San Francisco Congregation Unites After Church Fire

Senior Pastor Mark Ferrell, who has led the congregation for about 20 years, said workers were resealing the porous sandstone around the windows to guard against water intrusion when the fire started between 1:30 and 2 p.m. Construction crews called the San Francisco Fire Department, which arrived within minutes, he said.

“It quickly ballooned up to a three-alarm fire with multiple trucks, more than 100 firefighters,” Ferrell said. “Over the next several hours, they did a wonderful job containing the fire and making sure that there [were] no structures that were burned around.”

Built by shipbuilders out of brick and Arizona sandstone, the congregation has worshiped at the church since 1927.

Among the building’s treasured features are its stained-glass windows, installed in 1892 and recently restored, and a pulpit tied to the denomination’s 19th-century founders.

The fire began near the upper windows and climbed to the roof, Ferrell said. When the roof burned through, it collapsed into the main worship area, leaving behind waterlogged pews, charred timbers and heavy soot damage in the classrooms below.

Ferrell said the fire department told him that the blaze was connected to the construction — a pattern that he observed among other historic church fires, including the 2019 fire at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

“A building like this on the inside has a lot of dry timber,” he said. “Just a spark can get going very quickly.”

The loss is personal for Ferrell. He was married in the church 18 years ago, and his father was baptized there. “This church means a lot to me and my family, and it’s like losing a friend,” he said.

Ricardo Villoria, president of the Central California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, stressed that the congregation, not the structure, is the church.

“This church is going to come back from the ashes,” Villoria said. “It will come back stronger, and it will come united.”

The building’s history reaches back to the denomination’s earliest days in California. Ferrell said church pioneers Ellen and James White used $6,000 from the sale of their home to build the first Adventist church in San Francisco, on Laguna Street, and its pulpit — where many early leaders preached — was moved to the current site when the congregation relocated in 1927. That pulpit survived the fire and is being restored.

“It’s just a really strong connection to the power of God at our church,” Ferrell said.

Mayor Daniel Lurie praised the response in a social media post, writing that “the coordination was incredible” and that firefighters “helped contain that fire over the course of many, many hours.”

The fire prompted a shelter-in-place order, street closures and a power shutoff in the surrounding area, according to the church. The cause remains under official investigation by the fire department.

For now, the congregation of around 300 will worship at the nearby San Francisco Philadelphian Seventh-day Adventist Church.

“The church is not a building,” the Central California Conference communication office wrote in a statement, “but a community of believers united in Christ.”

KQED’s Juan Carlos Lara contributed to this report.