Historic Riverside Church to vote on woman as senior minister

Amy Butler is poised to become the seventh senior minister and the first woman to lead the famed Riverside Church in Manhattan. Butler has been senior minister of Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., for 11 years. The church has about 300 members with an estimated 150 people in attendance on Sunday mornings.

When she arrived at Calvary, she inherited a church that had dwindled from 5,000 parishioners to about 70 on a Sunday. As pastor, she pushed the downtown church to be more multicultural and oversaw a massive redevelopment of the church’s downtown property.

Under Butler’s leadership, Calvary Baptist voted in 2012 to dissociate from the Southern Baptist Convention, citing concerns over the SBC’s commitment to the separation of church and state and allowing local churches to make their own decisions. Calvary, for example, is open to gays and lesbians in leadership.