At the end of last month, two days before Christmas, Rev. Dr. Katrina D. Foster, pastor of St. John's Lutheran Church in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, discusses her church's recent renovations. The neo-Gothic church was built in 1891 and has the original blue vaulted ceiling; wooden benches; stained glass windows; and a pipe organ from Jardine & Son all looked relatively new.
“On December 7, we had a huge rededication service,” said Pastor Foster, 56, who walked through the church with quick, cheerful steps and couldn't stop beaming. “It was the same day Notre Dame had theirs.”
Since 1994, when Pastor Foster was ordained, she has become known for her work to renew churches whose physical buildings and congregations are on the brink of collapse. She does this by organizing community organizations and building financial support for the church among churchgoers and the broader neighborhood.
“She has often been entrusted with congregations that are struggling financially,” said the Rev. John Flack, pastor of Our Savior's Atonement Lutheran Church in Manhattan. “She's been able to do some amazing things, not just to keep them alive and going, but even to thrive.”
She has mainly helped churches that she led as a pastor. But other municipalities have also recruited her as an advisor. “I have been invited to meet with congregations to talk about financial stewardship, evangelism, discipleship and building homes,” she said.
In November, Pastor Foster met with the leadership team at Our Savior's where, Pastor Flack said, she emphasized the importance of showing congregants that even a small contribution can make an impact.
“If you can't give that much – say you can give 50 and someone else can give 5,000 – the weight of that $50 is even greater than the weight of the 5,000 because it shows that people who are struggling are still investing. ” he said.
When Pastor Foster arrived in Greenpoint in 2015, the Gilded Age building was crumbling. There were holes in the walls, plaster falling from the ceiling and loose paint chips everywhere.
“The interior of the building was an evangelism issue,” she explained. “How do you share the good news of Jesus when people are looking at falling paint, and it looks horrible, and people don't want their kids here because they don't want them eating lead paint?”
The congregation did indeed become smaller. “We had 15 members,” Pastor Foster said. (The state of disrepair also deprived them of potential revenue, she said. For example, two television shows wanted to film in the church but backed out when lead was discovered.)
It took Pastor Foster nine years, but she was eventually able to renovate the bathrooms, replace the plumbing and electrical systems and, most recently, raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to restore the church's interior. The money came from members – there are now 80 – and from the wider community.
“There are people who live down the street who don't go to church, but they bring us a check every year because they see what we do,” she said.
St. John's Lutheran Church is now a hub for the neighborhood, hosting Scout meetings, a community meal that feeds nearly 500 people a week and 12-step programs. (Pastor Foster, a recovering addict, has been in recovery for 34 years.) In 2017, “Beardo,” a Broadway play, was rehearsed and performed at the church.
“They wanted a place that looked dilapidated,” the pastor explained, laughing. “It was like, 'Please.'”
A lack of business skills
Keeping churches open today is no easy task, says Richie Morton, the owner of Church Financial Group, a company that advises churches and religious nonprofits on their finances.
Fewer people are going to church, he explained. “The demand is not there,” he says. “Unfortunately, this is the culture we live in. In post-Christian society, fewer people go to church, and even church people go less often.”
“There will be more and more churches facing difficult decisions,” he said. Some researchers even predict that tens of thousands of churches in the United States will close in the next decade.
It doesn't help, he added, that the leaders tasked with keeping churches open — the pastors — don't always have business skills or passions.
“A lot of pastors don't even want to learn the business side,” Mr. Morton said. “That is not why they entered this profession. They have this beautiful dream, this calling, to feed the hungry in the city and write beautiful sermons. But to do these things, they need money. They have to find ways to find supporters and support in the community.”
Pastor Foster, who said she was called to the job at the age of four while serving as an acolyte at her family's church in North Florida and singing the preacher's parts, believes she has a solution: to get people to feeling spiritually or spiritually connected to the church. in common, and the resources will arrive.
“I always say we don't really have any money problems,” she said. “We have faith issues that show up in our finances.”
Pastor Foster learned this lesson at the age of 26 when she was placed at Fordham Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Bronx, a small and then predominantly Caribbean-born congregation.
“I was young, I was Southern, and the members were deeply suspicious of me, and rightly so,” she said. “The buildings were falling apart, there were less than 20 people living there, and I thought, 'Okay, what do I do now?'”
Her conclusion: Follow in the footsteps of Jesus. “Jesus organized people, resources and power,” she explained.
She went door to door in the community asking people what they needed and how she could help. When a school needed money to repair holes in a fence, she helped call a news conference where she held up clear bags of used condoms and needles collected from the school yard. When children were hit by speeding cars, she directly called the commissioner of the Bronx Department of Transportation and begged him to install speed bumps.
Savita Ramdhanie, 51, who works as a social worker in the Bronx and was a member of the church, recalled being shocked by the pastor's willingness to get her hands dirty.
“I don't know if I was impressed or thought, 'You're going to kill yourself,'” she said. “I was like, 'Listen, this isn't where you come from. This is the Bronx. You can't chase people late at night or talk to drug dealers.” But she would do those things.”
When congregants expressed concerns about her safety, the pastor reminded us of her karate belts, Ms. Ramdhanie said.
The more community members saw value in the church, the more they invested in it. Pastor Foster grew from 20 to 120 members. Annual donations increased from $8,000 to $72,000, allowing them to invest in three new roofs, three new boilers, a home for girls who had been in foster care and a tutoring program.
However, her time at Fordham was not without controversy. In 2007, after revealing that she had married a woman in a religious ceremony (gay marriage was not legal at the time) and that the two were raising a child together, Pastor Foster, along with other gay and lesbian clergy, faced the possibility of defrocking from ministry by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It was the nation's largest Lutheran denomination and then allowed openly gay ministers to serve but prohibited them from having same-sex relationships. (Eventually, Pastor Foster was allowed to remain at the church; she and her partner are now legally married. The church itself has since closed.)
In 2008, Pastor Foster was asked by Robert Rimbo, then a bishop, to move to the Hamptons, on the eastern tip of Long Island, where she took charge of two churches that were on the verge of closing: the Hamptons Lutheran Parish of Incarnation Lutheran Bridgehampton and St. Michael's in Amagansett.
“Incarnation had some money, but no people,” Pastor Foster said. “St. Michael had some people, but no money.”
To build community support for the churches, she started a television program in which she interviewed local politicians (she pressured Lee Zeldin, then a representative, to vote for the House appropriations bills) and advertised the church on a local radio station. (In one commercial, she announced that when people came to church, they always had questions like, “Is the church full of hypocrites?” “Yes, it is,” she replied. “And there's always room for one more. , we will give you a score sheet so that you can keep track of the sins of others.”)
By the end of her term, she had raised enough community support and resources to build a 40-unit low-income senior housing project and community center, and expand Long Island's Immigration Legal Services, an organization that helped people on those fleeing gangs or surviving human and sex trafficking.
Not just on Sundays
Brad Anderson remembers the mood at St. John's when Pastor Foster arrived in 2015. “We were about to sell and close our church, and people were really, really upset,” he said.
Mr. Anderson, 63, who is now vice president of the church, recalled a mood change almost as soon as their new pastor arrived. “Her sermons were exciting and interesting, and she delivered them from the church floor, not the pulpit, and people noticed almost immediately that she was different,” he said.
While the church doors were normally only open for prayer on Sundays, Pastor Foster insisted they remain open at all times. In addition to providing a meeting space for community groups such as AA and the Scouts, she has also set up a discretionary fund to help people with funeral costs, rent, food, heating, electricity bills and other costs, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. She even started a financial literacy course through Dave Ramsay's Financial Peace University, which helped congregants learn to budget, save and build wealth.
Every time someone entered the building – whether for a play or to attend an AA meeting – she told that person about the efforts to renovate the church. (The latest financial campaign debuted on GoFundMe in May 2024.)
The approach was refreshing, Mr Anderson said. “I don't think anyone has ever asked people from the community for a donation,” he said. “It was very isolated, like, 'This is our group, and this is what we do,' as opposed to 'Let's try to expand our group.'”
At St. John's, Pastor Foster now hangs enlarged photos on the wall of what the church looked like before it was renovated over the summer. She said it was meant to remind the council how far it had come and the work it still wanted to do.
“Our ultimate goal is to raise $233,000,” she said. “God always calls us to do something.”
