Thousands and thousands of members call their spiritual home one or the other of two churches on the campus of Loma Linda University Health. But the two large congregations started out as one in the year 1906 with just 16 charter members.
Called the Loma Linda Seventh-day Adventist Church, it first met in the parlor of original hotel-turned-sanitarium and then in a log assembly building before getting its own dedicated structure in 1910. They called it the Chapel. Fan-shaped, dark green on the outside and located on the hilltop, it was later torn down in 1938.
Last week’s trivia challenge was to identify what artifact from the Chapel can still be seen today on display in the Loma Linda University Heritage Research Center.
Correctly answering the Chapel’s solid pine pulpit are random winners Michael Olivarez, Marguerite Lauderback and PinkyJean Castillo. Please email pr@llu.edu to claim your prize, which must be picked up within 60 days.
Ellen White, an important early leader of the Adventist Church and a founder of Loma Linda University Health, spoke from this pulpit in 1911 at the age of 83. Many other fixtures of the Chapel, such as windows and doors, were incorporated into local homes.
In 1928, 240 members of the Loma Linda Seventh-day Adventist Church split off to form the Loma Linda College Church. Joined by 44 other community members, the congregation they formed is today’s Loma Linda University Church.
This left 680 members who continued to meet in the Chapel on the hill. Space continued to be a problem, so the congregants later built the current structure on the hill, now know as the Campus Hill Church.
On New Year’s Day of ____, people gathered from all over Southern California to inaugurate the new building. What year was that? Email the answer to pr@llu.edu by midnight Tuesday, March 17, for the chance to become a random winner. One answer per person.