Hi, my name is David Staniunas, records archivist at the Presbyterian Historical Society. And this is an oral history with Reverend Cedric Portis of Third Presbyterian Church in Saint Louis, Missouri. Reverend Portis, thank you for being with us.

Mm hmm.

I wonder if you could start by telling me a little bit about Third's history.

Oh third Presbyterian Church has a long, rich history. The church was started in 1893. During that time. It was started, I think, in a. It wasn't actually a church building. It was just a group of people. And the first building wasn't built until around 1915. That building was built at the corner of Union and Highland in Saint Louis, Missouri. And I still have some pictures of it being built. And it was built by members with basic materials that they had and or found. So if you look in if you look at the building, the walls were like ten inches thick because they're what they used for studs was railroad ties. So it was. I didn't hear you on mute, Dave.

Oh, yeah. No, I was just being quiet.

Yeah. So. But plaster Paris. And it was built at a time where people walked to church. So it was never really a church for commuters. Right. Because it was built at a time where I think it was before we even had cars. Of course, when it was first started, it was an all Caucasian church, as most of the Presbyterian churches are and were. And the church was more like a neighborhood church. And it never grew to more than a couple of hundred people. Oh. Because people walk to church. Oh. Around. 19. In the 1950s, there was a phenomenon called urban sprawl that took place a little bit Be you know, during that time, that was also something going on called the Great Northern Migration. And when machinery took the place of slaves on the plantation. Then you had a lot of African-Americans leaving the south, going northward. And most of the time, especially in Mississippi, Alabama, they traveled the way of the Mississippi River. So this is why you will have a large nucleus of African-Americans in Memphis and Chicago and St Louis, Flint, Michigan, all the way up. So. During the. But I'll give you some. Some some history about Saint Louis. He. You didn't find any African-Americans past grand. There's a street in Saint Louis, past grand. But urban sprawl. African-Americans started to move outside of the quote unquote, project areas into what we call the suburbs and the suburbs right now as we passed there. But at that time, that line was grand. Third Presbyterian Church at that time was west of Grand. So what the church saw was African-Americans moving into the neighborhood. Mm hmm. And the church did not like that. So in the 1950s, early 60s, I think it was the 50s, early 60s, somewhere in there. They had a meeting. And on or on the meeting and we had the meeting minutes for this. They said there are too many Negroes moving into this community. We don't know how to minister to them and we choose not to minister to them. So we vote to close the church. And. It was a majority vote yes to close. It wasn't unanimous, but it was a majority. And at that time, that was the first time that the church almost died, because the pastor, as well as most of the giving members of the church, about 30 families left and moved further west. White flight? Yeah. But there was a remnant that stayed. They say we don't agree with this. There is a ministry for us here. So at that time, the presbytery stepped in with some guidance and resources and they called an interim pastor. His name was Reverend Veil. And he was an African-American pastor. He pastor for about couple of years. And in 1967. They called a young seminarian by the name of Arthur McFadden. He had the longest tenure of any pastor in the entire history of third, and he pastor for 35 years. Well, in 1967, the church was probably what you would consider right now as biracial. It was half, half white, half black. And as. That time continued, it became more African-American. And one of the things about the church becoming more predominantly African-American, but with things like red lining and a glass ceiling on income that can be earned. Then the income the church was able to realize dropped as well. So the church would resort to, you know, unscripted methods of fundraising and, you know, selling food to pay their bills and things of that nature. Because even though the church still had maybe 150, 200 people, the socioeconomic demographic of those people were different than the 30 families that left, including the pastor, and went west. Therefore, the building became an albatross because a lot of that the resources were in the building. They got to a point at one time where they couldn't afford. To pay into the pension and insurance program because. Understand, the whole idea of the pension insurance program was created for white people. Affluent white people because most African-American churches cannot afford to pay 33 to 36% over and beyond what they're paying the pastor. So the pension program in and of itself is racist, and it seeks to destroy Black churches because there is no way that we can afford that and pay a pastor. But they don't want to have that conversation. So they they couldn't pay it. So therefore, the insurance lapsed. And I remember a story that I heard that the pastor got sick but didn't have insurance. So a couple other members had to meet him at the hospital to give their insurance card just so that the pastor could be seen. Wow. Yeah. So. The presbytery itself had a real, I want to say. Tenuous relationship with African-American churches because they set them up to fail or set them up to die. The same thing happened to a church called Brilliant, but their church thrived. Their pastor, you know, they you know, his name was Bill Gillespie. And Bill Gillespie and Arthur McFadden came at the same time. But and they were friends. But for some reason, Arthur McFadden had just a different kind of. I don't know what it was. Where his. Now, I don't know if it was his preaching style or whatever, but his church never grew the same way. Called Brilliant group. He was never in the community like, you know, the other pastor was. There was a time in the church where he went six months without receiving a paycheck. But the presbytery just kind of stood by and watched this this whole thing happen. When he started to get ill with dementia. The press. But for some reason, the Presbyterian, his family got into a really big tiff. And I think the family, they were trying to push him to retire. And the family threatened to sue the presbytery. I don't know the whole story behind that, but the presbytery just just took their hands off of everything and basically just let the church deteriorate to the point where it was about 30 or 40 members. And in the 2003. He died. And he you know, he was still being allowed to preach, even though that if he was in the middle of a sermon and lost his place, he'd start over if he got to the bottom of. A passage in the Bible and needed to turn the page he couldn't understand. To turn the page, he would just stop reading. And someone will come out of the choir, stand to turn the page. It got that bad. And the presbytery, for whatever reason. They didn't do anything about it. So in 2003, in August of 2003, he died. And at that time I had been preaching over there. You know, every now and then because my family joined the church in 1978. But in around 1983, I stopped going to church altogether because it was just, you know, too boring. I just couldn't take it. Well, anyway, my mom stayed there. And by this time, I had already been ordained in the Baptist church and I was an associate pastor somewhere else. And the session wanted to get the pastor some help because no help was coming from the presbytery. And my mom says, Well, why don't you call Cedrick? Because he's a preaching minister now. And so I began to preach over there once a month, twice a month, three times a month. And then in August of 2003, he died. But the. But the. And the session wanted me to be their pastor and I didn't want to be their pastor. I'm like, this church is about dead. But, you know, I definitely sense the calling to this place and. I remember the fact that I didn't want to be here. But the Lord has a way of saying this is where you need to be in making it real uncomfortable with where you are. So I real uncomfortable where I was for whatever reason, and I said, okay, God, this is where are you going to be? And I was trying my best to do everything to sabotage it, to say, See, God, it's okay, I'm not supposed to be here. So I remember meeting with the comedian ministry. Because at this time I had a master's and bachelor's degree in engineering. But I didn't have, quote unquote, the credentials for ordination in the Presbyterian Church. So. I remember meeting with the committee on ministry and we were talking about, you know, ministry. And when I preach and all of these different things and I remember saying this, I said, you know. I said, I'm going to go ahead and walk out now so that you all can vote yes and then we can come back in and figure this whole thing out. And I just got up and left. And then when I came back in, they were like, Well, congratulations, we'll let you take the church. But at some point in time, you're going to have to pursue our ordination. I just said, okay, whatever. Because I had never planned on staying here more than a year. I called myself their hospice pastor that I'm going to make you. I'm going to make you comfortable until you die. And then I'm gonna go back to where I was because that's where, you know, I was comfortable doing ministry or doing some great things over there. So I actually started as what they call a commission late pastor or cop in December. December 7th of 2003. So in a couple of weeks, we'll make my 20th year at third. But doing during that time, say from 2003 until 2005, we began to grow like crazy. We were we were, for years, the fastest per capita growing Presbyterian church in Giddings, Lovejoy Presbytery. So we were like the blue chip Church. Now, understand, I still was not ordained, but I was actually serving on. We call it the vision team now. I'm trying to think what we called it back then. It's basically the session for the presbytery.

So, yeah, sometimes it's like a presbytery council.

Correct. We had we had a different name for it back then, but I wasn't even I wasn't even ordained as a pastor, but I was serving on that board. I was also I preached a couple of installation services for ordained pastors, and I wasn't ordained, so I was then. You know, the presbytery wanted to go, I guess. Keep an eye on me. So they assigned somebody to me from the committee, committee or ministry, or they signed a retired pastor. Her name was Evelyn Fulton. Right. You may know that name. She was the first woman ordained in the 1960s. I called her Jane the Baptist and she liked me name. She came and she spent maybe a couple of days over there with me and she was like one of those people didn't say a whole lot, but when she spoke, everybody conform to what she said. And she said he knows what he's doing. Leave him alone. That's the last time I ever heard anything from the presbytery. So as an undertaking, CLP, I, I did my own baptisms. I moderated the session and I served communion. Something that's unheard of. But that's just the kind of. That would never happen in a white church. Hmm. But understand, I've only been. At the church for less than a year, and I'm doing baptisms, communion and moderating my own session. Never happened. Like story will never happen again. Ever. At least I hope I don't. So over the next few years, we went from maybe 30 to 50 members to over 100. Started a lot of community outreach programs as well as just. I even started Bible study because they didn't have Bible study when I got there. It was a lot of things that, you know, you know, started a different choir. Brought in some instruments, just doing a lot of things that promoted growth. It got to the point where we had outgrew that building because, again, it wasn't a commuter building that was on street parking. It just wasn't conducive to what we needed to do. The way the building was set up, I tried to buy some property down there. That was a disaster. So I came to the session and said. We need to consider. Leaving the church. That was tough. They have been in that building for over 95 years. They had never imagined being somewhere else. Well. By us being that blue chip church. This was the same time where the lead guy blew off the Catholic Church and they were getting sued all over the place and they had a fire sale of all of their buildings to try to pay these lawsuits. And I said, Well, we might as well get into the sweepstakes, too, and buy us a Catholic church. But at that time, the presbytery says, Well, we have three buildings that we would like you to consider. So we looked at the different three and we decided up on one that kind of fit us the best. And, you know, through a series of meetings, we finally got the the church to vote that we would move to this, this, this church. So our last service at our old building was. The the last Sunday in May of 2006. And we started at our new location in June of 2000. Six. Now, during that time, I was still working as an engineer. And when we. When we decided to go to this other building, that's when some of this. You know, reparative situation started to kick off because again, I'd have to send you some paperwork because it's just a lot. It was 18 pages of documentation as to. How we were set up to fail. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So definitely tell me more about that. So the presbytery was in control of a piece of property that had problems?

Yeah, they were in control of a piece of property that had problems. They. They allowed the other church that was there. They were closing. To basically raid the building, take everything that was there. Now, if they were merging with somebody or assimilating, that's one thing. But the documentation is they were closing the ministry. It was documented that they were closing. If you're closing, everything stays there. But they were closing, yet they let them take everything to whatever church they were going to. That was the first problem. Second problem is all of the. All of the money that came from the sale of the building that we have presently been in, the presbytery took control of that money. Right. But when we got to the new place. We realized that it was going to take about $300,000 worth of. Repairs just to gain occupancy to move in. Now the presbytery. Was supposed to shoulder some of that, but they made us use all of our money from the other building and loaned us another $60,000 just to move in.

Like to gain legal occupancy, like to make the correct legal correct.

Also documentation have been brought forth. Now, we just learned this this year. That when we got there in about three years after moving there in 2009, I mean, it was all kind of stuff breaking down the boiler, the roof, all of these things. And there was documentation that the previous church had filed a claim on the roof, received $85,000 for it and never fixed it, and the presbytery knew it. That's fraud. Yeah. All right. All of this stuff was coming out through Ryan, looking through meeting minutes. But, you know, nothing was ever happened. And, you know, if there was any profit that came from the sale of our church, it was supposed to go to the church that already left. I mean, it was just crazy documentation that we started at that church, a sick building with zero money, and we still had to. So in two years we had to take out an additional loan of about $500,000 just to repair some of the things to make the building functional. The boiler, the chiller, $100,000 roof, some other things. I mean, it was so in within three years, that's $800,000 that we were out of in three years. Now you're talking about a church of a hundred people. And the presbytery has given us zero. So during that time from. 2000. Ten was when. All of the repairs and everything was done. And so we were all we went in from that time in 2017, we were over 500 members. Wow. So in spite of being yoked with this debt, we never had more than $60,000 in the bank. And we were always top in members game and ministry to the community. I mean, people were talking about us nationally as to what we were able to do. But, you know, I was always pushing to say, you know, we need to be debt free. Why aren't we debt free? When they talk to us about mission giving, I'm like, we are the mission. Where we are is a mission. So. We I was actually the co-chair of Cola that brought Gia here in 2018. Yeah. Okay. That was probably what I'm hearing is the best gia that people had ever been to. It was third Presbyterian Church is Choir that did the Friday event. I don't know if you in there.

Oh, yeah, I was there. Yeah. Yeah.

That Friday event. That was our choir.

Yeah. Okay.

So we've done a lot with a little and little to nothing. When. Ryan. Was. I have been trying to fight this whole getting us debt free thing for about five years through three executives until Ryan showed up.

And that's Ryan Landing. You know, the current.

Yes. Okay. Yes. And so. When I told him, I said, now this fight is going to have to be done by a white man because some things will be discovered, some things will have to be done that, you know, our previous exec, Craig. Who was an African-American man, it just wouldn't fly. Okay. So Ryan actually found the documentation that implement it and implicated all of these people. We changed the name because some of the people were still around. But at that presbytery meeting this summer. The 18 page document was gone over and there were reports of, you know, the powers that be going into the property committee, strong arming them, making them sign documentation. It was crazy. It was like some Italian mafia stuff going on all in attempt to. It seems like we just like what Ryan says. We were absolutely set up to fail. But we. But we we thrive anyway. And. There were people crying because they couldn't believe that was done. And I said, You're crying because you can't believe white people did this, that you call sister brother in price. I said, I can't. I've been fighting racial justice, but I never thought I'd be fighting it in my own denomination of people that I call sister brother in Christ. But this is exactly what happened. We're not talking about something in the 1800s or the 1950s. We're talking about something that happened 16 years ago.

That's right.

And some of these people are still here. So it was overwhelmingly voted to. One. He raised all of our debt immediately. That was about $368,000 that we still owe. Go ahead.

And I'm sorry. That's the 368,000 is debt that originates with the Presbyterians, with the presbytery loaned to the church.

No, this is these are the laws that we had to take to fix the building, right? Yeah. We have paid off the initial loan to the presbytery. Okay. Remember when they. They paid us to say they loan as a 60 grand just to move in? Yeah. Okay. They paid that off. Look, this was the loan that we took for the major renovations. Things started to break now. So we took them on that loan all the way through Covid. Never missed a payment. Right. But joke with this kind of debt. So they voted to erase that debt immediately, which saved us about $41,000 a year is what we were paying in loan payments. They also agree to. To return every cent of principal and interest that we've paid since the origination of the loans. That was another $358,000 that they wrote us a check for. That's where the reparations actually came from. And that was just amazing that that happened. How? What questions do you have?

I have I have like minor small bore questions. And then I think I have big picture questions. Please do. So the 368,000 to renovate the church, get it up to code. Is that a pimp loan or was that a bank loan?

So here's the here's what that was. It was the money that came from the sale of our property. Which was over 200 grand plus. The $67,000 that they loaned us to complete the renovations to move in. Mm hmm. So that's how we moved in. Like, all of the equity that came from the sale of our building went to repairing a church that should have been repaired by the time you sell a building. When it changes ownership, then you're. You're responsible for those repairs. And they never went after the old church for. Fraud. And they had claims on record insurance claims and the repairs were never done.

Yeah. For the document that Giddings Lovejoy produced. The 18 page document is. The Presbytery has made that public read.

Now what now?

The 18 page document that Giddings Lovejoy produced with all the evidence that I have.

Oh, yeah, I can send you that. Okay. Oh, yeah, that's part of the record.

That's outstanding. Going back to like the growth in the church and kind of the way that you contrasted Arthur McFadden and Bill Gillispie. I mean. What do you think was Bill Gillespie's secret? And also, by extension. What's your secret in mobilizing people and getting the church chakra?

So I think Bill's was he he invested himself in the community. Hmm. And I don't think Arthur did the same. The ministry was more insular. Focused. Hmm. And. With. With me. It wasn't necessarily a secret sausage. First of all, we started to teach people, right? For whatever reasons, Presbyterians want to hang their hat on being theologians. But what I found is they knew absolutely nothing. And so I began to teach and preach and grow them through Bible study. And the outreach, the same as as Bill Gillespie. I was in the community. I was on school boards. I was on all of these different boards. So they knew us. It was a branding thing. We were doing coat drives. We were doing everything for the community because my whole thing was if. If your church closed today, would anybody care? Other than the members, you have to become a vital organ to the community. For the community to support and love you back. They got to know that you love them. And again, if we close today, it would be problematic. We have over 70 kids in a preschool. We have a coat drive that attracts about 3 to 400 families per year. We have a summer camp where has got over 100 kids that we engaged in an enrichment program for for 12 hours a day, for eight weeks. We feed them twice, take them on field trips. I mean, we're doing some big things in the community. And we were doing all of that before we got any of these reparations.

And so, I mean, you have such a vital ministry, obviously. You said that. The original move from the old location just west of Grand to where you're at now was precipitated by like needing to be available to commuters. Is most of. Are you a neighborhood church or like everybody else, you're kind of like drawing from all over.

Both. It's all over at this point. It's all over at this point, Yeah.

Yeah. And so since so many of the people are from so many different parts of like Greater St Louis and how was, I mean how was. Third impacted by 2015 and the murder of Mike Brown and and the unrest in Ferguson.

Huh? That's always a funny question to me, because where that happened was literally two miles from my church. And what we did, what we did was we made our church available because. What? What? Because they closed the schools during that time. And what you may not understand about a an area where 100% of the children are on free and reduced lunch. Sometimes when they close the schools, they don't eat.

That's right.

And so what we did was we opened up our church so that the kids from the neighborhood could come to the church because the school district dropped off the meals. And we were able to distribute them to the kids that came to make sure that whoever, you know, wanted to could continue to eat during that time.

Yeah. Yeah. That again, again reminds me of 2020. And one of the things that we undertook during 2020 was to collect Easter sermons from that period and that kind of extended into the Pentecost season following. Following the, you know, the beginning of the nationwide uprising in 2020. We saw. Folks throughout the, you know, white churches, the key Pentecost message was to plea for peace. And actually, first, Ferguson has a big sermon where they're pleading for like, tranquility. And the key themes among black churches, especially in Pentecost of 2020, were demands for justice. You know.

It's it's funny that the outcry would be a pray for peace because there cannot be peace in the midst of injustice.

That's Jeremiah Wright.

Wright. It's crazy like that. That seemed crazy to be preaching for peace to a group that had a hand in the injustice that is being. Fought against.

Yeah. And so, I mean, given everything that you've related to us about. You know how you said I never expected that it would be people that I call brothers and sisters in Christ to treat us this way. Where do you go from here? Like, what do you think reconciliation looks like?

Well, I think. Reconciliation is something that will never end because obviously we didn't all of a sudden wake up like this. Yeah. This is hundreds of generations of systemic. And intentional poverty. Mm hmm. So we need to start thinking of different ways to make the playing field level. Right. One of the biggest things I feel is we got to do something different with the the pension program because we were, you know, fortunate. Because although I wasn't ordained until 2012, but I had already been a pastor of the church for nine years, so we didn't have to pay. So then we were able to grow and utilize those resources that would have went to a pension program to grow the ministry. And so when you say most of the church right now. Just look at the demographic of how many churches are without a pastor because they can't afford it. But the pension program has probably, what, $10 billion in 10 billion? If no one paid a cent into it, it would last a hundred years. At this point, a hundred years it would last. And so what we are as a denomination dying with our hands wrapped around an oxygen tank. So I predict that in 50 years the USA will not exist and it's because of the pension program. You can't afford.

It. Now, that's the that's the single thing that changes there would affect so much in the denomination. You think?

Yeah. It would allow it would allow people to be able to afford pastors. I mean, and not understand the program is great if you're white, but black churches can't afford that. Most of them can't. And a lot of a lot of white rural churches can't afford it either. And that's why you'll have one person pastoring four different churches. I mean, we are an absolute mess right now. When I first came to Giddings, Lovejoy in 2003, we had over 27,000 members. Right now we have a little bit more than ten. Now do the math. We were bleeding a thousand members a month for almost a year. For almost 20 years. Anything slowing down.

Yeah, it's something that folks come back to. Time and time again. You know, the high watermark of the mainline Protestant denominations being 1960, you know, and the moment where people began to see not just decline, but they were concerned about the decline in the rate of growth. That was the thing that freed people out. And late 50s, early 60s, given those kind of headwinds. What makes third different and what's next for the four third church?

What kind of what makes us different than what? Again.

Given like the headwinds that mainline Protestant denominations face and given just what you said about the Presbyterians declining population, what makes third church different?

Me. Okay. Someone asked me. I'm definitely an anomaly because I had a first career that severely impacts the bottom line of not only the church, but the presbytery. So my engineering construction background has saved the presbytery literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, because for ten years I was the sole person. On the property committee, you can have a committee of one. But it was and I was the one, you know, managing contractors and renovating buildings and selling churches to save the presbytery from bankruptcy. You know how much money I receive from that? Zero. With a third. Who do you think managed the 29 contractors with a $300,000 budget for us to move in? Me? Who managed the $500,000 to make sure the contractors were doing what they were supposed to do with the roof, the boiler, the chiller, all of these things. That was me. A regular pastor with a seminary degree could not do that, and that saved third over the course of 20 years, probably somewhere around 800,000 to $1 million in savings based on my ability to be able to manage contracts and negotiate. It has saved the presbytery at least that much. I brokered a deal to sell our home office to the Botanical Gardens. For $650,000.

Oh, the presbytery office right across the street from. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. That office got sold. And now we don't have, quote unquote, a brick and mortar office. And that saves us right now over $50,000 a year. So the only reason we have money right now was because of those moves with the property.

I see. Okay.

So the next pastor won't have that skill set. So it's because you know of some of the skill sets that I brought that made an impact to the bottom line. So, you know, most pastors that come out of seminary, they don't have a clue of what's going on with the building or how to negotiate contracts or, you know, how to know when you're being overcharged for stuff.

Hmm. It's that real world experience that you're bringing to to the chair. Yeah.

Correct.

Reverend Fortas, is there anything else that you would like to share with us about third church right now?

Well, not necessarily right now, but I would love the opportunity after you able to marinate on some of this to, you know, ask some more questions, because like I said, you know, the whole story can't necessarily be told in an hour, but those are just some of the highlights that could possibly, you know, tease out more, you know, discussion.

Okay, I will do that.

Okay.

Well, for this beginning.

Yes, I look forward. And anytime you want to to have a chat, let me know.

All right. I will do, sir. Thanks for your time.

Thank you so much. You take care. Have a great night.

He's.