The Costa Mesa Meetinghouse

An eager Mormon welcome by Bishop Wynn and Elder Parker. Costa Mesa, CA, 01/2026

For most, Genesis is a story about creation. Elder Parker thinks of it as a story about beginnings that don’t yet make sense.

“Sometimes, the beginning is unclear,” he enthusiastically tells his Sunday School class that morning. “Before light, before order, there’s a lot of confusion.”

It is the first Sunday School of the year at Costa Mesa Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which Parker calls “the Meetinghouse”. The classroom was plain and practical, a room designed to be used rather than admired: a green chalkboard, folding chairs, the low hum of an overhead light. The room was full of firsts: a young Mexican immigrant’s first time in America looking to improve his English, two newly arrived missionaries with the sun-burnished look of the American South, and Parker’s first Sunday school “of many”, he added. A sense of emergence hung in the room.

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

Parker, neatly dressed in a black jumper covering a collared shirt and beige slacks, his curly hair styled in quiet precision, let the verse sit in the air for a moment. He called on the Mexican boy, who, with an eager smile on his face, straightened his chair and read the following verse.

“God… sees the light,” he said slowly. “And it is good. He… separates the light,” he continued, “from the darkness.”

The boy spoke carefully and Parker smiled and listened without interrupting. Parker pulls out his personal Book of Mormon, an immaculately kept copy with gilded sides full of fluorescent index tabs and a Tartan knitted cover. He nods before telling the class, “Sometimes saying it out loud is the separation. Light from dark.” The Mexican boy smiled and loosened his shoulders, meeting Parker’s eyes for a moment before looking back down.

Parker breaks us into small focus groups and we introduce ourselves. The two sun-burnished missionaries go first. In a loud, self-assured voice cushioned by a Southern drawl, the first girl announces her name and hometown, each word rounded and deliberate as if she’s said it many times before. Her sister introduced herself in a lower register, this time tempered by hesitation.

Parker laughed softly. “You two are already doing this better than most of us,” and the two girls laugh, as loud as each other this time. “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

When it came time to introduce himself, Parker kept it short. “My name’s Parker, and I’m learning too,” he said, smiling. Around him, the room had settled into eager attention, no longer a collection of firsts, but something beginning to take shape.

Parker didn’t say much more about himself that morning. He later told me he grew up in Missouri, was deployed on his mission in Scotland and Ireland, before studying marketing at Brigham Young University. As an adult, he found himself in California as an advertising manager at a motor company. The real blessing though, he said, was the congregation he found in Costa Mesa.

“In the suburbs outside St. Louis, everyone had something they were serious about,” he reflected. “For my family, that was the Church.”

Parker spent the first 18 years of his life living in a gated LDS community. Mormonism was all he ever knew until the age of 14, where he entered a public high school. “It was strange being questioned by people who also believed in God,” he continued. “That took some getting used to.” Parker didn’t know what he believed until people started asking why, inducing him to serve a mission after graduating high school.

“Graduating high school didn’t feel like the big moment,” he recalled. “Opening Missionary Online and seeing where they placed me did.” Young LDS missionaries are informed of where they are to be assigned their mission through the Church’s online portal, missionary.lds.org. Barely with a high school diploma in hand, Parker left the United States for the first time in his life and flew to Cork.

He told me of street conversations in rural Ireland where the accent was barely intelligible. “You learn pretty quickly that being misunderstood doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It just means you haven’t listened long enough.” Relishing the sarcastic Irish humor, Parker “reached a point where he could say he heard all the stories people could throw at him,” finding an inner peace and reassurance in his faith.

Looking to test that self-assuredness, and how much much it had been honed on the streets of County Westmeath, I turned the conversation toward the controversies that tend to follow the Church: polygamy, accusations of cultism, and the burden of its public image. 

Parker didn’t bristle. He paused, leaned back slightly, and joked, “you hear those early, usually before anything else.” Parker was careful not to offer certainty where he didn’t feel it. Unlike the polished explanations I’d heard from missionaries, he spoke of limits in knowledge and perspective. He doesn’t claim to understand why Joseph Smith was called to practice plural marriage, only that he believes the reasons mattered, even if they remain unresolved. “We’re all still learning.”

As the conversation deepened, the bishop of the church, Steve Wynn, entered the room and said a few words. He spoke loud and at length, delivering a formulaic spiel of the “hands-on” nature of the church and how he worked as an "orthodontist by weekday, bishop by Sunday.” He left the room and Parker paused for a second before going back to thoughtful reflection. 

On Mormonism’s controversy of multiple holy lands, Parker said God would choose many places, many peoples, rather than sanctifying a single geography. To him, uncertainty seemed not a weakness, but a condition of belief, which he was more than happy to share in a classroom of many new beginnings.

Genesis does not begin with certainty. Before light, before order, there is a lot up in the air. Back in the classroom, Parker calls on me, and I oblige, my British accent just one of many voices heard that day. “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” For Parker, that beginning matters. Faith, as he understands it, does not emerge fully formed. It starts unclear, surrounded by questions that one can only understand after years of believing.

Parker teaches with that rhythm in mind. He didn’t push the group toward conclusions so much as guide them forward, attuned to who was speaking and who was still finding the right words. The Mexican student followed along more confidently than before, the missionaries leaned back in their chairs, the room no longer tentative but settled. Our discussion hasn’t been resolved, but that didn’t seem to bother him.

As the class ended, Parker stacked chairs and wiped Genesis from the chalkboard, closing the day not with answers but with the quiet sense of a beginning completed. Next week, he told the group, we’d pick back up where we left off. He smiled as he said it, the promise of another day.