Setting up God's shop

~ Chronicler of American ghetto turns his camera on storefront churches

amilo Jose Vergara has spent the last three decades taking his camera to some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, documenting places few outsiders ever visit.

Over the years, he noticed that urban areas emptied by blight were filling up with storefront churches. The pastors were cab drivers and retired steel and transit workers with little or no formal religious training, yet they took on an important role in their communities.

Vergara, author of the book "The New American Ghetto," saw these churches as part of the story he's been trying to tell with his photography about the lives of the poor. After four years of Sundays spent in churches from the Bronx to Detroit to Los Angeles, he has published a book of photos called "How the Other Half Worships."

"The work I've been doing all of these years is for the country to come together," said Vergara, recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." "If you get beyond what you know and you begin to get into other people's lives, people who tend not to be in the media, the next time you find yourself there it becomes more meaningful."

The title is a nod to the influential Jacob Riis book of photography published in 1890, "How the Other Half Lives," about tenement life on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Unlikely places

Vergara, also a New Yorker, filled his book with photos of churches in unlikely places: a former car dealership, a shutdown Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, a former furniture store.

The trend is alive in Southeast Missouri as well. Vacant stores in the downtown area, particularly along Broadway, are now home to churches. The building that now houses Cape First Church on Silver Springs Road was once a Mr. K's grocery store that has been renovated into a worship center as well as a day care center and bookstore.

Selecting that location came with several advantages, according to church officials. For one, there is ample parking in the former grocery store's lot. The sanctuary there seats 1,200.

A few of the congregations in Vergara's book are in houses of worship that once served another faith. A Jewish synagogue in a destitute section of Brooklyn has become a Latino church called La Sinagoga. Stars of David still adorn the facade and sanctuary.

Inside, the churches were often decorated with paintings by congregants, or items they found in vacant churches or bought cheaply in local stores.

As compelling as the buildings are, Vergara said he was struck even more by the devastation that surrounded them.

He once saw a body being pulled from an abandoned building near La Sinagoga. In Camden, N.J., he photographed a brightly painted white church with a tall steeple which sits at the end of a row of crumbling houses with overgrown front lots and boarded-up windows. Vergara wrote that the church looked like it was from "another planet."

Thriving congregations

Amid this decay, many of the congregations thrived, providing aid to the poor and homeless, a social network for church members and a human presence in areas that had been all but abandoned. Vergara, a native of Chile who was raised Roman Catholic but is no longer active in the church, found a range of religious traditions in the neighborhoods.

Vergara was particularly fascinated by the pastors. He said many were retirees who "in the pecking order of society, weren't really high up," but had become revered within their own churches, he said. The startup congregations also gave worshippers a chance to play important roles they could not fill in larger, more established churches, he said.

"In the little church, everybody is sort of a king," Vergara said. "When there are 20 people or 30 people, it's a lot easier to do than when you have 500."

Despite his years of research on the congregations and the nearly 300-page book of photos and text, he believes he has only started looking into the significance of churches in poor communities.

Features editor Callie Clark Miller contributed to this report.