Its solid red doors with black, metal handles and mint green spires look out over South Second Street.
Many Louisvillians or visitors may pass this church on their commutes or as they travel through downtown, but they may not know that the Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral predates the American Civil War and has since become a gathering space for many Louisvillians.
Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral says it’s Louisville’s oldest house of worship. The building is more than 200 years old, and its aged structure is starting to crack. Church leadership said a $500,000 matching grant could better support the building and Louisvillians who rely on the church nearly every day.
Rev. Matthew Bradley is the dean of the church. He said he remembers visiting the house of worship when he was five years old in the children’s choir. Bradley, now 42, is learning about what materials work best to sustain a roof with a two-century-old bell tower.
He said structural maintenance is the primary project.
“It's kind of a bones campaign, honestly,” Bradley said. “There's not too much fancy we're doing. We're doing trusses, beams, rafters.”
The grant is from Partners for Sacred Places, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving historic houses of worship and other sacred spaces. Christ Church Episcopal Church is the first in Kentucky to receive a grant from the National Fund for Sacred Places.
“It was so gratifying that they weren't looking for the fanciest place or the biggest church, but places that were serving community,” Bradley said.
On a chilly December afternoon, Bradley climbed a dust-ridden, rickety ladder to the roof, three floors up. At the top, a poplar tree bears the weight of the roof’s frame. The yellow poplar tree was common in Louisville in the 1800s, so the beam was built into the cathedral’s original structure.
This type of wood is less than ideal to permanently support any structure because it's a softer wood and susceptible to rot, Bradley said. The old beam has shifted over the years and left gaps in the roofing structure. The grant would allow the church to fully reinforce it with the proper materials, he said.
In the cathedral’s worship space, some of the front columns are cracked where they meet the roof. At the side entrance, sandy bricks peek out of the wall. The green, red and beige paint that once covered the expanse is faded, revealing cracked and chipped plaster.
Bradley said he is excited to finally fix some of the wear and tear, but he wants to find a way to leave some of the brick exposed. After researching the building’s history, he said, he discovered that enslaved people created most of the materials to construct the cathedral, including the brick.
“How do we leave a section of the brick where you can see it, and put up a marker that will acknowledge that part of the story?” he said. “We wanted to be more open and transparent about the full scope of it. Churches love to tell the good parts of their story. There's a reason that something like slavery was allowed to happen in America. It's because the church signed off on it.”
Being ‘a downtown church’
The original cathedral was built in 1824 on what used to be the edge of Louisville on the Ormsby farm, one of Louisville's historic families. In 1865, the congregation opened an orphanage for girls in the building, in response to the yellow fever outbreak. The orphanage later became Home of the Innocents in the Irish Hill neighborhood.
The cathedral continued to operate as a meeting place for worship and community gathering for women, children, the LGBTQ+ community and the unhoused.
Nearly 200 years after its founding, Bradley said the cathedral opened its doors to protesters during the 2020 racial reckoning, following the police killing of Breonna Taylor. He said he remembered welcoming downtown Louisville demonstrators at 6 p.m. each night and letting them spend the night in the church until sunrise.
“It's part of what it means to be a downtown church,” Bradley said. “If this is a building that we open for five hours on a Sunday to have worship, what are we doing? And I think one of the things that we need to do to be better as a church is inviting people into the space. Let's not wait ‘til it's a crisis. Let's let people know this is a space that they can use anytime.”
Now, Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral houses a women and children’s shelter, several weekly Alcoholic and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and the Room in the Inn program that provides temporary overnight shelter in the winter months.
The church has to raise one dollar for every dollar of the National Fund for Sacred Places grant. If the congregation meets its goals, Bradley said the engineering and construction contractors could start the restoration in April 2027.
Bradley said he wants to also raise money for St. George Episcopal Church and Church of Our Merciful Saviour in West Louisville.
