Heart of Life UMC, the new name of a merged congregation previously known as Grace-Hanson UMC. Heart of Life UMC is in the “Good News” Cooperative Parish (representing Downtown Brooklyn), Long Island West District. Kevin Block.
Pulling Together
Collaboration Supports New Life for Sacred Places in Transition
By Dana Dabek, Director of Community Engagement
In the rural community of Reardan, Washington, a hamlet about 30 minutes from Spokane, the congregation at First Presbyterian Church struggled with how to transform underutilized space in its building into a home for a vital program benefiting the community and the church’s long-term sustainability. At first, in a meeting with Partners for Sacred Places staff, members of the congregation were unsure how to pair its mission with the needs of the community. But during a community conversation, 12 local stakeholders, including members of the school district and city government, gathered in the Fellowship Hall and elucidated the desire for after-school programming in Reardan. There were no such programs in the town, so youth from the nearby middle school and high school would walk past the church to the nearest convenience store, which became their hangout space. After spending the next few months refining the idea in collaboration with the Presbytery of the Inland Northwest and the nonprofit Rooted Good, First Presbyterian Church of Reardan established community partners and transformed its space into a hub for youth in their community.
Like First Presbyterian, congregations seeking to rethink or transform their relationships to their building and property often turn to Partners as they contemplate their paths forward. But Partners is also part of a thriving ecosystem of nonprofit organizations that work together to guide and serve these congregations. Given the vast number of religious properties in the United States and their potential for creative use and greater community engagement, collaboration among congregations and service organizations is key to navigating this pivotal moment in a changing religious landscape. Empty Sunday School wings and unoccupied parsonages are underutilized but have enormous potential for community and civic benefit. More congregations than ever before are poised to ask difficult but strategic and hopeful questions about the next phase of their life cycle and how their property will fit into this new vision.
Congregations now can turn to a strong, interconnected network of organizations that provide a flow of energy, ideas, and expertise to help navigate the challenges posed by shrinking membership and aging buildings. In one such instance, Partners is engaged in a five-year initiative with multiple groups of congregations (First Presbyterian among them) in the Presbytery of the Inland Northwest, based in Spokane. Partners is working in collaboration with Rooted Good, a national organization that uses a social enterprise model to increase congregational capacity and develop church-owned property. The social enterprise model applies business principles to addressing social issues. Rather than relying on donations and grants like a traditional nonprofit, social enterprises generate income through mission-aligned goods and services. Churches in the cohort participate in Rooted Good’s Good Futures Accelerator, while Partners’ staff conducts site visits focused on the use of space and facilitates conversations with community stakeholders. Both Rooted Good and Partners believe that deepening engagement with their surrounding communities is critical to the long-term survival of congregations, and the Presbytery saw these approaches as natural complements.
“Working with Partners for Sacred Places has dovetailed well with the use of Rooted Good’s Good Futures Accelerator curriculum,” says Katie Stark. “At a midpoint in our discernment process, Partners does a site visit and facilitates a conversation between the congregation and community stakeholders. That community conversation has been pivotal for our congregations listening to the needs of neighbors. The congregation then responds by aligning their building use and mission with the expressed needs of the community.”
After the completion of the first year of the program, Partners found the participating churches were better prepared for site visits, having completed part of the Good Futures Accelerator, and the congregations’ social enterprise projects were strengthened by Partners’ in-person insight into the potential of church properties.
In another part of the country, the Thriving Cooperative Parish Initiative (TCPI) demonstrates a different approach. Partners is working with the Good Friday Collaborative and Ministry Incubators for the TCPI, a project of the United Methodist City Society and the New York Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church to transform geographically linked churches into flourishing cooperative parishes. Over the next five years, Partners will provide training and expertise on space use and mission alignment through site assessments and workshops, while the Good Friday Collaborative, a faith-based organization that supports churches in the process of closing, and Ministry Incubators, which works with religious communities to launch projects for community change, will provide a faith-based approach to congregational health and community engagement. The multipronged approach will serve the spatial, spiritual, and missional needs of the cooperative parishes, as each collaborative organization begins its work where the previous left off.
In another example, Partners is working with Plainsong Farm and Ministry, a living laboratory for environmental education and creation care in Western Michigan, to support parishes in the Episcopal Diocese of the Great Lakes that are exploring new uses for their buildings and land through climate resiliency work and sound land stewardship. As a part of the Holy Ground for Whole Communities project, Partners will provide space-sharing training and space asset inventories and facilitate community conversations with stakeholders. Modeled on Partners’ work with the Episcopal Dioceses of Indianapolis and Northern Indiana, the project combines Partners’ expertise on property use and sacred places with Plainsong Farm’s commitment to integrating practical care for creation and community. Participating congregations will receive a toolkit, hands-on training, site assessments, and access to grant funding. Program partners have the opportunity to learn from each other’s approaches and provide a richer experience for participating churches.
Across America, historically and socially significant houses of worship with under-utilized buildings and property will keep the transitions and adaptive reuse field busy for the foreseeable future. As the field grows with new organizations and resources, Partners is well positioned to meet the needs of individuals, congregations, and judicatories beginning the process of building discernment. Partners provides support for what can be a long but fruitful journey into smart shared use and property transition and is happy to share in the work of helping congregations navigate this wave of change.
Crop space at Plainsong Farm, a living laboratory for environmental education and Christian discipleship in Rockford, MI. Karen DiLossi.
