The Revitalization of Resurrection’s People

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Resurrection Brooklyn, as it is now known, began in 2004 when Matt and Deb Brown opened our first congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn for public worship with many robust ministries. A year later Vito Aiuto planted a new congregation in Williamsburg and a budding network of collaborative, missional, parish-based church plants began to form. Soon to follow were congregations in Flatbush, Clinton Hill, Sheepshead Bay, and Brooklyn Heights.

 

In the decade to follow our growing network of church plants would engage in sacrificial, beautiful, life-giving, and missional witness to the love and transformation offered in Jesus to New York City and the world. We had many highs and we had many lows. We trained and worked closely with dozens of pastors who were also friends. We participated in God doing many amazing things. But funding was always a problem and permanent space was the elusive dream none of us could realize.

 

The neighborhoods we were in became saturated with other new church plants that, coupled with transience and consumerism, made our own sustainability a true problem through attrition and other factors. We had already discovered a growing conviction amongst ourselves that church partnerships with established churches and the work of church revitalization was arguably a better use –– at least in our time and place –– of kingdom resources. Then Covid all but wiped us out. 

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We found ourselves with fewer remaining congregations and only two pastors from the former network, only one of which was able to remain full-time in ministry. Through creativity, imagination, hope, and a dose of holy desperation, we sensed that God might be calling us forward in a previously unimagined way: merge the congregations into one, and accept the offer of Cadman Memorial Congregational Church to purchase their historic but neglected property in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

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The Revitalization of Resurrection’s Place

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The Cadman Memorial Church at 350 Clinton Avenue on the corner of Lafayette Avenue was built in 1922 in the neo-Gothic style for the Clinton Avenue Congregational Church, replacing a Romanesque Revival church built in 1854 and designed by James Renwick. The church held its first worship service in its current sanctuary on Easter Sunday, 1923. The congregation later merged with the nearby Simpson Methodist Episcopal Church in 1933, forming the Cadman Memorial Congregational Church.

 

The Reverend Jamison Galt first met the good people of Cadman Church in his early efforts to form a new congregation in the neighborhood, maintaining a cordial and cooperative relationship over the next decade. In 2019 Cadman offered the use of their parlor for Sunday morning worship, with early discussions of a potential partnership and purchase of the property. By Christmas of 2021, Cadman’s lovely congregation had dwindled to a handful of faithful women who were dedicated to ensuring the church remain a Christian congregation after their own dissolution –– they at last offered the building for sale.

 

The following two years were filled for the now-merging congregation of Resurrection Brooklyn with negotiations, bureaucratic hurdles, and calculated and costly “gospel-risk” repairs to the property we did not yet own. On April 9, 2023, Resurrection Brooklyn celebrated its first Easter Sunday in the sanctuary as a formally merged congregation, exactly one-hundred years after the original worship service here. In December of 2023, we closed on the property and became home-owners for the first time in our network’s twenty-year history. God is doing a new work, and there is lots more to do. It is our work, our partners' work; it is God’s work. And it continues.

 

Resurrection Brooklyn’s dual works of revitalization will be expressed and shaped by the three core virtues we seek for God to make us fruitful with as we abide in Him. 

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