Missions
A Scientology Mission is a storefront to sell Hubbard books, along with being a low-level auditing and training center (people usually go from "life repair" to preclear before moving on to the local Org.) Usually Missions are the first Scientology outlets in an area, and San Diego followed that pattern.
As far as we can tell the first Scientology Mission in San Diego was at 1052 10th Avenue, in a single-story building that has since been demolished (it's now a parking lot.) This Mission was part of a series of Missions run by a man named Carl Barney in Los Angeles; the four LA Missions were allegedly incorporated as the "Church of Scientology of Los Angeles" and all five were called Scientology Coordinated Services. In order to keep ordinary people coming in (prices were rising in the 1970s), Barney ran this odd usury scam involving a front corporation called the Nationwide Acceptance Company, which would defray costs through loans to the public members. Barney was found out by the "mother church" in 1979 and was forced to sign over his Missions and declared a Suppressive Person (an antisocial person wrecking Scientology), and kicked out. It is unknown if Carl Barney founded the San Diego Mission or bought it out, and we do not know when it was founded. A former staff member, Howard Dickman wrote about his involvement in Scientology, which lasted from 1972 to 1977; according to him, Scientology grew so fast in San Diego that by 1973 they had moved around the corner to 926 C Street (property has also since been demolished.) It should be noted that the area in question is in downtown San Diego, which has been going through radical changes in development since the early 1980s. In any case, 926 C Street was the first true San Diego Church of Scientology.
The next organization was the Mission of La Jolla. La Jolla is a beach community slightly north of downtown San Diego and part of the county. We do no know where the Mission was, but we know incorporation papers were drawn up in April of 1971 by Robert H. Fell II and Janet and Gary Lawrence; the papers were filed on April 13, 1971. The Mission lasted until 1973 when it was merged with the San Diego Mission. The State of California records claim that the Mission of South Lake Tahoe (now defunct) was the agent for the La Jolla Mission, but that may have been after Carl Barney was thrown out.
Around 1973 two Missions formed: the Mission of Encinitas and the Mission of Adams Avenue. As with the La Jolla Mission, the address of the place in Encinitas is unknown to us. We do know it did not survive the 1970s, because it is not on this 1979 list of organizations (taken from the appendix of What is Scientology?, a Church-published reference book.) Encinitas itself is a beach city north of La Jolla and next to the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. The Mission of Adams Avenue was far more important because it boasted such excellent auditors as Enid Vien (d. 2012), and was still raved about by former Scientologists years later as an excellent Mission. The place began at 3201 Adams Avenue (now the "El Zarape" restaurant), then moved to 6911 El Cajon Boulevard (at the time an abandoned supermarket in a strip mall - now a "Papa John's" pizzeria in the same strip mall.) According to this I have it backwards, that the Adams Avenue Mission ended in March of 1989 and became the Mission of Encinitas the same month, so the Mission moved east and then went north. Either way, both are defunct.
Chula Vista had two Missions, separated by thirty years of time. The first time they were at 192 Landis Avenue at least during 1978-79; then they were at 311 F Street, suite 103 from January, 2008 to October, 2010. They had a website for the 2008 version, but I can't find it now; that small storefront (today a computer repair place) was the last Mission the Church ran. None of the same people were involved as far as I know.
Escondido also had a Mission from July of 1987 to July of 1994, and like the Encinitas location I know nothing about it. This claims they changed names in 1994 to the "Church of Scientology Mission of Coast Mission", but that is a typo or wishful thinking because I can't find that place. Escondido itself is a few mile east of Encinitas, yet another inland Southern Californian town.
Churches (aka Orgs)
A church is not where Scientologists go every Sunday; it's where they go for auditing (psychology while holding E-meter cans), and training to Clear and the "Operating Theatan" (OT) levels, which run from OT I to OT VIII. There are also side levels and self-auditing, so you can spend the rest of your adult life doing Scientology courses. As with the Missions, they also sell the Hubbard books, CDs (formerly open-reel and cassette tapes), DVDs, along with E-meters and other paraphernalia. The term "Org" is short for "organization", which is what they called these places before Hubbard went all religious in the 1960s-1970s to dodge taxes (at one point "ministers"*, including the President of Scientology International Heber Jentzsch, wore Catholic-style clerical collars.) As with most places, San Diego had far fewer Churches than Missions.
We wrote about the first San Diego Scientology Church above; that organization lasted until around 1980 in that large two-story building.....but it gets slightly complicated. According to the State's records, in December of 1975, a "Greater San Diego Scientology Church" was incorporated. The mailing address for this Church was 3956 Texas Street, Room 9, San Diego, which may have been the address of the agent (that seemed to be the case for some of the Missions.) If it was a re-name of an existing Org, it only lasted five years because they changed.....
Into the same name but a different address: 2559 C Street, San Diego. The agent was Linda Schive. What I have heard from ex-Scientologists is that in the '70s people preferred to get auditing at the Adams Avenue Mission rather than deal with the Church of Scientology San Diego, "Greater" or not. They were at that address from 1980 to 1994. The building at 2559 C Street was demolished and the lot rebuilt into yet another obnoxious condo complex.
The last and present Church of Scientology, San Diego was incorporated in December of 1994 by its current (the last we have heard) President David A. Meyer. 1330 4th Avenue has been the address since it was incorporated. For a period they were trying to sell the building, then rent it out while working on their failed Ideal Org project on Parkway Drive in La Mesa (more discussion on that later.) At the present time, the Church on 4th Avenue is the only outlet for adult Scientologists in San Diego County.
Scientology Schools
Scientology was one of the first to copy the Rudolf Steiner "Waldorf Schools" and push for a private education system built on Scientology ideas. San Diego has seen secular private schools, Fundamentalist Christian private schools, Waldorf Schools, military schools, and also the Scientology schools.
Apple School: this was the first Scientology school in San Diego County. Based on a school run by Bonnie Bishop in the mid-1970s when she took over the Los Feliz "Midtown School" and turned it into the "Apple School", this school was run out of storefront at 4616 Avocado Boulevard in La Mesa near the El Cajon city line, and was open to non-Scientologists. The school ran from Kindergarten to 6th grade in two long separate rooms and most of the instruction was self-directed. I've heard rumors that the school originally started in a former Catholic nunnery in Chula Vista, one person online** claimed they had been part of a prototype version of the school somewhere in El Cajon or Del Mar which was just a large house with a trailer in a backyard. Apple School La Mesa lasted about a year, or a year and a half, from 1982 to 1983 or early 1984. Afterwards the location cycled through a number of businesses and is a gym (Crossfit La Mesa) today.
Delphi Academy: Based on the Scientology education ("Study Tech") at the Delphian School in Oregon, the one in San Diego was in La Jolla at 7527 Cuvier Street, and it was dead by 2011. There was also the Delphi Academy of San Marcos (134 Woodland Parkway) which was run on the same site as the Old Richland Schoolhouse which was used for wedding receptions. The owner of the school was Jonathan ben Gerson, and his back rent problems sunk the school and caused the venue to shut down for a period.
Applied Scholastics: The main difference between this and Delphi is.....not much. The Applied Scholastics Academy of San Diego was just the Delphi Academy in La Jolla (7527 Cuvier Street) working out of the same building rented from a Methodist church, and the school is now defunct. Ben Gerson's San Marcos Delphi Academy also became an Applied Scholastics school. Speaking of which, he also ran a tiny AS school in a mall in La Mesa. The school was at 5911 Severin Drive, though the school itself overlooked Amaya Drive. The La Mesa school died with the San Marcos one, in 2011....coincidentally, the school was near a 7-11 convenience store, mirroring how Apple School was next door to a 7-11. Finally, the one school that still exists is Applied Scholastics Academy North County (800 West Mission Road, San Marcos.) As with the La Jolla school they are renting space from a Methodist church. So out of five schools in thirty years, only one is operating. [2018 update: Applied Scholastics Academy North County has been dead since 2016.]
Front Groups
Before there was Narconon or WISE (World Institute of Scientology Enterprises), there were a number of national front groups Scientology created in the 1960s-70s and San Diego had a number of them.
National Commission on Law Enforcement and Social Justice: Group founded in 1974 claiming to be about human-rights promotion and government record-keeping has allegedly been used to attack Interpol (or so says Arnaldo Lerma's Lermanet website.) In 1979 their HQ was at....926 C Street, the San Diego Church of Scientology.
Committee On Public Health and Safety: Also credited as Committee on Health and Public Safety. This was the way Hubbard got back at the American Medical Association for the heavy interference they gave him in the early 1950s, and also how they forced the Church to put stickers on the E-meters claiming that it wasn't a medical or scientific device. COPHS heavily promoted alternative therapies, pointed out how expensive American medicine was/is. In 1979 their address was at 321 20th Street, San Diego.
Citizens Council on Human Rights: This is the one most people know, thanks to their LA anti-psychiatric,"house of horrors" museum on Sunset Boulevard. Founded in 1969, this is the anti-psychiatry wing of Scientology front groups. When R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz were popular, these guys promoted them (and Szasz co-founded CCHR.) In 1979 their address was.....321 20th Street, San Diego.
Committee to Re-Involve Ex-Offenders: An ex-convict's group allegedly designed to get former prisoners into Scientology. As with the other two, the 1979 location was 321 20th Street.
All of the 20th Street organizations shared the same telephone number, a good indication they all worked out of one room. The building on the location looks too new for the time period. None of these groups seem to be operating in San Diego today.
The failed Ideal Org
This is a long, complicated story involving Jonathan ben Gerson, David Meyer, Gerri Fischman (the actual head of the CofS-SD), and David Miscavige's demand that all Orgs become "Ideal Orgs" (a Hubbard term for an Org that is running well, but twisted by Miscavige to mean "a nice-looking, big building full of expensive Scientology-made furnishings, which the Church owns outright.") It also involved Proposition 8, a failed attempt to get La Mesa to approve an anti-hate-speech ordinance, the SD Church begging its members for cash, the purchase of the abandoned Coleman College campus (formerly a bowling alley at 7380 Parkway Drive in La Mesa) right when the commercial market went south in 2008, their failure to make enough money to please Miscavige and start construction on a new building, and the final selling off to a developer so that the property could be converted to ugly shitbox townhomes is a story that deserves a book chapter unto itself. Supposedly the San Diego Church has only 20 full-time "publics" left, because all the begging went nowhere and infuriated the rest.
The TL;DR Section
After decades of existence, Scientology only has one working Org and
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* Ministers are hard to define inside Scientology; today there are "Volunteer Ministers", but those are just staff members in yellow jackets sent to natural disasters. In the past people would appear for the press cameras dressed like this (another Lermanet photo, unfortunately; Heber Jentzsch is on the right.) Or this (Yvonne Gillham Jentzsch, Heber's first wife, possibly a file photograph.)
** From a former version of the ExScientologyKids.com messageboard, when it was locked and the only messages allowed were on a test forum. I also heard from a former parent user of the Apple School itself; she told me that the school had closed with no warning. Possibly the members were accused of "squirrling" the "Tech", of doing things without Hubbard's sanction; or the money behind Apple School was a Missionholder hit in the 1983 Missionholder's Conference, where the people who owned high-performing Missions were forced to sign them back to the Church. Either way Apple School died harder that some of the San Diego private schools I've heard of, such as St. Albans (collapsed in 1985 after a "parent strike" over allegedly poor teaching); or Fairhaven's Christian (imploded dramatically in 2000-2001 after the pastor of the mother church admitted an affair, let other people run the organization for six months, then tried to commit a coup. Rather than deal with a crazy man, the church and school shut down, and sold the site to another church. That pastor is still out there, and somehow still at a pulpit. His name is Preston Bunnell.)
There was an older Scientology "mission" (?) that was in a mini-strip-mall building on the northeast corner of El Cajon Blvd. and College Avenue, before they moved to 10th Avenue.
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