Sometimes a yoga class is an exercise class and sometimes it’s worship. Sometimes a luncheon is one-part prayer service and one-part lunch. Park Slope Presbyterian (PCA) may do “God’s work” in the city of Brooklyn, but it is as much a social justice operation as it is a church.

This week the United States Supreme Court decided not to hear a case filed by a Bronx church (Bronx Household of Faith) which would render a decision on whether it is lawful for religious groups to hold worship services in public school facilities. As a result, 60 churches in New York City will lose the worship spaces they rent in public school buildings when school is not in session.

Worship is a big part of my life. I attend mass often. I attend services at a synagogue occasionally. I celebrate my own Sabbath — as well as my husband’s — weekly. I’m a Catholic who strenuously opposes school vouchers. I don’t want a crèche outside my courthouse. I don’t even want a Christmas tree there. I question whether any church should have tax-exempt status. To my thinking, the Decalogue has no proper place in a courthouse. I think it improper when the president drops God’s name in a speech. Yet when it comes to the question of whether a church has the right to rent space in a public school, I’m not sure what I think.

On one hand I know prayer has no place in public schools; on the other, I believe that those who worship have a have as much right as any other group to assemble and to rent space for this purpose.

Until recently I worked in a social justice ministry established and run by Park Slope Presbyterian Church, a church which has been renting space for Sunday worship in John Jay Complex, a public school building in my Brooklyn neighborhood. Until quite recently, this building was occupied by three struggling schools which (mostly) black and Latino students attend. (A fourth school — a screened school designed to attract white middle class students — opened in the building in September of 2011 with the help of corporate funding.)

John Jay, which was not long ago known as “Thug School” (Lately I’ve heard eighth-graders call it “the segregated school.”) has long been forsaken by neighbors in its affluent part of town and the NYC DOE (New York City Department of Education) who took not nearly enough interest in a building with chipping paint, non-operational toilets and metal detectors at the entrance.

Park Slope Presbyterian got ejected from John Jay this week as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the Bronx Household of Faith Case. I asked Sandhya Reju Boyd, an active member of Park Slope Presbyterian and a founder of one of its vital (and ever expanding) advocacy programs for the indigent, for her thoughts on the new restrictions.

She noted that her church did not merely rent space at John Jay, but that Park Slope Presbyterian took an interest in the John Jay community. When the school’s scoreboard broke down, for example, Park Slope Presbyterian stepped up when no one else would.
“No one at the DOE gave them the money. Our church did. We were proud to do it…so they would not have to forfeit their season… ”

On one hand, relationship is the very thing those who oppose allowing churches to hold prayer services in public schools fear. On the other hand, because the Park Slope Presbyterian worshippers had a commitment to leaving no evidence of their presence at the school after assembling there, few if any children even knew a church group was using their cafeteria on Sundays.

Millions of dollars have been poured into the NYC schools by 60 churches that have rented space in public school buildings over the past decade. Those schools will lose that revenue now. With regard to the Park Slope Presbyterian/John Jay arrangement, I think it ironic that an invisible church served as a supportive presence in a invisible school — by which I mean invisible, in the Ralph Ellison sense. Before the NYC DOE pushed the new school into John Jay, students in the building were — as poor people so often are in NYC — in their own community. Park Slope Presbyterian saw them.

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