Jimmy Stewart and Church

SOURCE:  Guideposts Magazine.  Published December 1987.  www.guideposts.org
KEYWORDS:  church, Hollywood, father

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.