Dan Genung and his wife, Francis, outside All Peoples Christian Center. Photo courtesy All Peoples Christian Center (click to enlarge)

By Ryan Singleton, DisciplesWorld contributing writer

CLAREMONT, Calif. (9/4/08) — All Peoples Christian Church and Community Center in Los Angeles is mourning the loss of its visionary founder Dan Genung, who died on Aug. 12 at his home in Claremont.

All Peoples empowers individuals and families in its south central neighborhood by providing social and spiritual resources. Genung helped establish the center in October of 1942, founding the church four years later, according to the organization’s website.

The church and community center both functioned under Disciples’ auspices until 1964, when the center unaffiliated itself with the denomination, in order to receive governmental funding as a not-for-profit institution.

Saundra Bryant, executive director of the center, was two, when she came under care of All Peoples. Her parents enrolled her in the daycare the same year Genung retired, and their paths didn’t cross until Bryant was an adult; however, she said, “I grew up with his vision of a better place, a vision of justice for all people, for giving people an opportunity to be self-determinant.”

Bryant continued, “I’m here because part of my calling is to be able to carry on that legacy of allowing people to grow.”

Genung was dedicated to the ideals of individual and communal growth, from his adolescent years through adulthood. He joined First Christian Church, Tucson, Ariz., in 1933, according to Mary Workman, a member of that congregation and an ordained Disciples minister. Workman further commented, “Dan was originally baptized in a non-Disciples congregation that had ‘hellfire and damnation written all over the walls,’ as he liked to say.”

Around the same time Genung joined First Christian, John Paul Pack, fresh from Yale Divinity School, was called to serve as pastor. Workman recalls that Pack was a formative figure in Genung’s early life.

Through this relationship, Genung witnessed charity and compassion, which inspired him to study at Disciples Divinity House of the University of Chicago, where he would earn two graduate degrees, Workman said.

While a graduate student, Genung thought about doing interracial ministry and began writing to Willard Wickizer, an executive for the United Christian Missionary Society, who was looking for ways to improve Disciples’ ministerial placement, according to Genung’s autobiographical book, A Street Called Love.

With the start of World War II and racial hegemony of the 1940s, many of the Missionary Society’s West coast properties were vacated, and Wickizer was eager to fill them.

Among those vacancies was the Japanese Christian Institute and Church, whose members were forced into internment camps on account of their heritage. Rather than sell this property, which “would bring further heartbreak to the Japanese Christian church members,” Wickizer and Genung would use this facility to serve as a multi-ethnic church, according to A Street Called Love.

Genung’s mission was to launch a racially inclusive church. His legacy is a community center that “provide[s] a broad spectrum of social services to all, regardless of faith or race, and…empower[s] the community to meet its needs by promoting equality, unity, respect and self-determination among all who participate in its programs,” according to the center’s mission statement.

Ernie O’Donnell, a Disciples minister and Genung’s colleague at All Peoples, recalled that “Dan was a visionary. He could see things that nobody could see.”

Genung retired from All Peoples in 1956 to pastor First Christian Church in Oceanside and then Foothill Christian Church in La Crescenta, Calif. He retired from the ministry in 1970.

Genung received many awards, including the Martin Luther King Jr. Award, presented by the Christian Church in Southern California in 1979, and was honored as Distinguished Alumnus of Disciples Divinity House in 1993.

Furthermore, Genung authored two books: Death in His Saddlebags: A History of Arizona (1992) and A Street Called Love: The Story of All Peoples Christian Church and Center, Los Angeles CA (2000).

He is survived by his wife, Francis, of 65 years and their four children. Genung was 93.