Church and social spaces: grant opportunity
My writings on churches have been somewhat negative, shaped by my agnosticism-atheism, and my experience in DC, where many churches built large property portfolios that they didn't take care, bought buildings to tear them down for parking, and the phenomenon of urban church closure, abetted by the high cost of maintenance and repair, alongside neighborhood change and suburban outmigration, etc.
-- "Churches, community, religion and change," 2012/2015
Note that Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. lamented not wanting the religious part of church but still wanting the connection ("I left the church — and now long for a ‘church for the nones’" and letters to the editor, "Perry Bacon is not alone in his search for connection without church").
I am not religious, but I definitely respect the social justice strain of Christianity. In DC, there is the Sojourners group, and also Luther Place Memorial Church (Evangelical Lutheran), which in the 1980s started leveraging their property portfolio on Thomas Circle to house people in need. There are probably more positive examples than I realize, and that's the case in many cities across the country.
I've written about third spaces ("Third Place Issues," 2024), including how church social halls helped the nascent DC punk music scene develop in the 1970s and 1980s, where social halls were the venue for all ages concerts.
Last year, Eerdman's published Gone for Good: Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition. It asks the very good question about what do you do with church spaces, especially those serving community purposes, when a church closes? Who picks up the slack, if anyone? (Interview)
Note that there is the phenomenon of the "non church" ex-religious building still used for community events, like the 6th and I Synagogue in DC ("Born Again," Washingtonian). This, the Atlanta Freethought Society ("Smyrna Atheist Helps Revive 140-Year-Old Primitive Baptist Church," Patch), and the Washington Ethical Society, an offshoot of the Unitarian-Universalist Church, is probably what Perry Bacon is looking for.
That's a provocative question, making me more aware of my previous bias.
I realized that my thinking about "the church in the city" was too narrow, and at the same time, how to translate the idea or concept of social infrastructure as laid out by Eric Klinenberg in Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life could use examples of religious facilities as part of the exploration into facilities and programming that could make social infrastructure real. This is a long term writing project.
The idea of facilities and programming isn't different from my writings on how to support the development and maintenance of a local arts ecosystem.
-- "Reprinting with a slight update, 'Arts, culture districts and revitalization'," 2009/2019
Note that one trend in church recapture in the face of abandonment has been conversion to housing ("These old Maine churches are being transformed into homes," Bangor Daily News, although DC has had instances of this since the 1980s) or other types of for profit development ("As Hundreds of Churches Sit Empty, Some Become Hotels and Restaurants," New York Times).
Like the Church Brew Works in Pittsburgh (which is pretty cool--but its creation led the Cardinal of the Milwaukee diocese to put strict restrictions on what could go into sold off church property, "What to do with a closed church? Why, you sell it, of course," AP); and we stayed in an airbnb in a converted church in Savannah once, as well). Also see "What should we do with all of those empty churches?," BigThink.
=============
Because time is of the essence, I thought it would be worth bringing this up even though I'm nowhere near the stage of a review because the National Fund for Sacred Places has a small grant fund:
to provid[e] technical and financial support for congregations to repair or improve the functionality of their community spaces. To apply for the grant, the space must have been originally built to be a house of worship and owned by a faith community; the congregation must be at least three years old; the property must possess historical, cultural, or architectural significance; and the congregation must be community-minded and serve nonmembers, among a few other considerations.
Labels: change-innovation-transformation, churchly blight, community building, community development, land use planning, religion, third place/social spaces, urban design/placemaking, urban revitalization
posted by Richard Layman @ 4:00 AM&Permanent Link
4 Comments:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/05/arts/african-orthodox-church-cambridge
Black History in Action works to bring Cambridge church back to life amid gentrification
Since 2020, the nonprofit has sought to safeguard, restore, and revitalize the African Orthodox church and reinvigorate its community
Manjapra also sees places like St. Augustine’s as an important tool to disrupt the narrative that gentrification is a process people need to accept as inevitable. He noted that renovating a church wasn’t something new. However, reconnecting the church to the current community while also honoring its legacy allowed St. Augustine’s to serve as an anti-gentrification practice, he said.
While the restoration of a building is important, he said the restoration of buildings for new purposes without context of their history or without the community they served “is a kind of damage that has become normalized.”
“It … ties into the beautification movement, and the idea that the best thing to do in a neighborhood is to ‘beautify it,’ and to take ‘derelict places and to refurbish them,’ and to give them new purposes and make them nice and shiny, but then the question is, for whom and at whose cost?,” Manjapra said.
“That’s exactly why we think of this project as anti-gentrification because, yeah, it is about re-enlivening. It is about reactivating, but not in a way that alienates the building from its original purposes, but that rather re-roots it in its legacy, and allows that legacy to live also for the people who are connected to that legacy, and then, of course, others.”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/17/metro/black-churches-boston/
Some Black churches are leaving Boston, citing changing neighborhoods, higher costs
A pile of debris, broken tiles scattered about, electrical wires strewn all over the floor. These were the last remnants of what was once a Mastrangelo Family Catering function hall on the eastern edge of town. But something new is taking shape in this most unlikely setting: a church.
And not just any church but the Ebenezer Baptist Church, which is departing the historically Black South End, where it has been a fixture for 152 years, for an almost all-white suburb 22 miles to the south.
It is a seemingly startling relocation, but one that the Rev. Carl Thompson had no difficulty explaining as he walked around the church’s soon-to-be home. In this little town of 17,000, he believes, the Ebenezer can afford to fulfill his vision of what a congregation can be.
“Take a look around,” Thompson said on a recent Thursday morning. “We’ll have a brand-new audiovisual system, a playground, a basketball court, a concession stand, a lounge for culinary arts.”
All of it, Thompson says, is his idea “to rebuild and rebrand the church.”
Three years ago, the Ebenezer congregation held its last service in Boston’s South End. Since then, church services have been scattered: at various function halls and schools, and broadcast to remote-worshipers on Zoom.
The Ebenezer is part of a larger migration. A Globe review identified about a dozen Black churches that have left Boston in recent years — or are considering it — for new chapels in nearby suburbs. Their reasons vary. Some cite the changing demographics of Boston’s neighborhoods, the cost of real estate, declining membership, even the lack of available parking. In the case of the Ebenezer, the new structure in Abington will better accommodate an aging congregation and possibly attract new members. Abington is just four miles from Brockton, a city which is 40 percent Black.
What is clear, though, community members say, is that as each church departs for cheaper and more expansive pastures, pieces of history and culture go with them. These are faith communities that have driven social justice movements, fed the hungry and housed the poor, and served for decades as Black Boston’s heartbeat.
“We’re losing cultural, social, and financial capital,” said Jaronzie Harris, director of the Black Church Vitality Project, a partnership focusing on supporting the city’s Black churches. “We’re losing … memory of Black history in the city.”
The movement of the churches, in many ways, mirrors that of their Black congregants, subjected over generations to the push and pull of discrimination and segregation, forced to pack up and search for new opportunities. In the 1800s, for instance, most Black churches were concentrated in the West End and Beacon Hill, where many Black people, including enslaved people, lived. But over time, churches began to move to or be founded in the South End and Lower Roxbury, as rising rents and crumbling housing pushed the Black community south.
“Costs, land, parking ... every church in Boston is now facing the same crisis,” Thompson said. “The prominent historical churches [that] are still in the city ... now, they may have to face those same types of decisions.”
New Hope Baptist had been gathering since 1968 in the aged building that once housed the Tremont Street Methodist Episcopal Church. But the Rev. Kenneth Simms said the church could no longer keep up with repairs. By the time he became pastor in 2012, the church was spending at least $250,000 a year to maintain the Gothic-style, 161-year-old structure. So, in late 2012, New Hope sold its church to a private developer for $3.6 million and closed on a $1.8 million Catholic church in Hyde Park two years later.
Still, the Rev. Conley Hughes Jr. said the decision to move was difficult: Many of the churchgoers wanted to hold on to key life events that had taken place in their South End chapel — weddings, funerals, baptisms. “All of the rituals you have in life were done in that building,” Hughes said.
Black Church Vitality Project
https://www.blackchurchvitality.com
1. Provide support and resources that will help a cohort of Black churches in Boston get perspective on their mission and operations and transition into their next phase of ministry
2. Convene an action-oriented learning community that will help partnering churches effectively navigate Boston’s changing social and cultural landscapes and work together to develop ministry practices that are more deeply rooted in the needs of Boston’s Black community
3. Share our stories so other Black churches in the city can learn from them
4. Help the entire Black Church ecosystem in Greater Boston to thrive
Post a Comment
<< Home