by Garth Meyer
Twice she stood at the edge of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, 245 feet above high tide, which it may not have been.
The first time, a professor happened to drive by, and stopped to talk down 19-year-old Julie Beals. The second time, what happened led her on a long journey to become the first female rector of the white, wooden church across from the Redondo Beach Fire Station.
Beals was installed at the Episcopal Church June 7.
Ordained four years ago, she now leads a combined congregation with St. Andrew’s of Torrance, after parishioners chose her – announcing last December they would forego a traditional search and name the associate priest who was already on hand.
Congregants address her as “Mother Julie,” or “Reverend.” Parishioners count about 50 each Sunday in Redondo.
Originally from Kent, England, and an Episcopal church volunteer since 1998, Beals enrolled at Claremont Divinity School in 2005, while working in marketing for Warner Bros. Pictures. She later quit to become the director of development at St. James in the City, on Wilshire Boulevard (Los Angeles).
At Claremont, at first, she studied philosophy.
“Then I got fed up with everybody calling God the ‘unmoved mover,’” Beals said, and started taking divinity classes.
At one point, her advisor told her she was halfway to a divinity masters, so she kept going.
All the while something was in the back of her mind. Since she first moved to L.A. in 1998 to study for an MBA at USC, she felt a calling to the priesthood.
“I resisted it for 23 years,” Beals said. “It was nagging at me. And it was really annoying.”
After she finished her Masters in Divinity in 2013, she put off the priesthood again, and met a man while volunteering at St. James. They married and she and husband Ken had two children.
Finally, Beals became a deacon for St. James in South Pasadena. The priest there made a phone call to Father Nick Griffith in Redondo Beach, recommending her for an associate position.
She arrived in the South Bay, and was ordained in early 2022. Griffiths soon moved back to New York.
Mother Julie is the daughter of two English diplomats. The government paid for her and her sister to go to boarding school. Julie began at age 7, at a Methodist school in Pembury.
“My parents seemed surprised I turned out religious,” she said.
Her first six years were spent in Nigeria and Laos, where her father was stationed. At boarding school, “I felt like I lost my parents and my sister, but I gained Jesus,” Beals said.
The students were required to wear uniforms, during the week and until 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, all the way through high school.
At the University of Bristol, Beals fell away from religion, almost in a dire sense.
“I was at a really dark stage in my college years,” she said, recounting an abusive relationship and standing on that bridge, when the older professor of hers happened to go by.
He died two weeks later.
Beals went to the funeral – her first – and then, three months afterward she stood on the bridge again, at the opposite edge, and had a conversion experience.
“For a brief moment, I was able to see the world as God sees it,” she said. “It was like when you get glasses, I was able to see every leaf on every single one of the trees. I had never seen that before or after. I had a vision, I knew that God was our creator. It was something I couldn’t have made up.”
Beals came to the U.S. to work for a book publisher in Boston, and later contacted USC.
“I only applied in Spain and Southern California, where it was warm,” she said.
Her first direct step toward the priesthood was to sign up for chaplaincy training at Los Angeles Good Samaritan Hospital, early in the pandemic, when visitors weren’t allowed and she would call relatives on the phone to say goodbyes.
“That was the turning point. Since then, everything has fallen into place,” she said.
As a priest here, Beals leads Sunday morning services, Bible studies, and does pastoral care such as visiting the sick and the homebound.
What is the hardest book in the Bible to understand?
“Leviticus. Leviticus is the most boring,” she said. “It’s not relevant to the current age, and people use it to exclude the LGBTQ community. It’s a lot of old rules that really don’t apply anymore.”
The Episcopal Church, often referred to as “Catholic Lite,” is a successor to the Church of England, established by Henry VIII, who broke off from Catholicism. During the American Revolution, colonists took references to “the king” out of the prayer books.
Beals is one of 165 Episcopalian priests in L.A. County, who report to the Bishop of Los Angeles.
St. Andrews was formed in Torrance in 1930, and Christ Church on South Broadway in Redondo Beach 40 years before. The two churches merged in 2019. Both buildings are still used.
“It feels exactly where I was meant to be,” Beals said. “And the parishioners came to that conclusion as well.” ER
