The Last Filipino Baptist Church in Boyle Heights

By Olivia Niland

With a church on nearly every street corner, faith is as integral, and omnipresent, in the Los Angeles community of Boyle Heights as it's ever been.

Yet with a population that is over 94 percent Latino, there is one aspect of Boyle Heights' religious community on the verge of disappearing entirely: its Filipino members.

Housed in an colorful, century-old stucco building at 206 S. Saint Louis St., the Faith Calvary Baptist Church is one of the only non-Latino congregations remaining in Boyle Heights, and perhaps the lone majority Filipino church still operating in the community.

This likely won't be the case much longer, though, as the congregation, after 20 years in Boyle Heights, is contemplating moving elsewhere soon.

“We have not seen a lot of integration with the community,” Genovevo D. Lubaton, Senior Pastor of Faith Calvary Baptist, said. “It would seem we are not doing well with that.”

For some years, the church found success in appealing to younger church-goers, offering events at Halloween and vacation Bible school during the summer, but these days, attendance by Boyle Heights community members is down across all age demographics.

“Our ministry basically [works] with kids on Friday evenings, but even that has dwindled,” Lubaton said. “So we felt that our integration into the community has not been very successful.”

Despite years of trying to find their place within Boyle Heights, some of the cultural barriers present in the increasingly Latino community have proven difficult to overcome for the Faith Cavalry congregation, as well as the few other non-Latino cultural groups that remain.

Language, according to Lubaton, has proven to be the greatest obstacle in fully integrating his church into the community, and some community members won't consider Faith Calvary Baptist once they learn that it does not offer services or Sunday School in Spanish.

“The churches that are thriving here are actually churches that speak both Spanish and English,” Lubaton said. “Those that are monolingual, that only speak English in the Sunday School, in the choir and the service, are not growing as much. So a lot of churches that were from here have moved out.”

For a while, Faith Calvary tried adopting the opposite approach, offering a free English-as-a-second-language program for the community, but it wasn't well attended.

Of Boyle Heights' nearly 100,000 residents, more than half were born outside the United States, and 87.7% of those residents in Mexico, according to the Los Angeles Times Mapping L.A. Data.

What may not be readily apparent to those who call the community home today is that, in the century plus since the Faith Calvary Baptist Church's current home was built, Boyle Heights has experienced a significant shift in demographics.

“This church used to be a fully white church,” Lubaton said of the historic building, originally constructed in 1906 and remodeled in 1916. “They called this [area] the Beverly Hills of Los Angeles before.”

Indeed, the community was at one point largely Jewish in the early twentieth century, and then home to significant numbers of Eastern European, African American and Japanese residents, its diverse history a roller coaster of cultural influx and exodus.

Today, Boyle Heights' population is just 2 percent Asian, 2 percent white and less than 1 percent black.

Given the large immigrant population in Boyle Heights, it isn't difficult to understand the prevalent role that faith, which can often serve as a lifeline to people and places far away, plays within the community.

For Faith Cavalry's largely Filipino congregation, this interplay between faith and culture is not unfamiliar, and if anything, the unsuccessful integration of the two seemingly similar groups―Boyle Heights' Latino and Filipino Christians―has contributed to Lubaton's mixed feelings about leaving the community.

“The Philippines was under Spain for 300 years, and our last names mostly reflect the last names of the people in this area,” Lubaton said. “And our habits, too; the big family reunions, the getting together. We don't get together and not eat. If we have a Bible study, we eat, if we have a meeting, we eat.”

Despite some hesitancy, and the congregation's attachment to the century-old church itself, Lubaton believes the move to be in the best interest of his members.

The congregation will most likely relocate to the Glendale area, where there is a strong Filipino community, and where many of the church's members already live, with some commuting up to 25 miles roundtrip to attend service in Boyle Heights.

Regardless of where the Faith Calvary Baptist congregation decides to relocate, or which group takes its place in the old church on St. Louis Street, Lubaton said that he believes Boyle Heights will continue to grow and thrive.

“When we came here in 1994, we had no trouble parking alongside the road. Now you can hardly find a place to park, especially on a Sunday. And the apartments are filled," Lubaton said. "We do not know what the future will be. But I think [Boyle Heights] has a bright future."