NORFOLK, Va. — When you walk into St. John's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Norfolk, you see a gorgeous near-140-year-old building. But when you look around, you see a lot of work needs to be done before the congregation can worship there again.
The church just found out it won two grants to help with that restoration project. Now it needs the community's help to fill some gaps.
St. John's AME has been a longtime beacon for Norfolk's Black community, and history is everywhere inside the building that has sat at Bute and Church streets near downtown Norfolk for 138 years.
Rev. Christian Savage showed News 3 some of the artifacts, including the journal of the first Virginia annual conference of the African Methodist Episcopal church held in 1867 and a pulpit Thurgood Marshall the first Black Supreme Court justice spoke from in 1939.
But to live on, that history must be preserved — and St. John's has quite the fight ahead.
"Altogether, it will probably take about a million dollars," Savage said.
Savage has been pastor at the church for the last five years. But he said that, as pastor, he has never preached at the altar.
"St. John's has dealt with water infiltration for many, many years. Unfortunately, during the COVID pandemic, a lot of those problems accelerated," Savage said.
The results are visible all over: mold stains, holes in the ceiling and ruined carpet that has been ripped out. The congregation has been worshiping in another room since then, with its eye always on a return to its rightful home — sometime in 2027.
To help with restoration costs, the church recently announced two grants it had won: $522,000 from Virginia's Historic Preservation Fund for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), and an award from the National Fund for Sacred Places.
"A grant of $163,000, but that's a matching grant," Savage said.
That means the congregation needs help from the community it has called home since the 1840s. Savage said the church is accepting donations and intends to fundraise, but money isn't the only way people can help.
"Any skills that you may be able to offer to the church in this restoration project, we would be so happy," Savage said.
The hope is that the community can come together to restore this historic worship space to its former glory.
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