a Santa-Ana based, family-owned developer of senior housing, wants to build an assisted living home at the site of The Main Place’s Tustin church.
“We’ve been around 20 years, and built many communities in Orange County,” said John Haffner, vice president of development at American Senior Living.
The Main Place has moved its main services and site nine times since it began 18 years ago.
Mathisrud is preparing to do so again.
The deal is in escrow and should close in March, he said
“It will help us fund the remaining 14 churches,” Mathisrud said.
For now, The Main Place is taking care of business.
The church has run businesses almost from the start, including the carpet cleaning business and a car detailing operation.
The thrift store has been open 12 years.
The Main Place has owned, sold and bought back the elementary school in the past seven years.
Curtain Call Theater is heading toward two years under The Main Place.
The Christian bookstore and the antique shop are six months old.
Once it even went the other way, turning a business into a ministry.
The Main Place turned an old Fotomat kiosk across the street from the main church into a drive-through prayer booth.
Risers on the side, already there, serve walk-up prayer “customers.”
