In The News
Find links to all the latest news about Pastor Amy,
her work with Invested Faith, and her new book!
Classic City News, October 1, 2023
Book Reading and Conversation: Amy Butler for Beautiful and Terrible Things. Avid Bookshop and First Christian Church Athens invite the public to an author event and book signing with Amy Butler in celebration of her bookBeautiful and Terrible Things: Faith, Doubt, and Discovering a Way Back to Each Other. This event is on Thursday, October 19, 2023, from 7pm-8pm at the First Christian Church. There will be a signing after the discussion.
Baptist News Global, September 26, 2023
This week’s BNG Webinar: Amy Butler
“Pastor Amy” will be the guest on this week’s BNG webinar with Executive Director Mark Wingfield. Amy Butler has written a new book, Beautiful and Terrible Things. This Thursday at 3 p.m. Central time, she’ll discuss the book and her life journey as a pioneering female minister.
Faith and Leadership, September 25, 2023
“Beautiful and Terrible Things” Book Excerpt: Epilogue: Hope rising
In this excerpt from her new memoir, the Rev. Dr. Amy Butler writes about being “unemployed and disgraced” after leaving the Riverside Church in the City of New York — then finding joy in her new project, a fund to help closing churches invest their remaining assets.
Baptist News Global: May 25, 2023
New documentary series shows how churches that close can keep ministry open
Invested Faith will premiere a mini-documentary series to inspire closing churches to donate assets to help social entrepreneurs bring about change in the communities they serve.
The faith-based organization launched by Amy Butler announced the first video in the series focuses on Tiffany Terrell, founder of a nonprofit mobile grocery business that uses buses to deliver healthy, low-cost vegetables, meats and other commodities to food-desert communities in Southwest Georgia.
The Christian Citizen, July 27, 2022
“In 2019 I started a donor-advised fund called Invested Faith. What follows is the story of how Invested Faith was born, and why a pastor like me, who barely passed my one required college math course, would ever try something as crazy as starting an investment fund.
Any faithful church member or pastoral leader paying attention these days has some level of concern about the decline of the institution of the church. I am among that group, and I’ve been thinking about this intensely since I first became a pastor in 2003 at the historic Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, DC.”
Washington Post, April 15, 2022
“How money from dying churches could breathe new life into communities” by Marisa Iati
“Invested Faith is founded on a different approach. Redirecting money from struggling churches to entrepreneurs focused on social justice, Butler said, is a way of embracing the abundance of God. It’s also a way of ensuring that those institutions leave a legacy,”
“From a spiritual and community standpoint, placing assets with Invested Faith would optimally be a shared decision made to celebrate the past witness of a congregation,” she said, and to ensure “the work of faith that congregation has held so dear for so long continues” even after “the life of the institution comes to an end.”
Good Faith Media, July 23, 2021:
Invested Financial, Moral Capital Beyond Stained Glass Walls by Zach Dawes, Jr.
In a culture in which institutions of faith are closing their doors at an alarming rate, the church in America stands to lose significant assets that have served communities in countless redemptive ways,” Butler, an ordained Baptist minister who is currently serving as the intentional interim senior minister at National City Christian Church in Washington, D.C., told Good Faith Media.
“Instead of spending down assets and closing the doors in sad resignation, what if we were to hold out our assets, believing that God’s work in the world continues, and the legacies of our communities live on as we make possible the work of social entrepreneurs imagining gospel in new ways?”
Washington Post, July 15, 2019
“Riverside Church Congregants Call for Reinstatement of First Female Minister..”
“A group of congregants at Riverside Church is calling on the historic Manhattan pulpit to reinstate its first female minister, days after the church did not renew Amy Butler’s contract following a visit she took to a sex shop with church employees and a congregant.”
Washington Post, June 8, 2014
Local DC Pastor Becomes First Woman to Head NYCs Influential Riverside Church
“On Sunday, the 1,600-member congregation of Manhattan’s historic Riverside Church, long one of the most prominent pulpits in the country, voted to hire Butler as senior minister, the first woman to hold the job once filled by famed pastor William Sloane Coffin.”