Testimony of Nathan Gebert
Treasurer, Congregation of St. Saviour
10 December 2002

Good afternoon. I am Nathan Gebert, and I want to thank you for the opportunity to address the commission. I come as an individual representing my own views.

I address you from two perspectives:

I am a member of the community. I moved to West 109th street in 1995. I love my neighborhood. For me it is the best that New York has to offer. It is the only place that I have considered "home" in my adult life. My commitment to the neighborhood took on deeper expression a few years ago when I joined the local Democratic club. I served briefly on the steering committee and have been active in several major campaigns.

I am also a member of the resident congregation at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Congregation of St. Saviour. Like many, I first came to the Cathedral because the edifice attracted me; I see the great south tower of the Cathedral from my bedroom window. I also knew that it had a progressive reputation. Once inside I heard a radically inclusive interpretation of scripture. I felt included, and I joined the congregation.

The congregation is one of the many programs that the Cathedral sponsors.  It is a separate legal entity chartered under the Episcopal Diocese of New York. In the words of one of our vicar's, the congregation is the warmth in the stones. When founded ten years ago the congregation had about 50 people. We have grown to almost 500 people of remarkably diverse backgrounds: African, African-American, Anglo, Caribbean, Central American, Indian, Japanese, Jewish, Muslim, Gay, Straight, Old, Young, well to do, comfortable, and struggling.

Superficially, we have little in common, even theologically we are heterodox, but we practice love toward one another in the most important, tangible ways.  We celebrate lasting unions, the birth of children, we bury one another's dead and bear on another's burdens. After 9/11 every member of the congregation was systematically contacted to see how they had been affected and how we could help. The congregation's website and e-mail alerts became a center for emergency information, and gained the attention of religious bodies overseas as an example how to use the Internet during crises. We also organized relief crews for the workers down at ground zero through out those first days and long afterward.

The community we are building has in impact far beyond what I can convey through numbers or anecdotes.  But we need greater assets to carry out our mission. I know this because I am also the unpaid volunteer treasurer of the congregation. I know that we do not have enough clergy to serve us, or others in the community. I know that our Sunday school program does not get the kind of space it deserves. I know that our congregation's monetary contribution to the Cathedral, while half of our budget, and enough for a medium-sized parish, is less than 2% of the Cathedral budget. I see our need and our potential. This is why I support the cathedral's proposal and its request for limited landmarking.

Some have said that institutions confuse what they want with what they need. This misses the mark qualitatively. First, we should not be grouped with other institutions in the neighborhood; we are several orders of magnitude smaller than our neighbors. And while I don't have the wisdom to discern the difference between the needs and wants for the other institutions, it is clear that hospitals and universities have the resources to fulfill both, one way or another. This is not the case with the Cathedral. For example, replacement of a roof thirty years overdue is an unfulfilled NEED, not a want. The plan outlined today and in previous testimony is a responsible plan developed carefully over nearly a decade to address our needs. Its value depends on certainty. And so the Cathedral has proposed self-imposed limits on development that respect the integrity of the cathedral itself and ensure an appropriate and positive impact on the community. Landmarking the entire close would be a heavy-handed way of achieving, or really, over-achieving, these same goals, and by creating uncertainty might greatly diminish, maybe completely negate, the proposal's value for the Cathedral. It is ironic and sad that that the Cathedral might ultimately lose an opportunity to realize it's mission, because it half-succeeded in building something beautiful. This proposal is about fulfilling the dream of an urban Cathedral "a house of prayer for all people and a unifying center of intellectual light and leadership," as in the Cathedral mission statement. We are still looking forward and do not want to become a museum. The New York Times called the Cathedral "a gothic ruin under construction." Let us continue the "construction" not the "ruin."