FIX IT AND THEY WILL COME: How the renewal of a crumbling New Jersey church became a model for reinvestment in community life.

• Author: Mazur, Laurie

Five years ago, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Essex County, New Jersey, had serious problems. Chunks of plaster fell from the walls of its 126-year-old sanctuary A raccoon had taken up residence in the box gutters that drained the roof, causing a bad leak. The rickety wooden ramp leading up to the front door was an accident (and a lawsuit) waiting to happen.

Worse, the congregation had dwindled to just thirty members, less than half of what it had been a decade earlier. Its part-time minister found himself preaching each Sunday morning to a small handful of congregants.

"We were discussing, should we go out of business?" says congregation member Mindy Fullilove, a professor of urban policy and health at the New School, about twenty miles away in New York City.

The church, she explains, entered "a complicated year of discernment" during which it partnered with others to embrace a new strategy for expanding the church's role as a center of community life. With help from a nonprofit crowd-funding platform called ioby (the acronym stands for "in our backyards"), First UU repaired its buildings and opened its doors to the people of its struggling neighborhood.

Today, the church, minus its minister, is a hive of activity--sewing classes, labor organizing, potlucks, a local music festival. As neighbors gather again under the church's (non-leaking) roof, they are spinning new webs of connection, strengthening the filaments of trust and fellowship that hold this community together.

First UU sits just off Main Street in Orange, New Jersey, a city of about 30,000 people near Newark. In many ways, Orange exemplifies the policies that have shaped America's post-industrial cities, with a devastating impact on working-class communities.

Orange emerged as an industrial powerhouse after the Civil War; by the turn of the twentieth century, its thirty-four hat-making factories earned it the nickname "Hat City." The city's residents built Victorian mansions, parks, and libraries, while enclaves of Italian, Irish, and African American factory workers thrived and grew.

The fruits of prosperity in Orange were always distributed unevenly. Even in its glory days, the city was rigidly segregated by race, ethnicity, and class, with inferior schools and services in the poorer parts of town. Then, starting in the 1930s, redlining steered investment away from African American and immigrant neighborhoods, spreading blight and deepening the wealth gap. And in the 1960s, construction of an interstate highway through the center of town sped the exodus of white residents--and capital--to the suburbs.

Today, nearly 90 percent of Orange residents are black or Latinx, including a large population of Caribbean immigrants...