East Hampton Press, August 2010

St. Michael’s has Activist New Pastor

St. Michaels Lutheran Church in Amagansett has a new advocate for its planned—and controversial—40-unit senior citizen apartment complex, slated to break ground in September if all goes well. The church also has a new pastor. The advocate and pastor are wrapped up in the same person, Katrina Foster, who is no stranger to controversy herself.

The youthful, hip, motorcycle-riding gay pastor—who is legally married to free-lance writer and poet, Pamela Kallimanis, and has a 7-year-old daughter, has only preached two sermons at St. Michaels so far, but has already studied up on the planned apartments. She sees the housing as central to her pastoral work at St. Michaels.

“We have all this land at the church (eight acres) and when I heard that the congregation wanted to build senior housing on it, I was thrilled,” Pastor Foster said. “The church has a mission,” she said, citing a parable in which Jesus was to have said when you take care of the least and the last among you, you have taken care of Jesus himself.

“So it’s a Gospel imperative,” said the devout pastor, who invited this reporter to pray for peace and serenity with her at the beginning of the interview.

“We could have broken up the land and sold it for a fortune, but as people of faith and as part of our ministry, we are going to build this housing,” she said.

Pastor Foster also just taken on the pastoral duties of Incarnation Lutheran Church in Bridgehampton, but St. Michaels was her original calling. She heard about the opening through a pastor who was a friend.

Raised on Amelia Island, Ga., near Jacksonville, Fla., she developed an understanding of a community that was filled with the wealthy and poor, so living on the East End, with a similar mix of people, is familiar to her. So is fishing, hunting, surfing and other recreational fun associated with living on an island.

Her passions for the ministry started to play out at the age of 4, she said and she knew all the while she was growing up she would become a minister.

“My joke has been that God took me from the South, to the South Bronx to Southampton,” she said. She lives in Watermill, which is in Southampton.

After getting her master’s degree in divinity at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, S.C., Pastor Foster’s first calling was to a Lutheran Church in the Fordham section of the Bronx. It was there that she got her first taste of what it was to plan for a $22 million affordable housing and community program associated with the church. Although the plans for the housing fell through when the economy tanked in September of 2008, Pastor Foster brings the planning experience to her job at St. Michaels.

She also played a role in the Bronx church, where she served for almost 16 years, in expanding the giving program. When she arrived at the church, annual giving was around $8,000 a year; when she left, the figure had skyrocketed to $70 million a year. “That happened with lots of prayer and hard work and inviting people to come and share the experience of our church,” she said. Most of the congregation had an income of $20,000 a year or less, but they tithed their 10 percent to the church anyway, she said.

Experience has been a good teacher to Pastor Foster, 41, and she learned a lot when she was almost defrocked in 2007 for being gay and married. The couple was married twice, once in 1998 in a traditional ceremony in New York, and a second time, last year, before a judge in Connecticut, where gay marriage is legal. In New York State, where gay marriage is not technically legal, the government recognizes marriages from states where it is legal, Pastor Foster said.

The Lutheran Church of America recently changed its policy about gay pastors with families. But in 2007, the church said a pastor could be gay, but mus remain celibate. Because of that rule, and her insistence that she had the right to be gay and have a family, the minister was almost defrocked. But the LCA voted in 2009 to overturn that rule, and welcomed gay ministers and their families into its fold. Pastor Foster played an active role in the LCA’s decision to open up its policies about gay ministers.

For now, however, the young minister has her hands full with getting to know her parishioners and the surrounding communities in both churches she serves, preparing her sermons, and becoming active in the efforts to build the senior housing.

A hearing on the church’s plans for the housing will be at the town Planning Board Wednesday night at 7 p.m. at 159 Pantigo Road. The plans for the apartment complex also call for the 40-unit affordable housing apartments to have a community center. The apartments will be funded with $5.9 million in grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but approval for those funds is only good through September. So representatives for the congregation are anxious to break ground that month.

One neighbor of St. Michaels, Dr. Huntington Sheldon, has asked the planning board not to rush its approval.

Pastor Foster brushed aside the misgivings of those who might be against the housing. “It’s basically just one person who is against it, but who knows, maybe he will need this housing himself one day,” she said.

Services at Incarnation Lutheran Church are 9 a.m. Sundays, and at St. Michaels, services are at 11 a.m.