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Legacy building meets tilt-up concrete. Steeple meets stark skyline. Almost like a storied university with old and new campuses that are marked by buildings designed and constructed in very different time periods, disparate church structures dot the contemporary American landscape.
Today, one church may awe a passerby with its architectural splendor, while another may stand out simply for its utilitarian structure and handsome greenspace. Yet, they co-exist and serve multiple functions within their urban and suburban communities—and they likely have either reinvented themselves or soon will to meet modern concerns.
Church migration
Go to the core of any major U.S. city and you will find them: marvelous downtown churches with ornate facades and intricate wrought iron fences. According to architect and writer Duo Dickinson, based in Madison, Connecticut, they stood proud in the era of the Industrial Revolution.
“They are buildings that were altar-facing, rigid, and jam-packed on Sundays,” as he describes these cathedrals and massive houses of worship, “because people could walk to church before the federal highway system. Factories were downtown, and people could walk from a tenement.”
Then came World War II and the attending social and cultural changes that resulted in the suburbs—and people flocking to them to escape the high cost and congestion of life in the city.
“… people could walk to church before the federal highway system. Factories were downtown, and people could walk from a tenement.”
—Duo Dickinson, Architect and Writer, Duo Dickinson Architect, Madison, CT
Today, the migration continues on another level, from the physical realm to the digital thanks to the internet, Dickinson notes. “Work can be completely disassociated because of the internet, and so all cultural hubs are changing” … once again.
For the downtown church, these changes mean they too must change. “What that means is the buildings remain in great locations, but they must be there to impact culture,” Dickinson notes. “If they’re going to remain and the culture changes, all buildings must change. Just as the shoe repair shop becomes a Starbucks, churches must change.”
Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James in downtown New Haven, Connecticut. Image courtesy of Duo Dickinson.
Breathing life back into the downtown church
In the duality of presence that exists today in downtown churches—where structures are either slowly decaying or springing into a new life—Dickinson shares an example of one that’s experiencing the latter.
At the Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James in downtown New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale University, “a very core group of people see the value of continuing to hold not only church services there, but of enhancing the existing structure to service cultural realities,” Dickinson finds.
Some of those cultural realities include homelessness, where St. Paul and St. James’ expansive undercroft space has become a haven to serve meals to those in need.
In terms of services upstairs, the core group of attendees who are working to preserve the historic site are also catering to new urbanites, such as their grown children and other Millennials who don’t want to own cars today.
“Within a 3-5 minute walk, or less, [from Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James in downtown New Haven, Connecticut] there are 1k new human beings in that neighborhood who weren’t there before.”
—Duo Dickinson, Architect and Writer, Duo Dickinson Architect, Madison, CT
“They want to walk and use the internet and live that walking life,” as Dickinson notes. “Which creates a need for community-oriented space—and there’s value to that.”
Incrementally, St. Paul and St. James is shifting to better service its surrounding community in the 21st century. Part of this community includes five new six-story apartment buildings within two blocks of the historic church. “Within a 3-5 minute walk, or less, there are 1k new human beings in that neighborhood who weren’t there before,” Dickinson describes.
And it’s not just historic church buildings that are morphing into current-day hubs of community and service.
“You’ll see this more in libraries, shopping malls, and zombie homes,” Dickinson shares, “those owned by no one, sitting there fallow because the culture has changed, where those they were originally meant to service are there no more.”
He adds, “Through the lens of sustainability, we have thousands of incredible buildings in locations that can no longer do what they were meant to do.”
On the outskirts of downtowns and inner cities, churches in the post-WWII metro suburbs are also not escaping the transformation of society in the 21st century.
Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James in downtown New Haven, Connecticut. Image courtesy of Duo Dickinson.
Mixed-use meets missions in the metro
In the suburbs is largely where architects like Ravi Waldon of Princeton, New Jersey-based Michael Graves Architecture (MGA), principal and faith-based sector leader, are helping some churches knock down what’s not working and supplant it with public housing or senior centers that do.
Macedonia Baptist in Washington, D.C., for instance, has become New Macedonia Baptist Church, offering housing in an area that lacks 100,000 units of public housing, Waldon notes. Through MGA and its partner firm, Enterprise Community Partners, a housing study was completed and the new approach to using the church’s land to service the community came into fruition.
In Severn, Maryland, Waldon shares that one church has so much land that they are turning it into a community life center with community gardens, sports fields, and a food pantry that serves thousands of meals each month to the area’s proportionately high levels of food insecure families.
“They’re creating a drive-thru where people can come and get food,” Waldon describes of the Severn project. “Then, there’s a small thrift store for clothing distribution. They’re meeting a slightly different need than the urban need, but they’re meeting the needs of their community.”
In Prince George’s County in Maryland, which borders the eastern portion of Washington, D.C., Waldon notes an interesting merger of two churches looking to partner and serve their community in a stronger way.
“Each wanted to build a regional recreation center,” he says of the churches’ natural convergence of community missions-focused vision. “One of these churches is also doing a large solar farm, looking to export energy. Both churches are interested in [doing] lots of things—it’s not just about Sunday morning worship.”
Churches now are, in essence, killing two birds with one stone. They’re meeting the needs of their communities as well as their own financial needs, Waldon notes, so that the churches aren’t tied to tithing as their sole means of revenue to support their missions within the communities they serve.
Willing partners and big-picture ministry visionaries
Jim Bergdoll is executive director of Neighborhood Development Ministries Inc., a 501(c)(3) in Oakland, California, that’s focused on helping churches and other faith-based organizations develop projects, find financing, and ultimately provide programs that serve the needs of their local communities. (Bergdoll has a 35+-year background as a city planner, affordable housing developer, and housing program manager; he once served as vice president for housing development at Habitat for Humanity East Bay in California, for example.)
“Church has changed, but in a way, it has come full circle.”
—Ravi Waldon, Principal and Faith-Based Sector Leader, Michael Graves Architecture, Princeton, NJ
“We’ve started to work with a variety of churches and related non-profits around the country in different types of situations,” Bergdoll notes, in accordance with the context and the missional interests of each individual church. “Our first question: what does the church have a passion to do?”
In many instances in metro areas, housing makes sense. Once churches have a concept of how they are called to serve their communities, whether it be senior housing or business/employment programs, for example, Bergdoll and his team help with real estate feasibility, community process, and financing.
“Mixed-use projects, especially, require going through lots of hoops in figuring out how to use a property for something else other than what it was originally set up for,” he notes.
Bergdoll and his associates have architects they turn to—Waldon, for example—and finance experts and other resources, such as sister non-profit Jubilee Impact Fund.
“Many churches have already established separate community development corporations, especially in the North, East, and Midwest,” he notes. “A development entity needs to be legally separate from the church.”
In situations where churches are wanting to use their land for community needs and mixed-use, but don’t already have a community development arm in place, Neighborhood Development Ministries has resources and tools to help them get set up.
From Bergdoll’s perspective, churches that are looking to a new model of serving their neighborhoods and communities at large are making an important move at this point in time.
“Mainline churches and almost all churches are declining in population and having trouble financing themselves in the traditional way,” he states. “Buildings are costly to maintain, and churches need not only revenue to maintain them, but people to manage them—and to use them.”
And while he notes that there aren’t as many resources for maintaining a church building today, there are ample ones to help them develop ministry-related enterprises like housing or job training. Neighborhood Development Ministries, he adds, has done the work to figure out how to find those resources and be successful.
“Churches are waking up and taking advantage of that, and doing more to directly help their communities,” Bergdoll says. “And in the process, they are making themselves more relevant.”
As Waldon assesses it, “The historical church was the center of its community, and now churches have a chance to be much more than just a Sunday morning place. They can again be the center of community.”
He closes, “Church has changed, but in a way, it has come full circle.”
