Hollywood’s former senior pastor holds ‘no bitterness’
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, January 30, 2006
I can honestly say that I hold no malice or bitterness in my heart towards any of those who are responsible for cutting short my ministry at Hollywood Presbyterian Church, the congregation’s former senior minister said recently.
Alan MeenanDr. Alan Meenan, who had declined interviews while the Presbytery of Pacific was taking steps to force him out of the Hollywood pulpit, broke his self-imposed silence on the controversy through a message that he sent supporters. He also sent a copy to The Layman Online.
For nine months, from the time he was placed on administrative leave and told to have no contact with the congregation until church members voted – at his request – to accept his resignation, Meenan and his top associate, David Manock, were the target of a presbytery effort to remove them from their ministry at Hollywood Presbyterian.
At one point, he told The Layman Online that he did not want to make a statement because he hoped he could trust the Presbyterian process. But, in retrospect, he now says what unfolded was virtually unbelievable.
“I can certainly say that, in a million years, I could never have seen the events of the past nine months unfold,” Meenan said. “I could not believe my ears when the Presbytery of the Pacific’s Committee on Ministry (COM) asked for my resignation last April for what I consider to be no good reason but merely because they had received some 30 complaints from a congregation of nearly 3,000 people!”
Those complaints led to the presbytery’s forming an Administrative Commission to assume jurisdiction over the congregation. After the commission was appointed, its members gave Meenan and Manuck a letter written earlier that day – before the presbytery considered the issue – ordering them to clear out their offices in less than 12 hours and to go on administrative leave.
One of the issues raised by the commission was a deficit in the 2004 Hollywood budget. “The matter came to a head when I discovered that my business administrator had not been keeping a close eye on the books, or if he had, had concealed the fact that we faced a large 2004 deficit,” Meenan said. “Even then, plans were mobilized to redress the situation and I was confident we could recoup that deficit by mid-year 2005. But Presbytery never gave us the chance with their heavy-handed approach which only further exacerbated the problem.”
The presbytery’s action was “particularly incomprehensible” because it came at a time when the church was thriving, he said. “We had moved to four worship services and our attendance was continuing to grow. Our Easter services the week before I was asked by the COM to resign accommodated packed venues with nearly 3,000 worshipers! Growth was particularly dramatic in our ‘cutting-edge’ warehouse service. Close to 400 people were crowding into the warehouse on Sunday mornings, up from the 100 or so with whom we began two short years previously. Numbers were increasing weekly and we had just moved to larger premises to accommodate the exponential growth.”
Meenan blamed some of the problems “on congregants who did not appreciate a perceived drift from traditional mores in worship and parochialism. … Building a $350,000 state-of-the-art playground for the children of our church family took greater precedence over helping provide basic accommodation needs for seminarians in Malawi who, for love of Christ, had to live in squalid conditions. I felt my calls to social responsibility resisted. To my absolute astonishment (and not a little amusement), I was accused of many things including tyranny towards staff, financial mismanagement (including money laundering) and favoritism within parishioners.”
But Meenan said a “small conspiracy would have gone nowhere were it not for the fact that it reached into the halls of presbytery leadership,” where there was “antagonism to a church that represented a bastion of Biblical conservatism, not to mention the existence of professional jealousies.”
Being “the largest and most prestigious church in the area, Hollywood Pres. was frequently considered a thorn in the side of many in the Presbytery particularly as it represented an evangelical oasis in a sea of pervasive liberalism,” Meenan said.
“I believe it was obvious, from the beginning, that the intention of those exercising leadership in the Presbytery was to remove me one way or another. And in the course of time they succeeded. Their strategy to wear me and others down worked. By forbidding me to speak to members of my congregation for these many months, I was effectively removed from a process of potential healing and redemptive ministry. Overnight, hundreds of people stopped attending the church.”