How Do You Resurrect an Empty Church?

On June 25, Summerfield Church in Milwaukee held its last Sunday service. The rough-cut sandstone church, with its bright red doors and stained-glass windows, was built in 1904 to house the state’s oldest Methodist congregation, and occupies a prominent corner lot a few blocks north of downtown. By this spring, the congregation had dwindled to just 11 members, none younger than 65, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. And the repair bill to get the water-damaged structure shipshape was $1.3 million.

With that, Milwaukee loses not just a church, but also a cooling center during heat waves, a place where hot meals were served until 2 a.m. on snowy nights, a meeting point for Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. As for the physical structure itself, which is a mental landmark for locals if not an official one protected by city law? That’s not yet clear.

It is a story replaying over and over in cities across the United States, where older churches have been hammered by neighborhood change and maintenance costs, coinciding with a national trend of plummeting religious attendance across faiths. Over the past decade, the share of Americans who attend weekly services at a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple has fallen to 30 percent, after hovering for half a century at 40 percent. Overall membership has fallen even more precipitously, and less than half of Americans now say they “belong” to a religious organization. A pair of studies has suggested that thousands of U.S. churches close each year (though a smaller, significant number are founded).

And all of this was happening before COVID, which normalized virtual participation and decoupled people from their neighborhood institutions.

“Churches have been on the edge of a cliff, and COVID was a blast of air blowing them off,” said Rick Reinhard, a consultant who has worked with the United Methodist Church on the question of what to do with aging structures. He rattled off a list of towns with half a dozen, a dozen, or more churches heading for obsolescence, from Rome, Georgia, to Orange, New Jersey, whose 291-year-old First Presbyterian was among the oldest institutions to close. “There is a great mismatch between small, aging congregations and large, aging properties,” he told me. “What empty department stores were 30 years ago, empty churches are today, but much more difficult to resolve.”

Last month, the issue made headlines in New York City, where the dozen-person congregation of West-Park Presbyterian Church is trying to sell its 19^th-century building to a developer who will demolish it and build apartments. Some famous neighbors, including Mark Ruffalo and Wendell Pierce, say the church’s $50 million maintenance bill is exaggerated, and that it should be preserved in its current form whether the congregation wants it or not.

This dilemma echoes older ones. Fifty years ago, white flight emptied out urban neighborhoods just as a new, global wave of immigrants began to repopulate those areas, and many churches changed hands. Others found a happy second life as theaters or homes. Tim Keller, the influential evangelical pastor who died this spring, recalled the jarring sight of converted churches in Manhattan, including a beautiful brownstone church in Chelsea that had served Episcopal worshippers since 1844. “Now it was the Limelight, an epicenter of the downtown club scene,” Keller wrote. “Thousands of people a night showed up for drugs and sex and the possibility of close encounters with the famous of the cultural avant garde. It was a vivid symbol of a culture that had rejected Christianity.”

But empty churches are a bigger problem now, and far beyond the shores of godless Manhattan. Maddy Johnson helps run the Church Properties Initiative at the University of Notre Dame, which tracks scores of conversions into apartments, refugee shelters, coffee shops, rehab centers, and other community facilities. The hope is that the project, which is focused on Catholic parishes, can help church leaders think strategically about whether it makes sense to sell some of their assets to uphold the church, sometimes literally, before the repair bills become untenable.

“The most common scenario is that next to a prime parking lot there’s an aging house of worship that needs millions in repairs,” said Johnson, who was trained as an urban planner. “We want to put a tourniquet on the deferred maintenance that’s taking away the lifeblood of the remaining parishes. Meanwhile, diocese leaders are saying: ‘You can help us unlock hundreds of millions in real-estate value? Let’s do that.’ ” In Austin, Texas, for example, St. Austin Catholic Parish leased some of its campus to a developer to build student housing; the money paid for a brand-new school and other facilities. In California, the state has passed a special law to help churches turn their parking lots into affordable housing—a movement known as YIGBY, or “Yes in God’s Backyard.”

But those are the easy projects. Many Catholic dioceses are reorganizing their parishes with maintenance costs (and real-estate opportunities) in mind. It’s a similar logic to the one that has driven public-school consolidation in many Rust Belt cities. As the diocese in Madison, Wisconsin, put it recently, outlining a consolidation plan: “We are investing increasingly more on buildings and less in people.” That’s also underway in Baltimore and in Cincinnati, where the archdiocese notes its Sunday masses are only a third full. It simply doesn’t need all of its buildings.

Locals often disagree. In Chicago, former parishioners at Saint Adalbert’s in Pilsen have been fighting the archdiocese’s planned sale of the closed church to a developer. Last year, the local alderman threatened to downzone the church property, reducing its value to developers, and its Pietà had to be moved from the church with a police escort. It’s a frequent conflict, even when the money goes to shore up the church’s mission elsewhere (the Pietà was moved to a nearby church), in part because many closing churches are in gentrifying neighborhoods where there’s both an opportunity to cash in and a fierce attachment to symbols of the past.

Still, better to have an empty church in Pilsen than in Ottumwa, Iowa, a city of 25,000 that has recently seen eight churches close. Or Gary, Indiana, which Reinhard says has 250 empty churches. There are now a handful of initiatives, like Partners for Sacred Places, that help churches, communities, and city leaders figure out how to make an abandoned or underutilized church work for everyone.*

Another of those undertakings is Church Buildings for Collaborative Partnerships, a grant-funded project at the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis. “The culmination is finding natural partners in the community, religious or not, and inviting them into our spaces,” said Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale, an administrator at the diocese. He cited a church in New Harmony, Indiana, that successfully raised $50,000 from its neighbors to pay off its mortgage. “It’s hard to say to newcomers, ‘Come join us, and by the way, we owe all this money,’ ” said Linda Warrum, a church member who led the fundraising, at a ceremony to burn the mortgage note. “Now we can simply say, ‘Oh, yes, come join us and let’s work together. Let’s do this.’ ”

O’Sullivan-Hale made the case against funding church business by selling property. “We owe a debt to our ancestors,” he said. “The church did a good job of acquiring prime real estate, and there’s value to communities in real estate being controlled by an organization without a profit motive.”

Indeed, pastors are not real-estate developers (and a good thing too). But if they do decided to sell or redevelop, they also have to contend with the simple question of the architecture. Like aging office towers, aging churches are challenging conversion targets subject to inflexible city rules. It’s hard to renovate them for other uses.

What’s more, they often have enormous significance even for neighbors who never set foot inside; they are fixtures of the town skyline and often, in their second life, house functions (like theaters) that can have trouble finding affordable, ample space elsewhere. Landmarking and zoning restrictions can prevent demolition and preserve the building, the memories associated with it, and its future potential. But that’s a smart path forward only if a new operator can take over before the repair bills mount into the millions of dollars—and often, before the congregation shrinks to a few dozen people. At that point, an aging house of worship may simply become—for both a church’s broader mission and the city itself—too heavy a cross to bear.