Filipino Christian Church

Historic Filipinotown grew up around a 1909 Methodist church on Union Avenue in Los Angeles. The building was put up for the Union Avenue M.E. Church. In 1950 a Filipino congregation bought it, and other Filipino groups followed it into the neighborhood. The building at 301 N Union Avenue was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2019.

Students who started a congregation

The congregation began in 1928 as the Filipino Christian Fellowship. Its founders were young Filipino men taking classes at California Christian College. Los Angeles had no earlier group devoted to the spiritual life of its first Filipino arrivals. Those newcomers were cut off socially, because discriminatory practices limited where they could find housing, where they could hold a job and where they could go to church.

The congregation's roots go back to the first wave of Filipinos who settled in Los Angeles, and its story largely mirrors that of Filipino Americans across the region. The Fellowship became a formal church in 1933.

Forced out, again and again

Over two decades the congregation was forced to move several times, from Little Manila to Bunker Hill and on to Temple-Figueroa. Many of those moves came because the City of Los Angeles cleared neighborhoods in and around downtown for redevelopment projects.

The search ended in 1950. That year the church bought the old Union Avenue M.E. building in the Temple-Beverly corridor to keep as its permanent home. Once the church settled there, other Filipino organizations and institutions relocated to the corridor too. The area came to be called Historic Filipinotown, and through the second half of the twentieth century the church helped drive its growth.

A first stop after World War II

Filipino immigration to Los Angeles picked up after the war. New arrivals came to the church to meet and spend time with people who shared their heritage, and they didn't have to share the faith. A newcomer with no bed could sleep in the parsonage for a few days while lining up something longer term.

The building was old by then and needed constant repair. Members handled it themselves, putting in volunteer work every week so the building was ready for each Sunday and for every special occasion.

The social hall and the groups it housed

People came to the congregation from many Christian denominations across greater Los Angeles. In the early years it was where Filipinos went to find their countrymen, and it encouraged ethnic pride in both immigrants and those born in America. Some of its most active members also founded other Filipino groups or served as their officers, from social service agencies to groups built around cultural and ethnic pride.

Owning a building with a basement social hall and extra rooms let the church work as a community center. It gave space to local groups and hosted a long run of events. Early presidents of the Filipino Community of Los Angeles included members of the congregation. That group, one of the country's earliest Filipino American organizations, was later renamed the Filipino American Community of Los Angeles (FACLA). The local chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society was founded by church members, and its meetings took place in the building. In its first years the Filipino Cultural School, a dance and cultural troupe run by volunteers, practiced in the social hall.

Over time the church became one of the leading social, religious and cultural centers of the city's Filipino community.

Finding it

The church is at 301 N Union Avenue, Los Angeles, in the Temple-Beverly corridor of Historic Filipinotown.