A church in Albany is getting a new lease on life as a community hub.
According to Gallup, nearly all faiths are seeing declines in regular attendance at services. Dwindling congregations often eventually lead to church closings as the institutions struggle to survive. Some of those church buildings fall into ruin.
Pastor Jonathan Hentrich's initial Christ's Church congregation of 15 people first gathered 12 years ago in his living room, then moved through bigger and bigger spaces, eventually landing this spring at number 8 Kate Street, a short distance from the busy corner where Delaware Avenue meets Whitehall Road and Second Avenue.
"We were looking for a space through kind of random conversations, we were introduced to some members of the reform classes, which introduces to this building," said Hentrich. "This building was the Third Reformed Church. It was here for over 100 years, doing great work in the community. But they have their last service October of 2023, and so it's been vacant for two years, and then they made an incredible move. Instead of trying to, like, sell it for the most amount of money, they wanted to sell it for the most amount of impact. And so they sold it to us for $20,000 which was just the price, basically that they'd been that was the money that they've been putting into it over the last years, kind of like making their money back, not really making a profit on it. And then we took over in March. The building was structurally pretty good, but had some pretty big environmental issues, mainly mold and water damage.”
Hentrich says they've invested more than $200,000 to rectify those issues. The church needs to raise an additional $300,000 to finish the building.
There are walls to be taken down, floors to be straightened, windows to be replaced, all with an eye toward making the new Love Albany Center a community hub.
Parishoner Estre Smith likes the way things are moving along. "I'm just very excited that we get this opportunity to, 'A,' give ourselves a space that we can now utilize more permanently, and 'B,' like to share it with the community and to do things. That's the kind of the church I grew up in, like it's always community activities going on, and I'm just excited that this could be another kind of space like that," said Smith.
Hentrich says Christ’s Church Albany has already engaged multiple local organizations to use the facilities, including Free Food Fridge Albany. Launched by Jammella Anderson in 2021, Free Food Fridge has refrigerators stationed at various locations across the Capital Region offering free food. Anderson says she jumped at the opportunity to base the organization in the new center, which boasts a modern industrial kitchen.
"And so for us, being able to cook food, for the community, to use this as a meeting place, to get volunteers to kind of come to a safe space," Anderson said. "We're in a neighborhood with lots of sidewalks, lots of parking. It's a really easy and accessible place to come together for so many reasons, and a church, you know, regardless of what you believe in, is always like this, like sign of like, safety, hope, community. And so for me, I feel like it's a really nice place to land together as we're starting to do that programming, I would think, I think that like the cooking, maybe not classes, necessarily, but just like gathering folks to, like, make food for the fridges, or host their own events with the fridges.”
Anderson says the shared community space model offers a way for people to access various not-for-profit services together, versus having to seek them out individually.
Hentrich says the shared multi-purpose community resource will retain the historic nature of the building.
"We hope to fill this space with as many different organizations that already have programs that are reaching out in the community, and hopefully this can be a space that will just kind of expedite the good work that they're already doing. And I mean, the more that literacy programs. And so we hope that kids in the neighborhood can read better. There's food programs, and so we hope kids are better fed. There's programs for parents. And so we hope that we can assist parents and anything that's already good in this community, we hope to make it even better. And any problems in the community, we hope that we can be part of the solution of those," Hentrich said.
