We are living in challenging and exciting times for the church in the United States. Churches and leaders are responding to a massive shift in the way people engage in their faith, facing a wave of adaptive reuse and sale of church buildings and land, and experimenting with what the church of the future is going to look like.
Our team at RootedGood has a front-row seat to this collective discernment of how God is moving in new ways throughout the United States. Through our nonprofit, we work with hundreds of churches and dozens of church-related organizations each year to build imagination and capacity for faithful social enterprise and property development.
We’ve had churches around the country go through our Good Futures Accelerator course and come out the other side with all kinds of incredible ideas for the use of their buildings and land. In addition to addressing the sometimes-critical issues that property and buildings pose, this movement extends ministry into the community in new and powerful ways. It can also generate new revenue for the church.
More than 150 churches have completed or are currently using the self-directed course, which comprises seven sessions over nine months. These churches are diverse: they are big and small, wealthy and struggling, urban and rural, progressive and conservative, and from a variety of denominations and traditions.
What are they doing? This is the exciting part. Congregations are turning empty Sunday school classrooms into small business incubators that reconnect the church and community and generate significant income for the congregation. They are inviting food entrepreneurs to use their commercial kitchens to launch food businesses. Some are launching community centers to expand use of church space by neighbors. Some are doing more than one development project: one church has turned a parking lot into a park, offers coworking space and partners with food trucks.
Some are responding to the pressing need for affordable housing in their cities by developing housing for families being priced out of the market; some are building small senior housing facilities in rural communities so seniors can age in place and not have to move. One recently closed church building near Portland, Oregon, was given away to a coalition of Native American groups so they can build tiny homes for Indigenous women and children experiencing homelessness.
As we support churches, we are learning more about what works. Five consistent themes are emerging for churches to get started well with adaptive reuse and property development.
Put mission first. Clarity and consensus about mission is always more important than questions of real estate and money. It’s easy to dive headfirst into conversations about leasing, selling and developing, raising questions about budgets, real estate agents and contracts. Those questions are important, but they are not the right place to start. It’s always best to start by clarifying the why and the what before the how.
Why do we want to use our property differently? What is God calling us to do with it? Those are the questions that a congregation is best positioned to deal with. And those are the questions to start with.
The technical questions around real estate and money are much easier to sort out when there is clarity and consensus about mission. In fact, in every instance we’ve seen a church launch into real estate questions before getting mission clarity, they’ve had to backtrack at some point — sometimes by years — to deal with the mission question.
So don’t skip the vital first step of asking, “Why?” It may feel as if it’s slowing down the process. That’s OK. In fact, some people have renamed our Good Futures Accelerator the “Good Futures Slow Down and Get Clarity and Consensus About Mission” process. That is pretty accurate! And it is the only way church property development leads to good outcomes.
Listen. The starting point for using property differently is to listen to the community. It is essential in this work to listen to the neighborhood and community the church is seeking to serve. What are the needs? What are the gifts that people have to offer? Where is God at work outside the walls of the building? How can the congregation come alongside God’s work, celebrate the gifts of its community and meet real needs?
We are good at imagining or suggesting what people should need and want but not very good at actually asking them or involving them in conversation. Meaningful property development works only when it is deeply connected to actual needs, desires and opportunities in a community. And that starts with listening.
Draw upon your legacy. Congregations that succeed often connect new ventures to things they have done or ideas they have considered in the past. Good ideas for new expressions of mission and ministry usually don’t appear out of thin air. Church members draw upon decades of beloved food pantry ministry, for example, when they set out to create a community-owned grocery store. Or they build upon their long music ministry as they create a performance and practice space rental program.
Emory United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C., built a $60 million affordable housing facility on their land; that project didn’t drop out of the sky or jump off the pages of a book. It emerged from years of being involved in efforts to address homelessness and housing. And it derived its spiritual roots from the legacy of a free Black woman who housed runaway slaves on that same land centuries earlier.
Start early. It’s never too early to start thinking about how to expand the use of church buildings and land. I regularly get messages from churches with 18 months of funds left asking how I can help them. Yet redeveloping property, especially on a bigger scale, can take a long time — even 10 years or more. It’s heartbreaking, but the truth is there isn’t much that can be done in 18 months other than figuring out how to rent or sell the building. So start early. Churches with plenty of resources can still improve the way they use their space for community impact. Don’t wait until the point of crisis to start thinking about property use, social enterprise and future ministry.
Start somewhere. The best way to get started in experimenting with new ideas is to do just that — get started! We get paralyzed by fear of failure. We quash ideas by wondering right away, “What if it doesn’t work?” There’s a very good chance the first experiment won’t work. That’s OK.
Start small. You don’t go to the gym to exercise for five hours on the first day back after a long break. You go for 15 minutes. It’s the same with this kind of innovation.
Say you’re thinking about using your commercial kitchen for emerging food entrepreneurs. Start with a pop-up meal. Or invite a food cart to set up in your parking lot one Friday per month for three months as a summer project. Start small, experiment, and learn from what works and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid of initial failure. But start somewhere!
