Church and social spaces: grant opportunity

Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Duquesne, Pennsylvania. Photo: Matthew Christopher, Abandoned America.  From "Why Are There So Many Abandoned Churches?," Atlas Obscura.

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.

Sign on what is mutual aid at the Steinbruck Center for Social Justicer at Luther Place.

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

Church Brew Works, Pittsburgh.

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.

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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:

Apply by Mar 15, 2025 

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.