The mismatch between small, aging congregations inside of large, deteriorating church buildings poses a major, long-term challenge to the integrity of our city centers and surrounding neighborhoods. Churches, synagogues, and mosques, after all, not only provide religious refuge, offer human services, and stand as architectural icons, but they also serve as important third places for the community.
Organized religion’s influence has been waning for decades, and today tens of thousands of once-thriving houses of worship are closing, coast to coast, across all religions and denominations. Cities are struggling to address these large church closures just as they must grapple with the demise of major department stores.
One big difference between the two property types is that houses of worship are more numerous than department stores. The director of planning for Gary, Indiana, reports that city of 68,000 residents has more than 250 empty churches. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Buffalo earlier this year announced the closing of 89 parish buildings in the eight-county western New York area, with other faiths also shuttering their doors.
Also unlike a vacant department store, the specific architecture of religious buildings make them difficult to reuse and redevelop; these spaces are neither easy nor cheap to divide up into smaller, more marketable units.
Finally, closing a house of worship is often felt more deeply than that of a department store. Many are local landmarks with steeples that rise high over surrounding housetops. For the parishioners, the sanctuaries are beloved sites of ritual and celebration based on a common faith. The special bond typically manifests itself in the larger community with essential services such as food pantries, childcare centers, and alcohol and drug counseling. Many churches, synagogues, and mosques already serve as third places for their neighbors, where they can join together as a community to sing, play basketball, and build personal bonds.
Redevelopment challenges, options
One current trend is to turn surplus faith properties into affordable housing. State and local governments, fatigued by NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) neighborhoods, are passing laws that give incentives, including density bonuses and approval by right, to developers building 100 percent affordable housing on land owned by houses of worship.
But often a property does not lend itself to housing, affordable or otherwise. What a community may need is for a site to retain its spiritual identity, while at the same time operating as a community hub. Partners for Sacred Places, a Philadelphia-based, not-for-profit organization, undertook a study in cooperation with the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice that showed the average urban church creates $140,000 in contributions to the community in the form of volunteer time, free meeting space, and the like, and generates more than $1.7 million in economic impact over its lifetime.
Mary W. Rowe, president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Institute, puts it precisely: “Spaces and places originally created and financed by communities of all faiths have over time played a significant role in fostering community cohesion and building social capital. From voting to vaccinations, food drives to newcomer supports, these early third places became essential to the secular life of communities of all sizes. As faith traditions evolve, the spaces they created need new purposes and new funding models to sustain their crucial role in building community resilience at every scale.”
Seven strategies
Some houses of worship are facing the challenge head on. Here are seven basic strategies that can help a struggling faith-centered structure to become a prosperous, mixed-use hub that benefits the entire community.
1. Sell and Reimagine. A declining First Church Miami UMC, faced with a dwindling congregation and increasing bills, sold its prime location in downtown Miami to developer Property Markets Group for $55 million. Using part of the sale proceeds, the church bought back 25,000 square feet (2,323 sq m) in the development for the church’s coffee shop—open to everyone—a gym, yoga room, and worship center. “The church wanted to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in downtown Miami in the future, and to do so for longer than the next few years, it would need to change,” said the church’s pastor, Rev. Dr. Audrey Warren. “We were at a point where we had to leverage our property.”
2. Close and donate. A 50-member congregation, Twinbrook Baptist Church in Rockville, Maryland, sold its building at well below market to a healthy Hispanic congregation already meeting there, then used its $1 million in proceeds to fund area charities, aiding 35 religious organizations and other nonprofits to help meet community needs.
3. Partner with a developer. Sharon United Methodist Church, the owner of significant land in a fast-growing part of Charlotte, North Carolina, elected to go big. The church partnered with developer Childress Klein to build the SouthPark Apex development, which includes 345 luxury apartments, a 175-room Hyatt Centric hotel with a rooftop bar and restaurant, as well as a 35,000-square-foot (3,252 sq m) worship center for SouthPark Church—a state-of-the-art facility with indoor and outdoor space that can host up to 300 guests and serves as a premier Charlotte event venue.
4. Collaborate with other faith communities. St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral, in a neighborhood adjacent to downtown Jacksonville, Florida, realized that its future depended in no small part on the health of the surrounding neighborhood. A technical assistance panel of the Urban Land Institute’s North Florida District led to forming a Cathedral District with five churches, other property owners, and the city on the board. The district works on making the entire area, not only the churches, a diverse, full-service neighborhood.
5. Build on surplus land. St. Peter’s United Church of Christ was a declining church in a challenged neighborhood of downtown Louisville, Kentucky, when it decided to invest in the underused property adjacent to it. Today, the Village @West Jefferson, also known as MOLO Village, is a 30,000-square-foot (2,787 sq m), mixed-use development that serves as a neighborhood gathering place.
6. Focus on recreation. The Church of St. Benedict in Manchester, England, was transformed into Parthian Climbing Centre, replete with state-of-the-art climbing walls, a café, and a retail operation. The size and shape of church sanctuaries from the 19th and early 20th centuries lend themselves to the sorts of gym operations at this facility and others, such as Newcastle Climbing Centre in England, Hoosier Heights in Bloomington, Indiana, and City Athletics in Philadelphia.
7. Increase offerings without redevelopment. New websites like Venuely out of New York, ChurchSpace out of Austin, and thisspace out of San Francisco make it simple for a house of worship to rent its underused properties to the local community—a sort of Airbnb for faith properties.
A new community-governance model
Rev. Graham Singh, founder and CEO of Relèven, a Montreal-based, not-for-profit corporation that assists houses of worship throughout North America, notes that revitalization of a faith property may require more than bricks and mortar. “Many current church properties, instead of undergoing redevelopment, are better suited to renovation, reuse, and often require a new community-governance model.”
While good examples of reuse and redevelopment exist for declining places of worship, the scale and wide distribution of these struggling buildings is daunting. A National Council of Churches official estimates 100,000 churches may be forced to close over the next several years in the U.S. alone.
“Any serious endeavor to reuse or redevelop a house of worship requires a strong will, infinite patience, and an infusion of property development expertise,” says Chris Elisara, vice president for civic partnerships of the Thriving Cities Group. “There are inherent challenges congregations have developing their property, especially when they overlook practical realities with impractical passions. Decision making can be confusing and diffuse: e.g., the Roman Catholic Church makes decisions top-down; Southern Baptist churches, bottom-up; most mainline Protestant denominations are a combination.”
At the municipal level, zoning regulations, building codes, and historic preservation ordinances were not drafted with church reuse and redevelopment in mind. And while federal, state, and local governments have programs to make at least limited funds available for affordable housing, money to transform distressed faith centers into community hubs is less predictable.
In communities with hot real estate markets, the major hurdle may be how to convince developers to devote space in a gold-star development for community use. For those in cold real estate markets, the major challenge may be how to rally players and raise money around a project that may look like a lost cause.
Efforts to transform underused faith properties into community hubs takes a village: municipalities, developers, design professionals, financiers, local citizens, and especially church members. And it takes analysis of multiple factors: the property and real estate market, the congregation and judicatory (parent organization of the faith), the neighborhood and municipality, and both the financial and human resources.
With a bit of faith, due diligence, and imagination, even a declining congregation can find a way to keep the spirit of their faith alive—even as the building itself shifts from its single-purpose origin to one serving the larger community in a variety of new ways.
Related reading:
Affordable Housing: YIGBY (“Yes in God’s Backyard”) Movement Seeks to Counter NIMBY Movement
