History
Brentwood Presbyterian Church was founded in 1929.
There is a book, titled Rooted in Love, Abounding in Hope (still available in our church library) about the history of our church from then until the 1980s (when it was written) and here are some images and a wedding story from the book:
Not everyone knows that Jimmy Stewart was an instrumental part of the building of Brentwood Presbyterian Church.
In his words:
“I remembered how, after I got started in pictures, Dad, who’d come to California for a visit, asked, ‘Where do you go to church around here?’
“’Well,’ I stammered, ‘I haven’t been going…There’s none around here.’
“Dad disappeared and came back with four men. ‘You must not have looked very hard, Jim,’ he said, ‘because there’s a Presbyterian church just three blocks from here, and these are the elders. They’re building a new building now, and I told them you were a movie star and you would help them.’
“And so Brentwood Presbyterian was the first church I belonged to out here. Later that church was the one in which Gloria and I were married. A few years after that it was the same church I’d slip into during the day when Gloria was near death after our twin girls were born. Then, after we moved, we attended Beverly Hills Presbyterian, a church we could walk to.”
(SOURCE: Guideposts Magazine. December 1987.)
At age 41, Stewart married former model Gloria Hatrick McLean on August 9, 1949. The photo shows them after, in front of BPC’s sanctuary doors. As Stewart loved to recount in self-mockery, “I, I, I pitched the big question to her last night and to my surprise she, she, she said yes!”
