Last June, the Rev. Van Scott took over as pastor at Harris AME, a handsome, Tudor-style church on N. 17th Street, just east of the Harrisburg Cemetery.
The building is Harris’ only asset, and its income depends almost entirely on weekly collections. With its dwindling congregation—three-fourths had followed the departing pastor, leaving Scott with about 20—Harris soon struggled to pay the mortgage. When winter arrived, parishioners couldn’t afford to heat the sanctuary, so services were moved to a smaller room in the basement. When heating even this room proved too expensive, they retreated into the kitchen.
“And now, you want to see our heat?” Scott asked me on a windy day in February, in a cramped room stuffed with chairs, a makeshift altar and a commercial refrigerator. He turned on three ranges on the kitchen’s gas stove, which sputtered to life with blue flames.
Scott wore a cowboy hat, a black leather jacket and jeans. At his previous assignment, in Roanoke, Va., he became known as the “Walking Pastor with the Cowboy Hat,” for his frequent walks in the neighborhood. He has a warm, cheerful manner and speaks with a pastor’s preference for parables, especially for ones invoking animal behavior. In our conversation, he cited the habits of bears, stallions, lions, elephants and bulls.
“I knew it was going to be rough,” Scott said, “but this is worse than I anticipated. I didn’t expect the weather to become a factor in how I ran my church.”
Scott perceives needs in the community, where poverty, crime and drug abuse afflict many residents, but his primary concern is simply keeping the church’s doors open. He can’t afford to address structural problems—among them a leaking roof, poor insulation and an antiquated boiler—and he often forgoes his monthly salary.
Fortunately, there is a glimmer of hope that the church might be able to pay for renovations. In October, Scott and the pastors of seven other churches attended the first of several training sessions on conducting a capital campaign. The session was led by Partners for Sacred Places, a Philadelphia-based outfit that has helped churches nationwide secure much-needed funds. It does so by teaching them to leverage an asset that many Harrisburg churches share: their historically significant buildings.
A Meaningful Purpose
If there’s one person who deserves credit for this program, it’s Jean Cutler, director at the state Bureau of Historic Preservation. Cutler, a proud Harrisburg resident, speaks about the city’s buildings almost as if she’s describing a treasure trove. Churches, she said, are a natural focus, because they tend to be the primary landmarks of their neighborhoods.
“When you look at N. 6th Street, what stands out? It’s Camp Curtin,” she said, referring to the Methodist church that dominates the block north of Woodbine.
In 2008, Cutler applied for a Preserve America grant, which, with matching funds from the Pennsylvania legislature and other sources, provided her department with a pool of nearly half-a-million dollars for projects related to African-American history. Much of the money was distributed in statewide sub-grants, but, in late 2012, with the grant expiring, Cutler still had about $43,000 left. She decided to use the money on a long-time dream—a series of training sessions to bring together Harrisburg’s African-American churches and promote their preservation.
Typically, to secure grant money for historic preservation, a church has to meet several criteria. First, its building must be on the National Register of Historic Places, a designation that requires, among other things, that it be at least 50 years old and have a historically significant association, either with a person, a period in architecture or an event. It also helps if the church serves a meaningful purpose, which usually means outreach in the local community.
Based on these criteria, numerous churches in Harrisburg qualify. But, as Cutler explained, there are varying degrees of awareness among congregations of their churches’ significance and history. One purpose of the training is to help churches recognize their roles in their neighborhoods.
Cutler is spirited and optimistic. At the training session I attended, she stuck out as the blonde woman in a turtleneck and floral vest, reacting with delight as the pastors swapped ideas. She sees the preservation project as a critical component of a citywide revival.
“I’m a true believer in integrated historic preservation,” she said. “You can’t just fix one building on one block. You also have to help with blight, crime, education, health.” But repairing the churches is crucial, because “these buildings anchor a neighborhood.”
God Preserved This Church
One such building is Fountain Gate Church, at the corner of Kittatinny and Derry, in Allison Hill. On a recent Saturday, I went there to meet Jim Buchmoyer, a deacon who serves there three days a week.
Buchmoyer is 6-foot-2, with thinning brown hair, and he walks with a metal cane. In 1989, while working at a limestone quarry in Annville, his legs were caught in a machine for breaking up coal. His right foot was crushed, but he was saved from even worse injury by a new pair of reinforced boots, which jammed the machine. “I said, ‘OK, God, you have my attention. Tell me what to do and I will do it.’”
Buchmoyer introduced me to Fountain Gate’s pastor, Bishop Roberta Thomas, who greeted me in a pink sweatshirt with an image of two snowmen decorating a tree. Thomas’ voice is gentle but commanding, and she frequently invokes the grace of God to explain good things that have befallen her congregation.
In 2011, a severe thunderstorm tore an 80-foot tree from the pavement outside the church, sending it crashing through the roof and windows of Thomas’ office on the third floor.
Buchmoyer and others arrived to find the third floor flooded, with water pouring down the stairs towards the chapel and sanctuary. Despite extensive damage, the water never reached the most vital rooms, stopping a few inches short of the chapel and furnace and about a foot short of the sanctuary. Less than four years later, nearly everything has been repaired, in part because retailers like Lowe’s have offered steep discounts on materials. Discussing this, Thomas teared up.
“God preserved this church for something. As long as God gives his favor, I’ll stay,” she said.
Allison Hill is one of Harrisburg’s poorest neighborhoods. For many residents, Fountain Gate is an indispensable source of clothing, childcare, medicine and, especially, food. Two to three days a week, the church distributes food out of a room in the basement. Around 75 households from the neighborhood partake, forming a line at 2 p.m. for a handout that doesn’t take place until 4:30. Fountain Gate also offers a program for seniors, a clothing bank and after-school programs to keep kids off the street.
Yet, when it comes to the question of congregants, the church’s relationship with the neighborhood is more complex. Despite the size of the population it serves—around 300 people attend its annual Thanksgiving dinner and upwards of 400 attend its summer fair—the church has only 50 active congregants and only five or six who live in the immediate neighborhood.
Thomas also expressed concern that an “entitlement mentality” pervades the community. For instance, the church has struggled to keep people in the neighborhood from parking in its private lot. They recently put up metal “No Parking” signs, which someone bent over in protest. This results in a peculiar paradigm, in which the church is supported by a small number of worshippers, mostly from elsewhere, while simultaneously supporting a large number of locals who are spiritually disengaged.
This is not new among churches, of course, and, in a sense, it represents the vision implicit in the Partners for Sacred Spaces training. If Harrisburg’s churches are to survive, they will have to position themselves as more than just places of worship. They will have to make the case that they are some combination of community pillar and historical landmark, and, as such, worthy of outside funds, even as Sunday attendance wanes.
Turrets and Leaks
Camp Curtin, on N. 6th Street, is a perfect example of a church struggling to define its future. The church overlooks a well-kept plaza that commemorates a major Union camp of the Civil War, through which more than 300,000 soldiers passed. Its sanctuary is furnished with beautiful oak pews, on both the floor level and in balconies, and is graced at one end by an intricate web of stained glass, and, at the other, by a massive painting of an angel hovering over a wounded soldier. Yet its architectural troubles are numerous—a survey in December noted disintegrating stone turrets, leaking pipes and roof, and inadequate drainage, among many other problems—and its congregation, as the church secretary grimly put it, “isn’t growing.”
The church’s historian, Lewis Butts, who is also running for mayor, has been dreaming for years of ways in which Camp Curtin can figure as a cornerstone of neighborhood revival. His plans include Camp Curtin street signs on the surrounding blocks, a display of replica flags of Civil War regiments and magnets, T-shirts and buttons to be sold to Civil War buffs. He also hopes to restore the museum on the church’s second floor, which once housed Civil War artifacts but has been mostly emptied to discourage looting.
Yet for all its history, and despite its location, Camp Curtin has so far raised only $40,000 out of a target that Butts estimates at around $2 million. If Camp Curtin is to become a tourist attraction, it will need more than just repairs. Its neighborhood, rife with blighted properties, will need to become more welcoming. The visitor before me, Butts said, was not a tourist but a cop, who was curious about access to the defunct bell tower, which he thought might make a good spot for monitoring crime.
At the core of these churches’ challenges is the familiar catch-22 of urban renewal. To attract residents, a city needs public spaces that are both functional and pleasing; to maintain these spaces, a city needs residents to provide it with revenue. The church preservation project seeks to jump-start a revival by using Harrisburg’s historic buildings to attract federal and local funds. The case for the churches’ historical importance is clear, as is the case for their importance to their communities. What remains to be seen is whether short-term repairs can produce long-term sustainability.
At the remaining training sessions, on April 20 and June 20, the churches will receive pointers on how to fine-tune their campaigns. Some of the money that Cutler has raised will help the congregations print statements about their churches’ history and significance, which they can then distribute to potential donors. But most of what the churches will do in the future lies outside the scope of the training. In their own time, and on their own terms, they will have to ensure that they are vital institutions, deeply engaged with their communities.
Van Scott, for his part, looks forward to the spring, when he can finally take the neighborhood walks that proved so effective in his previous posts. At one church, he had trouble with a yard that his neighbors kept using as a place to dump bottles and cans. He persisted in picking up the trash by himself, until the neighbors eventually caught on and stopped littering.
“People will do it if they see it being done,” Scott said. “The trash in your yard? You don’t need a grant to get it picked up. You don’t need the mayor to come pick it up for you.”
The story reflects the central challenge facing Harrisburg’s churches. Ultimately, a church, like the city, doesn’t depend on God or a training module or a federal grant to make it thrive. It depends on people.
