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We’re thrilled to welcome Partners for Sacred Places as the guest editor of this year's Special Edition Newsletter on Places of Worship. Recently, we took the opportunity to chat with Bob Jaeger, who co-founded Partners in 1989 and currently serves as its president, about the organization's work and his love of dalle de verre. 

 

Mr. Jaeger has overseen the publication of a recent study on the Economic Halo Effect of older sacred places, and the development of programs to help congregations with internal capacity building, capital campaigns, engagement with the community, and the shared use of space. Mr. Jaeger holds a Master's degree in Preservation Planning from Cornell University and an MBA from the University of Michigan.

 

Can you tell readers a little bit about the origins and development of Partners for Sacred Places? 

 

In the mid 1980s, several local nonprofit programs serving historic churches and synagogues arose in Philadelphia, New York, and New Mexico, completely independent of each other. I served the program in Philadelphia, and we soon discovered each other, started to compare notes, and agreed that a national advocate and resource center was needed. By 1988, the first national conference on this issue was held, and by 1989, Partners was founded with the support of leaders nationwide.
 

 

We heard that you especially love stained glass windows. What are your favorite midcentury religious buildings with beautiful stained glass?  

 

Indeed, discovering Tiffany stained glass in a church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I was going to school in the late 1970s, led to a lifelong love of historic sacred places. After World War II, architects and artisans were experimenting with new materials and new approaches to stained glass, leading to astonishing masterpieces such as the massive dalle de verre windows at First Presbyterian Church in Stamford, Connecticut (The “Fish Church”), and the enormous horizontal window at Loop Synagogue in Chicago.