For more than four years, a conflict over control of New Central Baptist Church near Fitler Square has prevented many members of the congregation from attending services there, or even entering the historic house of worship.
In mid-July, as a possible resolution to the long-running dispute was coming into view, a few of them finally visited the 101-year-old building on Lombard Street. They were distraught at what they found.
“We just cried when we went in there,” said Claudia Sherrod, a New Central parishioner for more than 80 years and the leader of a faction that worked to oust the church’s pastor.
“We need a whole new roof, four doors in the front, and to tighten up all the bricks. Inside, we have four holes in our ceilings, and we’ve got some other areas that have been ruined because of the water that went down the side walls,” Sherrod said. “And we’ve got to probably redo the whole kitchen anyway, and we have some little bit of mold — not a whole lot, but enough that it needs to be taken care of.”
The repairs will cost tens of thousands of dollars, at least, and likely $100,000 or more, especially if the members try to repurpose parts of the building for new uses that could bring in revenue, like a childcare center, classrooms, and living spaces.
Yet New Central Baptist can hardly afford such a major outlay. The congregation has dwindled over the past few decades from several hundred members to only about 35, many of them elderly.
Their plight is a common one for congregations locally and across the country, said Robert Jaeger, president of Partners for Sacred Places, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that helps fund restorations of houses of worship.
Many that experienced their heydays in the 1950s and 60s have shrunk dramatically as churchgoing in the U.S. has halved over the past two decades, and they struggle to maintain often majestic but aging facilities.
“A lot of these buildings are now a century old, and things that could be postponed for decades are now catching up with these congregations,” he said. “It’s not just money, often — it’s the people power to keep an eye on buildings, manage them well, and work with architects to plan repairs.”
At the same time, a number of older congregations in Philly and elsewhere have managed to find the resources to fix up their churches, synagogues, and mosques, and some have also invited in community members who use the buildings in new ways. That brings major economic and social benefits to their neighborhoods, Jaeger said.
“The fact that they’re smaller and may struggle does not mean they they’ll close someday, necessarily,” he said. “A lot of small congregations can stay and thrive again, but they do need a helping hand.”
Creating a community hub
Jaeger pointed to the example of Calvary United Methodist Church in West Philadelphia, an architecturally stunning gothic structure that was nearly dismantled in 1990.
Calvary’s diminished congregation couldn’t afford needed structural repairs to the church, whose interior is “sunlit by the riot of color” from its stained glass dome and two three-story-high Tiffany windows, according to a Partners for Sacred Places report.
The congregation had reluctantly begun the process of selling off its glass domes, windows, and world-class organ, until Jaeger and other community members organized focus group meetings and created a new nonprofit, the Calvary Center, to manage the building.
They raised more than $1 million from Partners and other donors, and commissioned a major overhaul that reconstructed walls, restored the bishop’s office and kitchen, and made deep-relief plaster repairs.
A host of local organizations made the restored church their home, including the University City Historical Society, Cedar Park Neighbors, Prometheus Radio Project, groups that held concerts and theater performances, several Christian congregations, and a Jewish congregation. Thanks in part to those tenants, the nonprofit had income to pay for continued repairs and upkeep.
The pandemic brought some of those activities to a halt, and the organization is now working to rebuild them, Jaeger said. But the center remains a vital part of Baltimore Avenue’s commercial district.
“The congregation and the center worked together to populate the building with lots of different activities. There’s a small Methodist church there still, but the building has really become a community center,” he said. “It’s a great building, and yes, they have two enormous Tiffany windows. There’s all that too, but really it’s about community health.”
Resources for challenged congregations
Church revitalization projects not only preserve grand buildings and enliven the community, but also bring direct economic benefits to the surrounding area.
The average urban historic sacred place generates over $1.7 million in economic impact annually, including its own expenses and offerings like below-market space rental, as well as spending at local businesses and other activities that promote economic development, according to a 2016 study by Partners and a researcher at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice.
“We look at the value of people coming into the neighborhood to participate in something like a wedding or a concert, or maybe they’re going to help with a soup kitchen,” Jaeger said. “They spend money in the neighborhood.”
If a church is converted into condos — as some New Central Baptist members feared could happen to their building — and the facade is preserved, that also provides aesthetic and economic value, he said. “But all that civic value is gone,” he said. “All the homeless shelters, the kids programs, the musical events — all that is gone.”
While the community organizing and planning to save a religious building can involve a lot of work, Jaeger stressed that financial aid is available, including from programs that specifically support Black churches.
Partners for Civic Spaces collaborates with the D.C.-based National Trust for Historic Preservation, whose African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund last year launched a $60 million Preserving Black Churches program. Its first round of grantees includes Philadelphia’s landmark Mother Bethel AME Church, which received $90,000 to rehabilitate its stained glass windows.
The National Trust supports Partners for Sacred Places’ national fund, which provides grants of $50,000 to $500,000 to houses of worship undergoing “once-in-a-generation” historic preservation projects.
Together with the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, Partners also recently launched the Philadelphia Fund for Black Sacred Places, a three-year program backed by the William Penn Foundation. It provides matching grants of up to $250,000 specifically for congregations in Philly.
If a local congregation is struggling to take care of its building and needs help figuring out how to proceed, they should reach out to Partners, Jaeger said.
“We sometimes call Philadelphia our laboratory to develop new outreach and new programs. Sometimes, once we test it here, we’ll take it national,” he said. “If there’s a congregation here facing some of these challenges, we’re a good place to start.”
A ruinous split over leadership
While the challenges New Central Baptist faces are broadly familiar, its crisis developed in a somewhat unusual way.
Around 2015, Sherrod and other members decided they could no longer abide what they described as domineering leadership by the pastor, Bernard Reaves.
They cited his takeover of the culinary ministry, dismissal of the Vacation Bible School leader, changes to the viewing schedule during funerals, and his wife’s circumvention of the elected trustees board when she hired a contractor to build a bathroom, among other actions.
“You don’t have the authority by yourself to arbitrarily start changing things. These things are supposed to go to the official board, and then come to the church [for a vote],” member Barry Canady told Billy Penn last year. “One member started referring to him as a dictator.”
After several trustees quit in frustration, Reaves appointed a new trustee without holding a required vote. “We got off the trustee board because he was so nasty,” Sherrod said recently.
An election was held in 2018 and four trustees were selected, but Reaves argued it was illegitimate because they had served before and quit. A majority at a congregational meeting voted the following year to dismiss him as pastor, but he claimed they couldn’t meet without his authorization and refused to leave.
Sherrod’s group says Reaves locked them out of the church. Reaves disagreed, saying in an interview that they simply stopped coming and refused to sit down with him and work out their differences. He described them as “insurrectionists” who tried to take over the church.
“They didn’t want to work with me at all. They wanted to be my boss. They wanted to run me,” he said.
Reaves defended some of his actions as necessary to ensure the church’s smooth operation. For example, after a dispute at a funeral he made a minor change to when viewings occur, and he intervened after members of the culinary ministry tried to take food home with them rather than distribute it to the congregation, he said.
“They got mad when I called them on that. Common sense stuff, you know what I mean?” he said. “Just really, really childish.”
He was particularly critical of Sherrod, a well-known community leader in Point Breeze who previously ran a nonprofit housing organization and has a block of Federal Street named after her. He says she was “mean-spirited” and led a group of church members who harmed the church by resisting change and repelling new parishioners he had attracted.
“They didn’t like me from the very beginning,” he said. “I had no idea why.”
Sherrod and others say it’s the trustees and congregation as a whole who are authorized to make decisions about church operations, rather than the hired pastor. Reaves, however, argues he was just doing his job when he made unilateral decisions and objected to what he considered to be improperly organized votes.
While he never had a contract, he said he had an informal “agreement” specifying that the pastor was “the chief executive officer over all ministries.”
“He oversees them, so when things aren’t going [well], he speaks on it,” he said, “and makes decisions on behalf of the church.”
Despite a resolution, church’s future remains uncertain
In 2019, Sherrod and other members sued to remove Reaves. After a trial in 2021, a judge found that his termination had not followed church bylaws and ruled against them. They appealed, and at a hearing in early August a new judge urged the two sides to find a resolution rather than continue on through another trial.
A week later, Reaves agreed to settle. The pastor — who says he hadn’t been paid for four years — received several thousand dollars from a church bank account and stepped down from the job.
“I felt that I did the godly thing,” he said. “You know, the church was already split, and it was in the best interest of the church. It’s what God led me to do.”
Sherrod said she would have preferred not to give Reaves the money, but was willing to do it so he would leave. “We wanted him to pay for what he did, for ruining the church and what he did to the parishioners and our money,” she said. “But God will deal with him. God will take care all of that.”
Reaves disclaimed responsibility for the church’s decrepitude, blaming it on decades of neglect. The basement was already moldy when he joined in 1990, and the congregation for years kept patching the roof instead of replacing it, he said.
Sherrod and fellow member Marsha Hurst said they’re now focused on applying for a National Trust for Historic Preservation grant and starting a GoFundMe so they can kickstart repairs.
Once the building is fixed, Sherrod said she envisions hosting educational programs, renting out the 700-person sanctuary for events, and perhaps turning several upstairs rooms into apartments for senior citizens if it’s legally feasible.
She also hopes the congregation will grow again as family members of the remaining parishioners start attending services, and neighbors who have expressed interest in the church’s welfare join up or participate in activities there. And if that means it’s no longer primarily a Black church, that’s fine with her.
“We welcome them, because we’re not looking for color,” she said. “We’re looking for souls who want to be saved.”
Editor’s note: An incorrect figure for Reaves’ settlement payment was removed from the article.
