Members of the Fordham Evangelical Lutheran Church are considering taking legal action following its abrupt closure.
Photo Elizabeth Foster-Feigenbaum
Members of the Fordham Evangelical Lutheran Church gathered for a candlelight vigil last month as part of their ongoing efforts to reopen their place of worship.
Congregation members, friends and family gathered outside of the Walton Avenue church in late July to hand out informational flyers to passersby, join together in prayer and strategize next steps — including possibly taking legal action — to regain access to their church which abruptly closed in June.
Patricia Jewett, a member of the Fordham church council and an attendee of the church since 2000, spearheads the current restoration efforts. She told the Bronx Times that the congregation plans to retain legal representation moving forward.
For more than 100 years, the church has served the Fordham community, bringing in members who have remained with the institute for decades. But the church community was shut out — literally — on June 11, when the congregation arrived to locked doors for their usual 11 a.m. Sunday Mass.
They received no warning of the imminent closure, churchgoers told the Bronx Times.
The Fordham Lutheran Church governs itself with an in-house constitution, but ultimately answers to the Metropolitan New York Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — which operates roughly 190 congregations in the city.
In a resolution issued June 10, the synod council announced that it had voted to “impose synodical administration/preservation” over the church. The resolution cites dwindling membership and resources as factors that add “to the impracticability of the congregation to fulfill the purposes for which it was organized.”
“Throughout the years, we have provided financial and pastoral support to the Fordham Evangelical Lutheran Church — but we have come to the inevitable…
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