‘Different type of service.’ Historic Miami churches get new spiritual life as arts spaces

The members at Coral Gables’ oldest African American congregation, St. Mary First Missionary Baptist Church, have dwindled over the decades. The same has happened at The First Church of Christ, Scientist just a mile across town, where only a handful of parishioners remain today.

But, these two historic Miami churches live on — at least the buildings do. They’re still places where people gather to uplift their spirits, but instead of religious sermons, it’s through dance and music.

That’s thanks to Lewis “Mike” Eidson, a Coral Gables lawyer and prominent arts patron, who’s converted three historic churches into new arts complexes through a nonprofit called Sanctuary of the Arts, saving the buildings from being destroyed or, as is the fate for many Miami properties, bought and developed into new commercial properties. Eidson is passionate about preserving important parts of the city’s history but he also sees live theater as a way to bring the community together, likening the performances to a different type of spiritual experience.

“A sanctuary is where people go to pray. They go to have relief from society’s problems,” Eidson said. “When somebody walks in the front door, I don’t want them thinking about the presidential race anymore. This is a sanctuary to get away from all that.”

Eidson had the idea to start the nonprofit after years of supporting the arts community and fighting to save and restore historic properties in Coral Gables and has been embroiled in the ongoing debate over what to do with the Coconut Grove Playhouse. He said he had long been looking for a way to provide a space for artists to hone their craft and give the community an opportunity to see high-end dance and music shows at an affordable cost.

The first church property that caught his eye was a large white building on Andalusia Avenue in Coral Gables.

“’I saw this piece of property and I brought my wife out there and I said, ‘What if we rent this and turn it into a performance space? We’ll do everything that we did at the Arsht Center only we’ll do it for the people of Coral of Gables,” said Eidson, who served as chairman on the board of the Adrienne Arsht Center for five years and also has helped lead South Florida theater, ballet and opera organizations. “They won’t have to drive downtown and it’ll be cheaper.”

The property contained two churches — a smaller one built in 1930 and a larger structure built in the 1940s — but much of the historically designated church had remained vacant for over ten years.

After several months of negotiations with the church’s attorneys, Eidson acquired a long-term lease for the property and cofounded the nonprofit, Sanctuary of the Arts, with his wife, Margaret Eidson, in 2019. The nonprofit gives spaces once devoted to religious worship a second life in the form of a home for the performing arts.

“The socialization of the community would be through the church ... and you see less and less of that today,” Eidson said, referring to the Baptist churches he grew up attending in Atlanta. “That’s one of the reasons why I repurpose all these churches. I want to bring the people back together through music and through dance.”

Sanctuary of the Arts premiered its first show in April of 2022, producing about 70 shows per year, with over 100 slated for this year. The nonprofit collaborates with a variety of professional music, dance, theater and visual arts organizations, but also allows the space to be rented by smaller, up-and-coming companies to train and perform, said Rafi Maldonado-Lopez, a dancer and choreographer who is principal managing director for Sanctuary of the Arts.

“Through the sanctuaries ... we make sure that they’re always affordable so that we can help organizations increase their economic sustainability.”

Maldonado-Lopez said the cost of renting performance space can be upwards of $50,000. At Sanctuary, it’s about $1,600.

Today, Eidson has successfully flipped three churches in Coral Gables — two belonging to The First Church of Christ, Scientist and a third, St. Mary First Missionary Baptist Church, a historic house of worship that served the Black community in Coral Gables’ MacFarlane Homestead Historic District for nearly a century before it was put up for sale in 2019.

St. Mary’s and preserving Black history

The church membership at St. Mary’s, once home to a thriving congregation of 1,500 members in its heyday, had dwindled over the years, leaving the building without adequate funds for upkeep.

“I looked at this church and I went inside it was the roof was leaking,” said Eidson. “They had all kinds of fines because nobody used it anymore ... This place was abandoned.”

Sanctuary of the Arts purchased the historic church for $550,000 in 2020, according to Miami-Dade County property records, and renovated the deteriorating building into a multi-purpose theater that seats about 300 people.

The church, built in 1958 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, was a prominent meeting place during the Civil Rights movement. It’s a part of history that Eidson says Sanctuary tries to honor with its events and local community involvement.

The Coconut Grove Ecumenical Network, for example, was the first group to dedicate the new space by producing a reenactment of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington. And later this month, Sanctuary will co-host a town hall about the proposed Florida Museum of Black History with Ten North Group, an organization focused on real estate development in low income communities.

“That church played a pivotal part of the future of Coral Gables. I wanted to preserve that history. That district is important to Coral Gables. And so is the building.”

Church members, many of whom grew up at St. Mary’s, had reservations about the purchase at first, said Maldonado-Lopez.

“Everybody was so skeptical, like, ‘What are they going to do here, another group of people telling us what we need and what we want.’ And we didn’t do that.’”

When it was condemned and put up for sale, many of its members were left without a place to worship.

“A lot of the people when the church was lost, knew no other church. They grew up here,” said Carolyn Donaldson, who visited St. Mary’s as a child, during a CBS 4 News segment.

“St. Mary serviced the community. As an art theater, they will be servicing the community. It’s just a different type of service,” Donaldson said.

Sanctuary donated the pews in St. Mary’s to a church in Haiti that was destroyed during Hurricane Maria and an earthquake in 2021, allowing a piece of the church to live on.

On a recent weekday in July, a group of young girls sat in a semicircle awaiting instruction before striking orange HomeDepot buckets with their drumsticks. Their instructor, Juan Posso from the University of Miami’s Donna E. Shalala MusicReach program which provides music education to under-served children in Miami-Dade, taught the girls various rhythm patterns in between loud bangs.

The summer classes are one example of how Sanctuary lends their space to art programs serving the wider public. The nonprofit also has a partnership with Miami-Dade public schools to provide a program that infuses dance with STEM technology and kinetic movement, said Maldonado-Lopez.

Money pressures on churches

The story of St. Mary’s is not uncommon for aging churches, many of which are struggling to keep up with expensive building costs.

Skyrocketing real estate values in South Florida have caused aging churches to adapt, with selling or leasing portions of a church’s property becoming more common, said Matt Messier, managing director for the religious, education and non-profit practice for Foundry Commercial real estate company.

“What you find is as the building gets older, that it’s requiring more money to be taken care of,” Messier told The Miami Herald. “There are some folks that say, ‘Hey, let’s really look at our real estate, do we need all this property? Because in many ways it’s taking money away from our mission in our ministry.”

Though the churches are no longer used for their original purpose, Eidson tries to maintain the structural integrity of the buildings as much as possible. On the outside, the buildings still look like churches, but on the inside, the nonprofit renovated the buildings to accommodate performances — updating the acoustics, adding sprung dance floors and knocking out pews to build an adequate stage.

“I had to take all of the pews out, all of them. And I put a dance floor down there and we use it every day,” Eidson said. “It’s a fantastic dance space. I’ll put that dance floor up against any dance floor in town.”

The larger building within the First Church of Christ, Scientist’s 1-acre property was renovated and converted into a 314-seat theater, while the smaller church was transformed into a dance studio, where local and international dance students now train and rehearse for shows. The Christian Science Reading Room building is still used by a small group of parishioners for their services.

As he researched the property, Eidson soon learned that the neoclassical church buildings, notably different from Mediterranean style architecture found throughout Coral Gables, were designed by famed Gables architect Phineas Paist.

“We get it and realize, this thing is famous. This is a famous piece of architecture,” he said. Eidson, who was a part of the team that preserved the historic building now home to popular bookstore, Books & Books, saw the rental as another win in his decades-long fight to save historic properties in Coral Gables.

“This is important to the city. Because I don’t want anybody to tear this down and build a building here,” Eidson said. “I want people to always be able to see this is where Coral Gables started.”

The Sanctuary spaces are used for a myriad of cultural and art activities, and have hosted performances by famed musicians like violinist Joshua Bell, as well as up-and-coming artists, like new local dance group, Syncopate Collective. Many of the shows feature artists from South America and groups dedicated to showcasing artists of color, such as the New Canon Chamber Collective.

Maldonado-Lopez said the accessibility of Sanctuary’s space to all types of groups allows the non-profit to deliver art to the public in a way that’s embedded in everyday life. Plus, the buildings get to remain a special place for the community.

“[The churches] have a good feeling. It’s places where people went to rejoice, to mourn, to celebrate, to meditate,” he said. “And that energy stays in those places.”

This story was produced with financial support from Trish and Dan Bell and from donors comprising the South Florida Jewish and Muslim Communities, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.