At 87, Pioneer Readies Her Next Move

Two venerable city institutions are scouting new turf after a $1 million property transaction: Yale University and Pastor Martha Green.

The hand-off is taking place on an industrial stretch of Goffe Street at the gateway from downtown to the Dixwell neighborhood.

It was a match made at the altar of institutional expansion.

Martha Green, a retired laundry worker and a female trailblazer in New Haven’s religious community, has tended to her flock in a 7,500 square-foot red-brick church there since 1983. The congregation, St. Mary’s Unison Free Will Baptist Church, has grown too large for the space. It needed to move.

Yale, meanwhile, has gradually been buying up the pockmarked block ever since former Alderwoman Joyce Chen suggested they try to improve and stabilize it. (Read about that here in 06520.) The two sides found each other and agreed to a $1 million sale of the property.

Yale has given St. Mary’s three years to find a new home. Green said she’s confident they’ll be moving much sooner.

The Lord told her it was time to move, she said. So she knew it made sense.

Just as the Lord told her back in 1963 to become a minister. ​“I got a vision from God for the peoples,” she recalled.

Just as the Lord told her in 1973 to form St. Mary’s, originally on Grand Avenue in Fair Haven.

Just as the Lord told her to move the congregation to the Goffe Street building. Thousands have passed through the doors since then and worshiped at her behest. The congregation has grown to around 250. At a recent Sunday morning service, the sanctuary was filled with singing, preaching, and organ riffs. A little boy danced in the aisle. A sign board reported that 91 children had enrolled in the church’s religious school.

Green has trained seven associate ministers to preach along with her. All are women. An eighth trainee, Juanita Lewis, has just left to start her own congregation on State Street.

Today Green serves as second-in-command of the multistate Unison Free Will Baptist Holy Convocation, to which St. Mary’s belongs. She’s the first woman to hold that spot.

“When [Green] started, it was unheard of for a woman [to start a congregation]. She really paved the way for a lot of women,” said city police Sgt. Robin Higgins, who’s the pastor’s niece. Higgins grew up attending St. Mary’s. Today she’s a trustee.

Green’s daughter Lillie Raper, a 70-year-old patient care assistant at the Hospital of St. Raphael, is one of the seven associate ministers who preach at St. Mary’s on the weekend.

“You are a role model,” she said to her mom during a conversation Thursday in Green’s Fair Haven apartment. ​“Not only do you preach. You live what you preach. People are drawn to Christ because of you.” (Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch Green recite a daily morning prayer during that conversation.)

Green moved to New Haven from Greenville, North Carolina with her husband Willie in 1953 to join her brothers, who worked at the Winchester Arms plant. Willie found work at the Malleable Iron factory. Martha worked at Yale-New Haven Hospital, then, until retirement, in the laundry room at the Veterans Administration hospital in West Haven.

In 1963 the Lord called her to the ministry. As she prepared her first sermon she focused on Chapter 1, Verse 5 of the Book of Joshua. She made it a foundation of the sermon.

“As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee,” the Lord tells Joshua in that verse.

The verse spoke to Green as she, like Joshua, prepared to ascend to a new leadership role.

“If He was with Joshua,” she figured, ​“I know He will be with me.”

To Green, religious observance begins and is founded on faith. She offered a parable. ​“If you hadn’t had faith your car would start, you wouldn’t have gotten in it,” she said. ​“That’s the kind of confidence you have to have. Confidence in God.”

Green has continued to turn to that verse in Joshua at moments of transition and challenge. And she has found she could meet those challenges. The congregation thrived in the original move to Goffe Street; the mortgage has long been paid off. Now comes the move from Goffe Street to a new home. Green said she has no doubt it will be a successful move. She already has a location in mind. She doesn’t want to reveal it yet. She knows where it is. The Lord knows where it.

“God don’t lie,” she noted. ​“He keeps his word.”