Dennis Mical never expected to transform a crumbling Eastern Orthodox church in his childhood neighborhood in Pennsylvania into a volunteer arts center where musicians jam, but the retired state auditor said it’s better to hear the rhythms of rock and jazz echoing in the building than the howl of the wind whipping through it.
“Most people thought I was crazy, but it’s kept the neighborhood pretty much the same as when I was growing up here,” Mr. Mical, 66, said. “There were only a handful of parishioners left, and they couldn’t afford to keep the heat on. Every time the wind blew, shingles would fly off the roof.”
Mr. Mical and his wife, Janet, bought the former St. George Serbian Orthodox Church in Johnstown for $3,000 in 2009, created a nonprofit to support it in 2012 and raised $200,000 in public and private arts grant money to replace the plumbing, roof and pews.
Today, the 2,800-square-foot building, renamed the Venue of Merging Arts, hosts a permanent art gallery and about 40 live music performances annually in the historic Cambria City neighborhood, about a mile northwest of downtown.
St. George is one of a growing number of houses of worship being repurposed in cities and rural towns in the Midwest and Northeast as worshippers migrate to the suburbs.
• In the District of Columbia, the nonprofit Sacred Spaces Conservancy reported this year that the number of houses of worship owned by their congregations in the nation’s capital fell by one-third, from 763 in 2008 to 511 at the end of 2023.
• The Boston Globe reported that cost-of-living increases, shrinking congregations and deferred maintenance have driven about a dozen Black Protestant churches out of the city in recent years. Developers transformed the historic buildings into yoga studios, high-end tapas bars and a Whole Foods Market as congregations relocated to the suburbs.
• In Pennsylvania, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia has closed and consolidated several parishes, including St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in City Center, a former hub for Black residents that stopped offering worship services last year.
Researchers interviewed by The Washington Times said rising costs, rampant crime and changing racial demographics make it harder to sustain worship spaces in large cities.
“It’s fewer people going, aging populations and deferred maintenance that the smaller congregations can no longer support,” said Matthew Manion, director of the Center for Church Management at Villanova University, a Catholic institution in Philadelphia.
Mr. Manion noted that Sunday parish collections, which traditionally cover building maintenance costs, have declined for 20 years.
In the Cambria City neighborhood of Johnstown, the nonprofit Steeples Project has worked to rescue two out of five once-thriving ethnic Catholic churches from demolition. The group has transformed the former German church into a “grand hall” and is converting the former Irish church into a performing arts center.
The Slovak church remains active, the Croatian church now functions as a chapel, and a private owner is redesigning the Polish church into an ethnic museum and restaurant.
As more urban neighborhoods become secularized, religious families increasingly prefer to settle in suburban enclaves up to 20 miles outside city centers, demographers say.
“Over the last 10 years, the 100 fastest-growing churches in America are primarily in the growing inner- and outer-ring suburbs of major cities,” said Ryan Burge, an Eastern Illinois University political scientist and religious demographer. “They’re almost always nondenominational Christian churches near cities like Charlotte, Charleston and Atlanta. They are the fastest because that’s where people are moving.”
Rural churches have also suffered, he said.
For 17 years, Mr. Burge has been the pastor of First Baptist Church in small-town Mount Vernon, an American Baptist congregation dating to 1868 that has dwindled to 12 elderly members.
Mr. Burge said the congregation gave its building to a startup Christian school four years ago after struggling to pay $20,000 a year for utilities and $10,000 a year for insurance. He plans to close the church within six months.
“It’s not ideal, but it’s the least bad thing we could do,” Mr. Burge said. “While urban churches have valuable land that generates revenue, rural churches are only worth the land they’re built on, and you’d have to tear them down to sell it.”
In New Orleans and several Midwestern and Northeastern cities, gentrification has pushed more Black Christians than other groups into the suburbs.
According to a study from the lay group Future Church and Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Catholic parish closures have been acute in 11 cities with heavy changes in racial dynamics: Baltimore; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Chicago; Cleveland; Detroit; Memphis, Tennessee; Miami; New Orleans; New York; Philadelphia; and St. Louis.
“Parishes ripe for closure have a higher concentration of poverty and people of color,” said Tricia Bruce, a sociologist affiliated with the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame.
On the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans, Hotel Peter & Paul opened in 2018 in a former Catholic church, school, rectory and convent. Lodgers can now book a king-size bed in the Mother Superior suite for $169 to $554 a night.
Ari S. Heckman, co-founder and CEO of Ash, a New York-based company that operates Hotel Peter & Paul, said historic urban worship spaces are “primed for repositioning into other uses.”
“Many of the properties have incredible historic character that would be impossible to build today and make for special places for people visiting or celebrating,” Mr. Heckman told The Times. “We are preservationists that believe in the cultural value of restoring landmarks, so we love to see historic properties be given a second life.”
Rather than start in the city and expand to the suburbs, most churches move in the opposite direction. Elevation Church in Matthews, North Carolina, started 12 miles southeast of downtown Charlotte. It later planted a satellite church in the city center.
Worship spaces are migrating to the suburbs as religious affiliation and participation decline.
About 11% of churchgoers did not return to in-person worship after the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, the evangelical Christian survey firm Lifeway Research reported in November. Protestant pastors say attendance has reached only about 89% of pre-COVID figures.
The share of U.S. adults identifying as Christian in national polls has dropped from about 90% half a century ago to the mid-60s in recent years, said George Barna, an evangelical pastor and pollster.
“The farther from a city center you get, the more religiously active people tend to be,” said Mr. Barna, who heads the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. “As our society changes, though, an increasing proportion of that religious activity is individualized rather than communal.”
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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