rel — — @
PRESER rio vy hey UNE 19-9, =

——

7,

tis easy to forget that the Reverend

Janet Hopkins is barely five feet tall.

What come to mind are her gump-

tion and determination in con-

fronting seemingly overwhelming
odds. Her church, St. James United
Methodist, is located in Chicago’s Ken-
wood area, which, like most

James is paying far too much to operate
and maintain its aging building. It is at
once the church’s greatest asset and its
heaviest millstone. The 56,000-square-foot
structure, which was built 68 years ago for
more than 1,000 members, now serves a
scant 200 mostly elderly members. The

meager resources of the

Donnie 4 j ; afta :
American inner-city neigh- Preservationists members offer only frail re-

borhoods, has been aban-
doned not only by its middle-
class residents (both black
and white) but by its institu-
tions as well. “Because
churches are the last institu-
tion left in many communi-
ties, we've had to expand

are framing

Chicago clergy

sistance to a crush of expen-
sive maintenance problems,
which, if neglected, will
eventually shutter St.

how to cope James’s doors and remove
with the

from the neighborhood one
of its last remaining bul-
warks against the effects of

what our social-service obli- secular duties poverty. As Hopkins ex-

gations are and become real
community centers,” says
Hopkins. Her church houses
a Head Start program, which
is run by Catholic Charities:
Kupona, a nondenomina-

of building
stewardship.
BY ANDREA

plains, her church has mul-
tiple roofs and a multitude
of roofing problems. The
wood-framed bell tower has
sustained interior structural
decay. The boiler suffers

tional AIDS support and OPPENHEIMER — from deferred mainte-

counseling group; and the DE

Kenwood-Oakland Commu-
nity Organization, a civic entity intent on
increasing the neighborhood’s supply of
decent low-income housing. Hopkins says
she doesn’t believe that God intended for
her congregation and others like it to pay
the gas and phone companies to keep
church buildings running and not do any-
thing important with them.

But then there is the problem that St.

PHOTOQERAPHY By

\\ nance, and heating bills

alone cost the financially
strapped church $4,000 a month. In fact,
fully half of St. James’s annual budget of
$98,000 is devoured by the costs of keep-
ing its building operational.

“When I saw what they could do to help
us I felt a surge of new hope,” says Hop-
kins, referring to Chicago’s fledgling non-
profit, nondenominational Inspired Part-
nerships. The organization was formed as

PAUL MERIDETH

The Reverend Janet
Hopkins. a United
Methodist minister in
Chicago's Kenwood
neighborhood, believes

that God intends.
inner-city congrega-
tions to use their aging
buildings for the good
of the community.

RESOURCES STRETCHED

The worshippers led by Presbyterian min-
bs ister Gerald Wise number only 204 in a
4 4 church that numbered 2,500 congregants
Ss in the 1950s. Today the congregation “still
doesn't raise enough to hardly turn the
lights on,” he says. The three Inspired
_- Partnerships staff members pictured op-
posite are director Holly Fiala flanked by
~ associate director Linda Young and Neal
Vogel, the director of technical services.

—

T00 OFTEN A CHURCH ENDS UP WITH
SHODDY, OVERLY EXPENSIVE WORK.

scope of work and going through a com-
petitive bidding process. Too often, Fiala
concludes, the church ends up with shod-
dy, overly expensive work “and with hav-
ing to do the same work three and four
times.”

At least as problematic, says Neal Vo-
gel, Inspired Partnerships’s director of
technical services, “is that a lot of pastors
feel guilty spending money on their build-
ing when they have day care, meals pro-
grams, and other ministerial needs.” It has
been Vogel's experience that pastors tend
to feel that their ministry is “all about peo-
ple and not about buildings. They don’t
recognize that you can’t have the one
without the other.” Most difficult to per-
suade, Vogel explains, are churches “that
have this humble concept of preaching
from the tent. But on nine-degree days in
Chicago you need more than a tent to pro-
vide a homeless shelter.” Although an old-
er church must spend approximately two
dollars per square foot a year on mainte-
nance, many spend only thirty cents per
square foot, according to Vogel, and the
result is widespread crisis management. In
a typical scenario, Vogel relates, “It’s mid-
winter and the boiler’s gone out. If they'd
thought about it in the fall they probably
could have caught the problems early, had
more control over the repair work, and
not been charged time and a half because
the contractor is out there on a Saturday
making repairs.”

Most building committees are com-
posed of inner-city residents, and most of
them are not homeowners and therefore
lack experience managing even a small
structure, let alone a large, complex build-
ing. Moreover, the architectural charac-
teristics that give old churches their ap-
peal—their high ceilings, steep roofs, and
tall towers—also make their care costly
and difficult.

The decline into poverty of most
churches is abetted by a prevailing atti-
tude that despite their growing role as
provider of social programs and despite
shrinking memberships the churches
should bear full responsibility for the care
of their properties. “The philanthropic

community is not favorably disposed to-
ward the religious community, falsely be-
lieving that churches already get a lion’s
share of philanthropic dollars,” Fiala says.
“What they don’t realize is that the mon-
ey is not equitably distributed and that
many denominational offices that used to
support churches are in a survival mode
themselves. The religious community is
still not seen as a major player in solving
community issues—although it is the
linchpin of most needy neighborhoods.”

To illustrate this point Fiala recalls that
in the wake of the Los Angeles riots of
1992, Chicagoans, fearing a violent sum-
mer, raised more than $2 million for youth
programs, but only $20,000 was earmarked
for the religious community. At the same
time, she says, churches are denied public
support because governments fear breach-
ing the barrier separating church and state,
and banks resist lending to churches “be-
cause churches are considered bad risks.”
Inspired Partnerships fashioned its stew-
ardship program to overcome these and
other hurdles that hobble the religious
community.

Among the pastors who completed the
first yearlong, ten-session stewardship
program, which ended last spring, is the
intensely spirited and resourceful Rev-
erend Gerald Wise of First Presbyterian
Church. This church is located in Chi-
cago’s impoverished Woodlawn neigh-
borhood, a community in which, says
Wise, the unemployment rate among
African-American males aged eighteen to
thirty-five can be as high as seventy-eight
percent. Problems linked to drug and gang
activities are rampant, as evidenced by the
bullet holes in the church’s splendid
stained-glass windows. “We're living in a
war zone. We're right on the border be-
tween two main gangs,” says Wise. “We
actually have an agreement with the
gangs, the Gangster Disciples and the
Stones. They recognize our youth pro-
gram as an alternative for kids.”

The pastor further explains that his
church, which served 2,500 members in
the 1950s, now has a congregation of only
204, about three quarters of whom are

33

The Reverend Richard Tolliver, the pastor
of St. Edmund's Episcopal Church in Wash-
ington Park, draws upon his experience in
the Peace Corps. Community infrastruc-
ture, including church structures like his
own St. Edmund's, are the building blocks
of social programs, he believes. ym

fully instructive examples of interpreting
material culture, and John Demos’s.A Lit-
de Commonweatth: Family Life in Ply-
njouth Colony (Oxford, 1970} uses inven-
cies, wills, conventional documents, and
tifacts, including the houses themselves,
evidence for expioring the Puritans” ba-

ic institution. Of the original sources
Mourt’s Retatian: A Journal of the Pil
grims at Plymouth, a series of five un-

INSPIRED PARTNERS

(Continued from Page 34) stewardship
program as a way to preserve and rebuild
his most fundamental form of infrastruc-
ture, the church itself. Without a well-
functioning building, says Tolliver, neither
his housing corporation nor his church's
social-service programs could thrive. Nor
could he hope to reach his most cherished
goal of reopening St. Edmund's elemen-
tary school as a model school for inner-city
youth.

The pastor carried out all of the work
recommended by Inspired Partnerships’s
building-conditions report: He had the
building's roof repiaced, its masonry re-
pointed, its electrical system upgraded, and
years of accumulated pigeon droppings
cleaned from its bell tower. Tolliver then
went beyond Inspired Partnerships’s rec-
ommendations and made St. Edmund’s
accessible to handicapped parishioners, re-
placed windows, pul in a new sound sys-
tem, upgraded the organ, and installed
computers.

Trustee Cornell Blaylock, Tolliver’s as-
sistant who tends to the day-to-day main-
tenance of the building and accompanied
the minister to stewardship-program
training classes, explains that “we
wouldn't have known how to start with-
out the [Inspired Partnerships] program.”
The program introduced Blaylock and
Tolliver to a group of building profession-
ais, including an expert on roofs who “an-
alyzed our problems and wrote out our
needs so we were able to talk to roofers as

CAPITAL CASTLE

(Continued from Page 45) above the séc-
ond Hoor.” (The building was also desig-
nated a National Historic Landmark in
1974.) Sixty-one feet above the first floor,
sunlight iltuminates 2,054 panes of clear
and colored glass in kaleidoscopic pat-
terns. Observed from a balcony suspended
between the third and fourth floors, a spi-
ral staircase descends from the second

MAYAHUNI. bod

signed documents from 1622 (Applewood
Books, 1963), and William Bradford's Of
Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647 (Modern
Library, 1981) are indispensable.

OFf these the most enlightening is still
Bradford, a great historian whe introduces
many of the recurrent themes of later
American writers. His styie is plain, his
view ironic as he recounts the planting of
a colony committed io comriunal values

though we knew what we were talking
about,” says Blaylock. “I thought [knew a
little about construction and maintenance
before, bul it was nothing compared to
what I know new.”

It is to gain firsthand experience and the
confidence that it confers thal a new group
of pastars enrolled in Inspired Partner-
ships’s second leadership program, ex-
tending from March through November
of this year. In addition to the Reverend
Janet Hopkins and sixteen other pastors,
the Reverend Marshall Hatch, the pastor
of the New Mount Pilgrim Baptist Mis-
sionary Church located in the West
Garfield neighborhood, is a member of
ithe group.

A year ago the congregation moved
from a bare-bones warehause inta what
was once St. Mel's, a 20,000-square-foot
Romanesque Gothic Catholic church that
was completed in 1911 and is distinguished
by some of the most dramatic stained-glass
panels in Chicago. During the year that
Hatch’s congregation has occupied the
church and its schoo! building, the pastor
has established Youth Activities, a pro-
gram that serves between thirty and fifty
youngsters each week, and Mountain
Men, a support group for young African-
Americans.

Hatch will soon become the landlord of
government-funded day-care and Head
Start programs, will donate space for the
City of Chicago’s summer-jobs program,
and anticipates establishing a support pra-
gram for drug addicts as one of its other
new programs. Hatch’s most ambitious

ficor into a dizzying checkerboard of black
and white marble. On the first floor, one’s
eye is drawn to the door of the governor’s
office.

Reoccupied by the governor and legis-
lature in 1882, the capital reopened dur-
ing a period of corruption exceptional
even by Louisiana’s standards. Historians
believe that Louisiana probably didn’t
have a single honest state election be-
tween 1868 and 1900. Much of the blame

that is repeatedly threatened by, and
quickly begins to disintegrate because of,
individual greed. One of the satisfying ob-
servations that we can draw from our vis-
it is that a zeal for the purity of historic in-
terpretation has permitted the creators of
Ptimoth Plantation to reconstitute—in a
very small but elegant fashion—the com-
munity that the religious zeal of our an-
cestors could not hold together. ¥

dream, however, is to develop a model el-
ementary school for neighborhood chi!-
dren “to show that you can educate any
child with good, community-based schools
that are linked with churches.”

The pastor's problems, which are simi-
lar to those of Hopkins, are nevertheless
formidable. New Mount Pilgrim Baptist
Missionary Church's zoof leaks, its copper
downspouts have been stolen, its windows.
are falling apart, there is significant plaster
damage, and the church still depends on
the original oil heating system. “What we
need is expertise for our staff in operating
the facility and access to specialists and
companies that are very familiar with
working on these kinds of buildings,” says
Hatch.

Hatch will receive from Inspired Part-
nerships such help and much more that
will permit his ministry to continue and to
expand its community role. Fiala under-
scores the importance of that role: “In the
African-American community churches
have been the place where leadership is
developed, where entrepreneurship is en-
couraged, where family life is affirmed,
where social services are offered.”

Inspired Partnerships’s most significant
role, as the program's assistant director,
Linda Young, puts it, “is that it demon-
strates how preservation can serve neigh-
borhood revitalization.” ¥
For more information about Inspired Part-
nerships, contact Holly Harrison Fiala, 53
W. Jackson Boulevard, Suite 852, Chicago,

Hlinois 60604-3611, (312) 294-0077.

can be imputed ta the Louisiana State
Lottery Company, which was created by
legislation in 1868 and for a quarter of a
century co-opted governors, legislators,
judges, and state officials while benefiting
every worthy cause that solicited help.
The most factious era opened in 1928
when the state elected Huey P. Long, the
Louisiana Kingfish, as governor. Long’s
campaigas to improve public education,
build roads and bridges, and champion the

93

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, i995

National Report

The New York Zimes

In a Faded Chicago Area, a Full-Time Church Shoulders Full-Time Burdens

Speciahia Che haw York Tuas,

CHICAGO, Feb. 2 — The old-tim-
ers ai the Progressive Community
Church, in a faded part of Chicago's
South Side, remember when parents
and their children went to church on
Sundays for a fiery sermon that
would jast them through the week.
Bul Sunday 1s no longer the only day
{O Bo ta Progressive, at least among
those — more than 78 percent of the
total — who attend but are not mem-
bers.

The nondenominational church,
which serves a poor predominantly
black nuighborhood, has became an
all-purpose communily center open
seven days a week, from 6 in the
Morning to Ti at ment IL offers
everything fram a hot meal 1 day
care, from nightume youth pro-
grams to diapers for infants of
young single mothers. To provide
these services, he church rejies on a
palchwork of government aid, dona-
tions from local businesses and help
from congregants who are oflen
hard pressed themsalves.

“W's ubways a struggle,” sald the
pastor, the Rey. B. Herbert Maru,
“but the church has a role to play.”

Among churches Itke Progressive,
that role, already grown in recent
years, seems likely co prow further
Still as the new Congress and states
from coast to ceast, trying lo pare
their budgets, shift more of the bur-
den of caring for the poar to philan-
thrapres.

A study by Independent Sector, a
Washington-based clearinghouse on
religion in the Urived Slaies, found
that in 1986, Lotal revenue of the
nation's religious congregations was
$49.6 billion, of which $1 billion was
Spent on assistance for the poor. By
198], the authors estimated, revenue
had slipped to $48.4 billion while aid
ta the needy had soared to $7 by |.

And at Mr. Martin's inner-city
church, ihe proportion of assistance
to the total budpet is far higher:
about hall af the $418,000 that the
church has raised for ihe current

At the Progressive Community
Church. the poor can find virtually
anything they need.

year, ihe paster said.

Such spending fills an important
niche. For mstance, Inspired_Part-
nershups, a nonprofit “group that
helps ‘congregations find the most
cost-efficient ways to mainiain their
churches, estimates that Chicago

pehos house 60 percent af all fond
distribution pragraiis im ie city.

Even as they do so, Progressive
and similar churches here have a
hard time just slaying open. Many
are in buildings that date from the
turn of the cenwury, The whttes wha
bull them and prayed in them have

long since moved to the suburbs,-and
the struciures they left behind are
expensive ta heat and in need of
costly repairs. Ingpired Partner-
ships says that of all Chicago
thurc Hd,
third are in disrepair. -
ey help mend the broken|
places in peaple’s lives; gaid Holly
Fiala, executive director of Inspired
Partnerships. “It's not their spirits
that are broken, it's the buildings.”

The Progressive Cormmumnity
Church itself was built as a syna-
gogue in 1895 by Jews af English,
Scottish and Russian descent and is
now one of the cides buildings jn the
community, Progressive bought tt in
1922 and has watched the neighbor-
hood grow ever needier in recent
years.

“Our church is in the center of
despair," said Bob Strickland, a
trusice there. “fi's like throwing
snowballs at the sun

Progressive has just patched its
roof, but the pulters need replacing,
the stained-glass windows have to be
caulked, and the church just spent
over $5,000 to have the boiler re-
paired.

“The cost of eperating these old
facihties is a significant burden 1o
congregations,’ Ms, Fiala said.
“The preservation of the facility is
not the end goal; the end goal is to
preserve the community.*

And that can mean taking on ai}
kinds of tasks: providing emergency
housing, iending neighborhoad resi-
dents money for transportation 0
work or job interviews and buying
milk and diapers for young single
mothers whe are having trouble pay-
ing their bills.

Mr. Strickland's primary function
as a church trustee is fund raising,
but that limited role has broadened
Co include buying 20 white shirts and
Blouses for children from a hearby
Public housing developmem who
wanied t0 sing in ithe choir but could
hot afford the uniforms.

“Every week,” Mr. Strickland

More than
worship, a great
deal more, goes on
here.

said, “my wife and [ wash and tron
20 shirts and blouses — and 1 dan'l
know how many pairs of white
gloves — on a washboard so that
they are clean for Sundays. We start-
ed oul buying shirts for three or four
of them, but then they brought their
brothers and sisters.""

Many of the church's members
double as counselors or surrogate
parents. The church also provides
meeting space for Cub Scout troops
and, as an aliernative (0 gungs,
highly youth activities.

"We have kids whose every wak-
lag moment is spent in this build-
ing,” said one congreganl, Laura Al-
exander. ‘If they aren't in schoal,
they are al the church, And same-
times you have to say. ‘It’s curfew
time. You all-have to ge home.'

Last Christmas, the church fed 500
families with grocery baskets filled
with enough food lo fast each family
a few days. Bur even thar did not
meet ali the need: more than 1,000
famuliés had lined up to receive a
basket.

“Wintertime is the worst time of
the year,’ said Mr. Murtin, che pas-
tor. “It is an awful feeling to have to
turn people away when you can see
there is a need.”

But, taking with a reporter, Mr.
Martin did not have much time ta
dwell on that. He was off ta find out
how much wt would cost to repair the
two 10-fool oak doors in the front of
the church. Both are coming off their

hinges.

Mecdeth far The hew York Tetes
Day care is one of the services offered by Progressive, but the despair of
the surrounding area, a trustee says, means that the church's efforts are
“like throwing snowballs at the sun."