Indiana is playing an important role in
elevating the challenge posed by vacant
and endangered religious buildings
regionally and nationally.” He notes
that his organization owns several
vacant churches, and has restored a
large and important church—the former
Central Avenue United Methodist
Church—for its headquarters in
Indianapolis, so Landmarks knows this
challenge well.
With two major grants from Lilly
Endowment, Inc., Landmarks has served
dozens of sacred places across the state,
including 29 that have participated in
the year-long New Dollars/New Partners
program and qualify for planning and
capital grants for their buildings. The
director of SPI—David Frederick—has
worked with churches from 42 counties
to date, spreading the word and
providing advice and resources across
Indiana. He is, in effect, serving as the
Johnny Appleseed for the state’s historic
churches, encouraging congregations to
see new ways to maximize the value of
their buildings.
Frederick was an early pioneer in
serving historic sacred places, first in
his capacity as director of the
Indianapolis office of Landmarks in the
early 1990s, when he planned and
managed educational workshops for
congregations. After working in other
sectors for years, he returned to
Landmarks in 2015 to manage SPI.
The core of SPI’s work is New
Dollars/New Partners for Your Sacred
Place, a training program developed by
Partners for Sacred Places that builds
the capacity of up to ten congregations
each year, followed up with grants to
plan and execute important repair and
restoration projects. Teams of leaders
from each congregation gather four
times during the year to learn how to
articulate their larger civic value to
neighbors and local leaders, develop
new programs by connecting their
building assets with assets in the larger
community, and prepare for a capital
campaign.
To supplement the training,
Frederick visits each church, sometimes
United Hebrew Temple, Terre Haute, Indiana
Photo: Indiana Landmarks
several times, to help them think about
ways to connect their building assets to
organizations and programs in the
community, plan their capital projects,
and extend and diversify their
fundraising.
Frederick has noted again and
again that his program can “lift the
curtain” for congregations, helping
them see the larger possibilities for
activating church spaces and working
with the larger community to serve
people in need. Some of the
congregations that really embraced the
asset-mapping approach have gone
furthest with SPI’s resources, such as
United Hebrew Congregation in Terre
Haute, which developed an interfaith
program that has included the Jewish,
Christian and Muslim communities. St.
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