Menlo Church
church in CA, United States
Menlo Church, previously Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, is a Presbyterian church congregation located in the San Francisco Bay Area with campuses in Menlo Park, Mountain View, San Mateo, and Saratoga, California.
History
The church was officially organized on November 30, 1873. Its congregation has over 3,863 members as of 2016. It was listed as the 17th Most Influential Church in America according to a 2007 survey.
The original site was donated in 1874, less than a year after the church was founded, and MPPC met for 76 years at 700 Santa Cruz Avenue and Chestnut, until the church built its current facility at 950 Santa Cruz Avenue in 1950, where it remains now. The Open Doors campaign led to the openings of two new campuses: the North Campus in San Mateo and the South Campus in Mountain View, in 2007 and 2008. In 2015, the church renamed itself Menlo Church to unify the different campuses, and also launched the Menlo San Jose, Saratoga and South City campuses.
On March 2, 2014, the congregation voted to affirm the recommendation of the session to depart Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in order to realign with ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians denomination.
Menlo Church was formerly led by Senior Pastor John Ortberg Jr., a widely known evangelical author and speaker. Ortberg was placed on a temporary leave of absence in November 2019 after allowing a volunteer (later revealed to be his son), who had confessed a sexual attraction to minors, to continue volunteering with minors at the church.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Menlo Church” is church in CA, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Menlo, Church and church, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “church in CA, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6817155. VIAF identifies the subject as 128292400. The Library of Congress control number is nr97018724. Authority coordinates are 37.449, -122.188. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1873, 2016, 2007 and 1874.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
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Contemporary maps, plans, listed-building records, estate papers and the responsible local or national archive.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Menlo Church”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Menlo Church primary sources, Menlo Church archive and Menlo research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Menlo Church” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.