History

Saint Lawrence Orthodox Christian Church of Felton, California carries one of the most distinctive origin stories in American Orthodoxy. The community traces its roots to 1973, when its founder, Father John Weldon Hardenbrook, moved to Brookdale in the San Lorenzo Valley of the Santa Cruz Mountains. What began as a small house church of former evangelical Christians engaged in a deliberate and earnest search for the True Church grew steadily through the following years, combining with other groups of seekers who shared the same longing.

That search led the community on a journey that culminated in 1987, when the house church was received into the Orthodox Church, finding in its ancient faith, sacramental life, and unbroken apostolic tradition the fullness it had been seeking. The parish took as its patron Saint Lawrence of Rome, the third-century martyr venerated as the patron saint of the San Lorenzo Valley, whose name the community and the valley itself share.

From those unlikely beginnings in a living room, the parish grew into a community of approximately 350 to 400 members, the majority of them American converts to Orthodoxy, nestled among the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains at 6180 Highway 9. The parish built a large, beautiful redwood church building and established the Saint Lawrence Academy, a parish school that has grown through multiple grades and produced generations of young people deeply rooted in the Orthodox Christian faith. All worship is conducted in English, with music drawn from a variety of Orthodox ethnic traditions and performed by a dedicated a cappella choir, reflecting the community's commitment to making the fullness of the Liturgy accessible to all who enter its doors.

Saint Lawrence Orthodox Christian Church at 6180 Highway 9 in Felton serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the San Lorenzo Valley and greater Santa Cruz area as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of San Francisco within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.