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 19th-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.
read more here....... https://slate.com/business/2023/07/church-real-estate-development-west-park-presbyterian.html
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 19th-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.
read more here....... https://slate.com/business/2023/07/church-real-estate-development-west-park-presbyterian.html
