As a child, Tyler Ray spent hours at the Church of the Advocate with his father, but it wasn’t until he saw the church’s roof leaking during a storm in 2018 that he realized how badly the church needs repairs.
“I just saw water running down the interior wall and it was just ignored by everybody and I’m just looking over, like, ‘you know this isn’t normal, right? it’s not supposed to rain inside a building,’” said Ray, a senior community development and historic preservation major.
Ray has wanted to preserve the church since he was young because of its historical importance to the North Philadelphia community and his family, who have been active members there since 1963. This summer, he plans to set up a nonprofit with the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania’s permission, the church’s governing body, to fundraise money and help pay for the church’s repairs and upgrades.
The church needs a cooling system, panic bars for the doors and a new roof, which is estimated to cost a total of $7 million, BillyPenn reported in 2019.
Some repairs were already made to the roof in 2016, and the church applied for a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation so they can continue making repairs, Ivey said.
The church was built in 1887 as a memorial to George South, a businessman and community leader, and has a history of progressive milestones and historic events, like ordaining the first female priests in the Episcopal church, and hosting the National Conference of Black Power in 1968 and the Black Panther Conference in 1970, according to the church’s website.
Preserving and revitalizing the church will help the church continue to connect with and serve the North Philadelphia community, said Reverend Betsy Ivey.
“That’s what the core of the revitalization of the church is: engaging with the community in such a way that we are answering the needs of the community,” Ivey said
Ray is still in the planning stages of forming a nonprofit and spoke with Ivey about the church’s future role in the nonprofit, Ivey said.
Ray’s family began attending the church after his grandmother moved to Philadelphia from the South during the Great Migration, a mass movement of Black southerners in the twentieth century who moved north in search of better economic prospects.
Ray’s dad was baptized in the church in the early 1960s and worked there as a sexton, a church groundskeeper, in the early to mid-2000s and was responsible for building maintenance, Ray said.
During the summer, Ray’s dad would bring him to work and show him around the church’s crypts, underground chambers where people are buried, Ray said.
To raise awareness about the church’s existence, history and conditions, Ray started giving tours to Temple University employees about the church’s architecture and murals depicting the experience of Black people in America during his freshman year and joined the Community Affairs department in Fall 2021, where he has continued his work, he said.
There isn’t much Ray can do on his own because any decision about repairs to the church must be made by the Episcopal Diocese, he said.
Judith Robinson, a realtor, public historian and tour guide docent at the church, met Ray when he toured the church with Temple, and Robinson and Ray talked about the church’s crypts. Robinson was impressed with how well Ray knew the church, she said.
Now that Ray is giving tours as part of his job in Community Affairs, he and Robinson sometimes give joint tours with Ray focusing on the building itself, and Robinson focusing on the church’s history, she said.
Robinson loves working with Ray because he is driven, hardworking and a North Philadelphia community member, and they are working on starting the nonprofit together this summer, she said.
In Fall 2021, Ray joined the Community Affairs team under Andrea Swan, the director of community and neighborhood affairs, because he wanted to help strengthen the relationship between Temple and the North Philadelphia community, which uses the church as an unofficial headquarters, he said.
In the future, Ray wants to continue doing preservation work with low-income neighborhoods, like Tioga, Stanton and Strawberry Mansion, to help them maintain their sense of identity and resist gentrification, he said.
“If you take away certain key identifiers of a certain neighborhood, then it feels like that culture is being lost,” Ray said.
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