" The building itself is a lesson — it teaches truth and honesty, this little tiled brick church at the corner of Lyon and Washington streets... "

Over one hundred years after those words were written by a newspaper reporter, the Swedenborgian Church still stands — flourishes, rather — in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Its creation in 1895 was influenced by an elite group of early California pioneers: the painter William Keith, naturalist John Muir, architect A. Page Brown, draftsman Bernard Maybeck, and most particularly by the Reverend Joseph Worcester, who would be its first minister. The spirit of the church arose from an appreciation of the beauty of nature, and a will to express that beauty as divinity itself.