‘This is all dreaming’

Sophie Carson

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel USA TODAY NETWORK – WISCONSIN

Redeemer Lutheran, once on the brink of closure, experiences a rebirth

While the Rev. Lisa Bates-Froiland was studying to become a Lutheran pastor, she got a call from the secretary of Redeemer Lutheran Church asking if she’d preach one Sunday a month. The church could pay her about $75.

She agreed, and eventually, in 2011, she took over as pastor of Redeemer, located across from Marquette University.

What she inherited was a bit concerning.

Just 33 people gathered on Sundays. The building, at 631 N. 19th St., had asbestos in its tiles, “atrocious” bathrooms and, puzzlingly, several refrigerators set up in a hallway. For a while, Bates-Froiland thought it might be best for the church to close.

ABOVE: The Rev. Lisa Bates-Froiland stands in the gathering space of the kitchen and dining hall that is part of the multimilliondollar renovation at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Milwaukee.

PHOTOS BY ANGELA PETERSON /MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

LEFT: Redeemer Lutheran Church in Milwaukee.

Today, Redeemer Lutheran just completed a $6 million renovation. Its free lunch program for the homeless and hungry draws more than 200 people in a week, and a free drop-in mental health clinic operates from offices on-site. Its congregation has grown to 350 people, with more than 100 regularly showing up for worship.

“When you have a location this good, you do want it to be able to be a hub,” Bates-Froiland said. “There’s no reason why this should be a church that opens up for an hour on a Sunday and closes up the rest of the time.”

The road to the completed renovation, the lunch program and the mental health clinic has been marked by surprising generosity and a commitment to better serving the neighborhood, Bates-Froiland said.

As so many mainline Protestant churches struggle to make ends meet, Redeemer is positioned to survive into the future while helping address the needs of today.

Two events led to a new direction

The pastor pointed to two jarring events in March 2019 that led the congregation to its current place.

At the start of that month, a sewer backup made the kitchen unusable. It would be thousands of dollars to excavate and even more to rebuild.

Meeting with the church council members, Bates-Froiland said she essentially asked: Is this the time we fish or cut bait? The church had so many deferred maintenance costs. Was it time to sell the building and move to a different location, or go all in and renovate the entire building?

The council decided to go for the major overhaul. Bates-Froiland laughs about it now, remembering how she thought: I was afraid you were going to say that.

Then, at the end of March, a homeless man named Johnny Smith was sleeping on the steps of the church when another homeless man beat him to death with a rock. Both men struggled with mental illness, Bates-Froiland said.

Smith’s killing was deeply upsetting for the pastor, who realized later that she’d known him. It was a turning point for the congregation as well. The church should do more to help people access mental health resources, members decided.

The result has been a newly opened free drop-in clinic on the building’s ground level run by Serenity Inns, a residential treatment provider. Counselors can quickly assess and connect people to mental health and substance use disorder treatment. Clinic staff sit in the dining hall during the lunch program to remind guests of their presence, and peer support groups are held after lunch. It’s open eight hours a day, five days a week.

The goal was to make it easier to get people the help they need. For years, Bates-Froiland would meet someone at the meal program and try to connect them to resources, but that appointment “would be halfway across town, three weeks from now.”

At a recent Sunday lunch, she prayed with a man who had suicidal thoughts, and they made a plan for him to return to the church Monday to meet with a Serenity Inns counselor. She was gratified to see the man there in the counselor’s office that day.

This was the vision, she thought, this was it.

And there’s a benefit to having those resources set up in a church. It’s open to anyone and not intimidating or difficult to access.

“They can break the barriers that we can’t break,” Raymond Blalock said of pastors. He is a Serenity Inns counselor specializing in addiction.

The lunch, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, takes place in a fresh, open space that was once home to an auditorium with a stage, a legacy from longtime member and former Milwaukee Mayor Frank Zeidler, who believed in the value of public discussion.

Staff also are booking the space as a wedding venue — a revenue stream that could help sustain the church into the future.

Church relies on generous partnerships

The whole renovation cost about $6.3 million. The church paired a loan with roughly $5.1 million in donations, including some “very, very generous anonymous donations,” Bates-Froiland said. For context, one of the first consultants that council members met guessed they could raise just a half-million dollars.

Restoration work on the exterior of the sanctuary took place last year. Renovation of the west wing, which includes the dining hall, kitchen and clinic offices, was completed over the summer. To make the building wheelchairaccessible, staircases in some places were made into ramps, doors were lowered to reach ground level, and elevators were added.

Bates-Froiland’s approach to leading Redeemer has been systematic, even academic — which makes sense, because she is a former communications professor. She and the members took on a neighborhood mapping project in which they walked all 68 blocks around the church and asked what kinds of resources people would like.

Some ideas came from experience. At lunches over the years, Bates-Froiland found herself wishing Redeemer had a shower to offer someone, or a washing machine to clean their clothes. Now, a shower is installed but awaiting an organized signup system. There are hookups for laundry machines. Each restroom is an individual, walled-in room to provide privacy.

“We’re not going to solve the large problems that people walk with. But we can be a stabilizing force in the neighborhood,” Bates-Froiland said.

Since the church started with such limited resources, much would not have been possible without partner organizations like Serenity Inns, she said.

Some of those collaborations are outside the box, like Redeemer’s deal with Two Chefs Tosa, a husband-and-wife team that runs a business making and delivering meals to households. They operate out of Redeemer’s kitchen for the delivery service and also prepare meals for the free lunch program once a week.

Bates-Froiland has gotten to know many of the lunch program regulars, and she greets them warmly. But looking back, she’s still surprised that she ended up in a city church.

She grew up in a small town in Minnesota and raised her children in suburban Milwaukee, so as she was studying to become a pastor, she never expected to work so closely on issues like homelessness, hunger and addiction.

In those first months preaching at Redeemer, though, “I fell in love with the people,” she said.

Now, the pastor is looking to the future

A few original rooms hint at the state of Redeemer pre-renovation. The walls of the sacristy still have chipped paint and water damage. A cracked and overgrown parking lot awaits a new paving job. A basement-level space, gutted to the brick walls, houses racks of donated clothing, but the plaque denoting it as the women’s restroom remains on its door.

And it’s clear there’s more potential in the renovated spaces, like wall space that Bates-Froiland imagines would be perfect for a mural.

In the dining hall, she pointed out light fixtures and a switch that made them change color. The space once had unreplaceable florescent bulbs that, as they burned out, made it dim over the years. She hopes to start a “gospel brunch” on Sunday afternoons with a stage and local music, local chefs and hungry college students.

“This is all dreaming,” she said. “But I’ve dreamed before.”