Jeremy Bates was driving to Kentucky, nearly to the Indiana border, when his phone started blowing up on a cold spring day last March.

Friends were tagging the McHenry man in Facebook posts about Elgin’s First United Methodist Church. The night before, on March 15, 2025, the 101-year-old church’s copper roof was ripped away during a severe storm, leaving a gaping hole in the Gothic building.

“I saw the hole, in horror,” Bates said. He abandoned his plans to check out a damaged church in Kentucky, turned around, and headed to Elgin.

When he got to the church on Highland Avenue, he was not the first roofing company representative there, Bates said. Others had already stopped in and left their business card with the minister, the Rev. Dr. Felicia Howell LaBoy. Restoration company ServePro was on site too, covering the sanctuary’s pews and floors to stop further damage.

Before he went in to add his business card to the mix, Bates put a drone up, taking video of the damage from above and getting a closer look at what needed to be done.

When he added his brochure to the pile from other roofing companies, he also included a thumb drive with that drone video, outlining the damage and what his crews would do to make the sanctuary whole again.

Bates got the contract.

“We know how to do it. That is why we get the work,” he said.

He’s gotten that expertise working on historic churches and homes. For the last five years, Bates has worked as a project manager for Texas-based Precision Construction and Roofing.

Working for that specialty roofing company, Bates has been their go-to guy for churches around the U.S.

There are not a lot of companies that do historic roof restorations, said Mika Hunter. She and her husband, Eric, founded the company.

Bates, she said, “is so smart, detail-oriented, honest and won’t cut corners, which makes him such a valuable employee for Precision. More so than that, he is reliable, which contractors don’t always have a reputation for, and more so than that, he has an amazingly calm demeanor.”

Because he’s from Illinois, the Elgin church “holds a big spot in his heart and one of the projects that he is most proud of,” Hunter said.

Bates’s first job with the company was in New Orleans, restoring church roofs for the Archdiocese of New Orleans following Hurricane Ida. Since then, he’s replaced roofs and restored historic churches in Ohio, Iowa, Chicago, Wisconsin and recently, St. Louis.

What he doesn’t do is suggest that historic, decorated roofs – copper, slate, shakers or Ludowici terra cotta roof tiles – get replaced with asphalt shingles. He’s working with the insurance companies and orchestrating tradespeople to give the house of faith its building back.

He’s become the “church guy” for the roofing company.

“I love historic buildings and old, European building techniques,” Bates said.

Be it copper, clay tile or slate, a church roof “isn’t just any roof,” Bates said.

What he’s done for the Elgin church is ensure the building and its roof will last for another 101 years, LaBoy said.

“He has been incredible. We didn’t know anything” about working with insurance companies or replacing an entire roof, LaBoy said.

They had what she called “ambulance chasers” show up the morning after the storm. “We finally had to have someone posted at the building to keep people out,” LaBoy said.

Bates, she said, didn’t know exactly what her congregation would need that day, “but he was compelled to turn around and to help us.”

The entire cost of replacing the roof and fixing the interior damage caused by rain and snow is $6.5 million, LaBoy said. She’s grateful “for how even-keeled Jeremy has been. He fought with the insurance company for us. He told them, ‘You owe them a copper roof.’ ”

Bates, 46, started as a union carpenter at 18 years old. But he didn’t want to be the guy wielding a hammer on a roof forever. He started selling exterior siding, roofing and windows, and later got into storm restoration.

That led to custom roofing jobs on the Chicago suburbs’ North Shore.

“I was posting pretty jobs” on his Facebook page, and the owners of Precision Roofing “were knocking on my door,” Bates said.

What he does is a very small niche, Bates said. Not every historic church carries the right insurance that will pay for a replacement roof, either.

At First United Methodist, he’s been in charge of nine different crews, all specializing in different parts of the restoration. That includes structural engineers, carpenters, brick masons, the flat roofing crew, the steeple team, the stained glass crew and others.

His sheet metal guy – creating the new copper shingles – is Gary Moore, also of McHenry.

In the photos taken after the storm, the church steeple is still standing. When engineers checked it, they found that water infiltration, combined with the fact that the copper and steel were touching in spots, had eroded it.

“I don’t know how it was still standing,” Bates said.

Because the steeple was untouched, insurance would not cover its reconstruction. The church is fundraising for the $120,000 needed for that, LaBoy said, adding they are about $20,000 away from the goal.

Before the steeple was put back into place a few weeks ago, Bates and the crew from Precision “showed incredible sensitivity,” LaBoy said.

“They asked us if we wanted to bless our cross before hanging it” on the steeple. In a short service, her board prayed over the copper cross that would be looking over the church again. The fingerprints they left on the copper would not be buffed out but left there as a patina develops on it – an idea suggested by the coppersmith, she said.

Bates, she said, “had that sensitivity to detail and to the care and concern ... to the spiritual significance to the things that we were doing.”