Churches change as our culture changes. In the Northeast, congregations were seeing falling attendance until the pandemic, which forced churches to be completely empty. Of course, some attendees then watched online, but some simply left. Hundreds of churches have closed and merged.
In that existential challenge, some houses of worship are redefining themselves. Monasteries saved Christianity in the Dark Ages, and the suburban American church became enmeshed with the Greatest Generation’s life post-World War II. And today, as an architect, I see green shoots of re-emerging faith in living churches born from the shells of legacy churches all across New England.
As you might suspect, there is fear of change and of inevitable irrelevance. It is easy to get lost in that fear and nostalgia, but some churches are asking simple questions, addressing the future. Part of that is addressing how all the legacy buildings of New England churches fit an uncharted future. I have worked with over 100 congregations over 40 years. Adapting buildings to change is simply what I do — and this new generation of change is different.
Today, humanity’s core spirituality is becoming dissociated from traditional religion for more and more of us. The atomizing of faith into “spiritual but not religious” and dissociating God from religion has meant the emptying of buildings for many places.
But humanity changes under the reality of God. Each life faces its end under God, and the changes in our culture touch our lack of control in the sea of faith we swim in, whether we know it or not. Sometimes building and religion find expression together. That is when hope becomes faith becomes reality.
The following three scenarios were born of the pandemic: one done, one almost done, one about to be done. These do not reflect a defensive pulling back, but the opposite: a faithful reaching out to remake the places that no longer work in the twenty-first century, and the creation of places for those searching for ways to realize the faith that is as real as the changing perceptions this now-clichéd Pew Report conveys.
Over a decade ago, St. Peter’s Church in Cheshire, Connecticut, realized the fruit of years of a capital campaign. Infrastructure and invisible needs were addressed, and the final $184,000 was in hand to recreate their chancel, which had multiple revisions over the last century.
Those changes followed changing religious rituals and symbolism: creating a rood screen, moving the altar to the outside of that rood screen from the outside wall of the chancel, creating a fixed communion rail — all amid many decorations and enhancements involving vinyl flooring, curtains, colors, and furnishings.
The layering upon layering of these evolving traditions simply stopped having the meanings that made them. The uses of the nave were not limited to the Religion of Sacred Practices — the world of a downtown New England town could find inclusion in a lovely building both rewarding and useful. All those layers that were applied to focus the nave on the altar and the chancel were simply opened up, reusing the elements that were changed.
After a few years, the congregation is invigorated, and the community around them is building the legacy and future of a space now literally opened up to a changing future.-
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in the downtown industrial town of Meriden, Connecticut, had reduced attendance, an endowment, and an extraordinary nineteenth-century brownstone Gothic sanctuary, with elaborate and fully developed parish house facilities from the post-World War II church boom. The remaining parishioners could simply sell out and join a neighboring church, but the group had the vitality to maintain its identity, but in a new direction.
The downtown was abandoned on Sundays, the parish hall was unused most days, and the 300+ fixed pew seating was from a past that had left both Meriden and Connecticut. But legacy lives in the living, and the value of the building could be shifted to a new building in a new location and with technology that cut operating costs dramatically. But the monetary value of the building needed to be in hand, and the church began the process of selling its Tiffany windows and then the building.
A terrific, empty piece of land in the residential side of Meriden was found. A design was discerned and zoning approvals obtained. The building sale is pending, and the bidding is done for creating a new building, a structure that is as open and outwardly focused as the original St. Andrews was inwardly focused.
A host of iconic pieces of the existing building will be moved and set into the new church, and a host of future features are planned into the master-planned design. The legacy of history is looking forward to an open future.
The core of human devotion common to each of these three scenarios is best exemplified at The Church of St. Paul & St. James (St. PJ’s) in New Haven. Like St. Peter’s and St. Andrew’s, a nineteenth century brownstone legacy building had become a hindrance to the way those who were devoted to the church used the building.
Apart from lowered attendance, the diverse use of St. PJ’s as an urban parish was in full flower. Its undercroft was a central food bank for the city. Its jazz service was a weekly cultural event. And its parish hall was used by multiple programs.
The building had a core set of donors who funded central, necessary changes, almost all complete and geared to many ways the building could be used: four bathrooms, including those for Americans with Disabilities Act compliance, were installed; the undercroft floor was leveled; and pews were removed and some reused as movable seating. The flooring under those pews was completely replaced using the funds from selling the salvaged old-growth flooring that was compromised when the pews were removed.
A new, safe entry to the undercroft will be built this summer, completing the project after a decade. New wine in an old vessel of great usefulness and value.
The core use of worship lives in each building because they were built, used, and now revised by the worshipers. But all have been recreated to adapt to and reflect the changes in the culture where God placed them. We can cling to what once made us comfortable (that fewer find meaning in), or we can listen to what we have and realize that we cannot control what is given to us. We can only act to join with where God is leading us.
The bishop of Connecticut, Jeff Mello, says of these and other reinventions, “These churches are desiring to live fully into who they are today and not remain chained to a physical ‘outward and visible’ construction pointing them backward to the 1950s.”
Building and religion are the gifts of the humanity we have been given. Building in faith is simply necessary, but faith found by the act of building is the regifting of God’s grace.
