- The Washington Times - Thursday, January 11, 2024

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Deacon Walter Carroll, a member of Mount Bethel Baptist Church for 65 years, said it was “sad but necessary” to sell the congregation’s historic building in Northwest Washington to real estate developers for $5.7 million in 2022.

Worship attendance had dwindled from about 400 people in the 1970s to about 40 old-timers when services were broadcast online during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, he said. Most had moved long ago from the church on Rhode Island Avenue to Prince George’s County.

“When you take the church out of the city, there’s nowhere for people to go and worship,” Mr. Carroll, 74, told The Washington Times. “It’s like when they took prayer out of the schools, there was an uproar. It’s a problem all around.”

The congregation, which celebrated its 147th anniversary last year, continues to worship online as it renovates an old church building it purchased in Forestville, he said. Real estate developers plan to turn Mount Bethel into apartments to serve the city’s up-and-coming Bloomingdale neighborhood.

Mount Bethel is among the 33% of religious congregations in the District that have sold their worship spaces since 2008 as aging churchgoers depart and wealthier non-churchgoing residents and commercial enterprises fill the vacuum.

The nonprofit Sacred Spaces Conservancy reports that the number of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and other houses of worship owned by their congregations in the District fell from 763 in 2008 to 511 at the end of 2023.

Historically Black Baptist congregations and mainline Protestant groups sustained most of the losses as the city’s population grew by 11% during the period, the ecumenical Christian group said. The conservancy advocates selling aging churches to emerging congregations rather than secular developers.

Evan Sparks, a board member and treasurer at the all-volunteer conservancy, said it often costs $1 million to $6 million to renovate aging D.C. churches because of decades of deferred maintenance. Cash-strapped immigrant congregations and growing churches have difficulty competing with secular developers for the properties.

“Congregations are struggling because their members don’t live nearby anymore,” Mr. Sparks said. “We’ve had a wave of economic and demographic change, and we are a more secular city than we used to be, so church attendance is generally lower.”

Mr. Sparks lives in Petworth and attends the Anglican Church of the Advent, founded in 2007. He said his church rents a space in Takoma Park but is closing on a historic church property in the District.

According to the Sacred Spaces report, the city lost an average of 17 worship places annually to residential and commercial redevelopment from 2008 through 2023. COVID-19 lockdowns delayed the process in recent years.

Each year from 2008 through 2018, the District lost 2.7% of its worship spaces. From 2018 through 2023, that rate slowed to 1.6%.

Shuttered worship spaces include St. Phillips Baptist Church on North Capitol Street Northeast, a campus in the fast-growing NoMa neighborhood that developers purchased for $3.2 million in 2017.

In 2019, the owners of the now-defunct LBGTQ nightclub Town Danceboutique announced on social media that they planned to reopen the city’s largest gay entertainment hub at a renovated St. Phillips.

Across the street, the Archdiocese of Washington closed St. Aloysius Gonzaga Church in 2012 because of dwindling attendance and fewer Jesuit priests to serve the congregation. The archdiocese merged St. Aloysius into Holy Redeemer parish.

All-male Gonzaga High School, which has protested the redevelopment plan for St. Phillips, now uses the old St. Aloysius church on its campus as a chapel. The basement houses the Father McKenna Center, a homeless outreach.

“Besides their spiritual function, churches are essential for building communities in cities and towns,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest in residence at Gonzaga. “They connect people and foster human interaction.”

Another recently vacated space is Grace Reformed Church in Northwest, which President Theodore Roosevelt attended.

“Grace Reformed Church made the decision to close and ended its ministry as a congregation in 2016,” said the Rev. Freeman L. Palmer, a conference minister with the United Church of Christ. “Our board of directors voted to list the church for sale in 2022, and we are seeking potential buyers.”

Sacred Spaces Conservancy reported that areas of the city with the most population growth shed religious spaces at the fastest rate. Among them:

  • Ward 1 (including Columbia Heights, Adams Morgan and the U Street corridor) lost 51.7% of its worship places.
  • Ward 6 (including Capitol Hill and Navy Yard) lost 47.4%.
  • Ward 5 (the center of redevelopment in Union Market and Ivy City) lost 42.4%.

Ward 5 includes Mount Bethel. Mr. Carroll said the neighborhood has changed dramatically since his childhood.

Not all congregations are pulling out of the District.

Sacred Spaces reported that evangelical congregations have saved many older churches from secular redevelopment. The Archdiocese of Washington, which operates relatively few Catholic parishes within city limits, has been largely unaffected by the demographic exodus of churchgoers.

“These buildings are important for all kinds of broader community purposes besides worship — including polling places, food banks, day care centers, nonprofit offices, art galleries and homeless services,” Mr. Sparks said. “When we lose them to the private sector, they become vastly more expensive for the community to access and use.”

Historical status could protect other churches in the city from secular redevelopment.

Sacred Spaces Conservancy based its report on data from the D.C. Historic Preservation Office. City officials noted in an email that many of the remaining houses of worship are on the National Register of Historic Places, granting them protection under the D.C. historic preservation law.

“We do not report on the number of houses of worship and how that figure has changed over time,” said Lauren Marcinkowski, a public affairs specialist in the D.C. Office of Planning. “The D.C. Historic Preservation Office does, however, recognize churches and other places of worships as important architectural landmarks, community gathering spaces, and centers of culture.”

Some congregations in the city have leaned into different kinds of ministry.

From its founding in 1996 until 2009, the National Community Church rented the now-defunct movie theater at Union Station for gatherings. After expanding to other rented movie theaters throughout the District and Northern Virginia, the congregation began “repurposing” secular and religious properties.

In 2014, the church bought the former People’s Church on Barracks Row in Southeast when that congregation moved to Maryland. Church officials restored the building, originally built as the Meader Theater, and renamed it Miracle Theater to host live events, film festivals and community gatherings.

“The driving motivation behind being in the middle of the marketplace is the fact that Jesus hung out at wells,” said Mark Batterson, lead pastor of National Community Church. “They were natural gathering places in ancient culture.”

• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.

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