At the end of last month, two days before Christmas, the priest Dr. Katrina D. Foster, pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, was showing off her church’s recent renovations. The Neo-Gothic church was built in 1891 and the original blue, vaulted roof. wooden pews; stained glass windows; and a Jardine & Son pipe organ all looked relatively new.
“On Dec. 7 we had a huge rededication ceremony,” said Pastor Foster, 56, who walked around the church with quick, glowing 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 turning around churches whose physical buildings and churches are on the verge of collapse. It does this by community organizing and building financial support for the church among churchgoers and the wider neighborhood.
“She is often trusted by churches that are struggling financially,” Reverend said. John Flack, pastor of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan. “He was able to do some amazing things not only to keep them alive and going, but even to keep them thriving.”
He has mostly helped churches he has led as a pastor. But other churches have also hired her as a consultant. “I have been invited to meet with churches to talk about financial management, evangelism, discipleship and building houses,” he said.
In November, Pastor Foster met with Our Savior’s leadership team, where, Pastor Flack said, he emphasized the importance of showing congregants that even small contributions could make an impact.
“If you’re not able to 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 $5,000 because it shows that people who are struggling they’re still investing.” he said.
When Pastor Foster arrived in Greenpoint in 2015, the Golden Age building was crumbling. There were holes in the walls, plaster falling from the ceiling and loose pieces of paint everywhere.
“The interior of the building was all about evangelism,” he explained. “How do you share the good news of Jesus when people are looking around at the falling paint, and it looks terrible, and people don’t want their kids here because they don’t want to eat lead paint?”
Indeed, the church was dwindling. “We had 15 members,” Pastor Foster said. (The dilapidated condition also took away potential revenue, he said. For example, two TV shows wanted to film at the church but backed out when lead was discovered.)
It took Pastor Foster nine years, but she was finally 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 interior of the church. Funds have come from members – there are now 80 – and the wider community.
“There are people who live down the street who don’t go to church and bring us a check every year because they see what we’re doing,” he said.
St. John’s Lutheran Church is now a hub for the neighborhood, hosting Boy 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,” an Off Broadway play, rehearsed and performed at the church.
“They wanted a place that looked like it was falling,” the pastor explained with a laugh. “It was like he was here.”
Lack of business skills
Keeping churches open today is no easy task, said Richie Morton, the owner of Church Financial Group, a firm that advises churches and faith-based nonprofits on their finances.
There are fewer people going to church, he explained. “The demand is not there,” he said. “Unfortunately, this is the culture we live in. In the post-Christian society, fewer people go to church, and even church people go less often.”
“There will be more and more churches facing some difficult decisions,” he said. Indeed, some researchers predict that tens of thousands of churches will close across the United States in the next decade.
It doesn’t help, he added, that the leaders tasked with keeping churches open — pastors — don’t always have business skills or passions.
“A lot of pastors don’t even want to learn the business side,” said Mr. Morton. “They didn’t get into this profession for that. They have this wonderful dream, this calling, to feed the hungry in the city and write wonderful 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 age 4 when she served as an usher at her family’s church in North Florida and sang the pastor’s parts, believes she has a solution: Making people feel connected to the church spiritual or communal, and the resources will arrive.
“I always say we don’t really have money problems,” he said. “We have faith issues showing up in our finances.”
Pastor Foster learned this lesson at age 26 when she was assigned to Fordham Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Bronx, a small and, at the time, predominantly Caribbean congregation.
“I was young, I was southern, and members were very suspicious of me, and rightfully so,” she said. “The buildings were falling down, they had less than 20 people and I was like, ‘OK, what do I do now?’
Her conclusion: Follow in the footsteps of Jesus. “Jesus organized people, resources and power,” he explained.
He went door to door in the community, asking people what they needed and how he could help. When a school needed a budget to fix holes in a fence, he helped call a press conference where he kept clean bags of used condoms and needles he collected from the school yard. When children were hit by speeding cars, she called the Bronx Department of Transportation Commissioner directly and begged him to install speedometers.
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 I thought, ‘You’re going to kill yourself,'” he said. “I was like, ‘Listen, you’re not from here. This is the Bronx. You can’t chase people or talk to drug dealers late at night.’ But he would do these things.”
When delegates raised concerns about her safety, the pastor “reminded us of her karate belts,” Ms. Ramdani said.
The more members of the community saw value in the church, the more they invested in it. Pastor Foster increased the congregation’s membership from 20 to 120. Annual giving increased from $8,000 to $72,000, which helped them invest in three new roofs, three new boilers, a home for girls who were in foster care, and a teaching program.
However, her time at Fordham was not without controversy. In 2007, after revealing that he 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 excommunication from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The country’s largest Lutheran denomination then allowed openly gay pastors to serve, but banned them from same-sex relationships. (Eventually, Pastor Foster was allowed to stay at the church; she and her partner are now legally married. The church itself has since closed.)
In 2008, Robert Ribaugh, then bishop, asked Pastor Foster to move to the Hamptons, on the east end of Long Island, where she took over the leadership of two churches on the verge of closing: Hamptons Lutheran Parish of Incarnation Lutheran Bridgehampton and St. Michael in Amagansett.
“The 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, he started a television show in which he interviewed local politicians (he pressed Lee Zeldin, then a representative, on his votes on House appropriations bills) and advertised the church in a local radio station. (In one ad, 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. In fact, I’ll tell you give a score sheet so you can keep track of other people’s sins.”)
By the end of her tenure, she had gathered enough community support and resources to build a low-income senior housing project and a 40-unit community center and expand Long Island Immigration Legal Services, an organization that helped people fleeing gangs or who had survived 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 getting ready to sell our church and close it, and people were really, really upset,” he said.
The 63-year-old Mr. Anderson, who now serves as the church’s vice president, recalled a change in mood almost as soon as their new pastor arrived. “Her sermons were electrifying and interesting, and she delivered them from the floor of the church, not from the pulpit, and people noticed she was different almost immediately,” he said.
While the doors of the church were usually only open on Sunday for prayer, Pastor Foster insisted they remain open all the time. As well as providing a meeting place for community groups such as AA and the Boy Scouts, it has also set up a discretionary fund to help people with funeral costs, rent, food, heat, electricity bills and other expenses, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic . He even started a financial literacy course through Dave Ramsay’s Financial Peace University, which helped colleagues learn how to budget, save and build wealth.
Every time someone set foot in the building—whether it was to play or attend an AA meeting—he told the person about the church’s renovation efforts. (The latest crowdfunding campaign debuted on GoFundMe in May 2024.)
The approach was refreshing, said Mr. Anderson. “I don’t think anyone had ever asked people in the community to give before,” he said. “It was very insular like, ‘This is our team and this is what we do,’ as opposed to ‘Let’s try to expand our team.’
In St. John’s, Pastor Foster now displays blown-up pictures on the wall of what the church looked like before it was renovated over the summer. He said it was to remind the congregation of how far he had come and the work he still wanted to do.
“Our goal is ultimately to raise $233,000,” he said. “God is always calling us to do something.”
