They say no good deed goes unpunished, and God's Open Door, as the 2nd Baptist Church is also known, is feeling a pain in its wallet from an ambitious one. What started as a fine idea to build low-income senior housing in a largely empty parking lot has ended up putting church finances "in a tailspin," said Pastor Wallace Shepherd, who began to lead the East Mason Street congregation a couple years after the venerable Pastor Leander L. Wilkes retired in 2004. Civil and criminal cases have been filed in the building snafu, but what greatly worries the pastor is that the church sold its 0.57-acre property to get out from under the project's debts.
"The oldest African-American church in Santa Barbara!" Shepherd exclaimed. "Our 107-year-old church may go defunct."
The problems first began last March when the church's construction lender refused to pay several invoices, Shepherd said. The lender claimed the contractor, NE Construction of Woodland Hills, was billing for a different job or had cancelled the materials being invoiced. Other problems surfaced, Shepherd went on, and the builder insisted they'd done nothing wrong. A flurry of court filings ensued, including a mechanic's lien in May by NE saying it was owed about $90,000, against which the church had to post a $127,000 bond, said Shepherd.