With religious construction on the decline, a ‘spiritual home’ can transcend a building

Story by Maddie Ellis

Video by Julian Berger

Photography by Emily Caroline Sartin

Graphic by Leighann Vinesett

Video by Julian Berger

On Easter Sunday, 2000, the United Church of Chapel Hill was overflowing. People sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the pews and in the chairs at the back of the sanctuary. Visitors even sat outside the main doors in the narthex. 

Easter is a special service for churchgoers — many community members only go on that day and Christmas Eve. But this wasn’t a typical Easter Sunday service. 

It was the first service in a brand new building. 

In 2005, the church began adding an additional wing to support children’s and youth ministry, which was opened in 2008. But since then, the building has stayed largely unchanged, despite future potential HVAC upgrades and addressing the windows with broken seals in the sanctuary. 

Since the new wing was opened in 2008, the United Church of Chapel Hill has seen no additional construction despite the projects that could be done such as repairing windows with broken seals in the sanctuary. “At this moment in our history as a church, you know, we aren’t spending a whole lot on the building,” Senior Pastor Cameron Barr says. “We are spending an awful lot more on personnel, program and mission. That’s a privilege that we have right now because we have such a well-appointed building.” Photo by Emily Caroline Sartin.

UCCH is an example of a national decline in religious construction spending. After hitting a high of $8.8 billion in August 2003, spending on religious buildings has steadily fallen to $2.9 billion in September 2021. And as overall construction spending has seen a 7.8 percent increase since last year, religious construction spending has experienced a 12 percent decline.

That statistic accounts for new construction and major expansions for buildings with a specific religious function, but does not include certain educational or charitable institutions even if they are owned by a church.

“What we are witnessing is a change in the tradition, and it’s rapid now, but it’s been happening for decades,” said Patrick Duggan, executive director of the United Church of Christ’s Church Building and Loan Fund. 

The decline reveals that the concept of a church building for many Christians is changing. And what matters more than any one building, with its ornamentation, decor and symbolism, are the people within a congregation — and their changing values.

David Schoen, minister of church closure and legacy for the Church Building and Loan Fund, said there are multiple factors behind the construction decline.

Churches are getting smaller and even closing, which leaves religious real estate on the market. Many congregations are repurposing existing buildings like the Congregational United Church of Christ in Greensboro and The Summit Church. And some ministries are converting their buildings into purely community spaces, rather than just religious, through the work of the Church Building and Loan Fund. 

What it takes to build a church

UCCH was formerly located on Cameron Avenue in Chapel Hill in a small building with a wide sanctuary shaped like a semicircle, so every member could see each other’s faces.

But there was little parking. Visitors had access to a lot but it was only open on Sundays, preventing the church from holding activities on weekdays. The church also began to grow faster than it could keep up with. 

Eventually, after considering a renovation, drawing up plans, consulting with architects and years of monthly meetings, the group reached a consensus: the church had to move. 

It was a decision that invoked grief and mourning. Physically, the church site marked life  milestones for its members, from baptism to funerals. A memorial garden held interred ashes of loved ones, and plaques fixed to the brick exterior memorialized their names.

The church held its last service in the Cameron Avenue building on Palm Sunday, 2000. Members gathered in front and waved the palm fronds in farewell. The next week marked the beginning of a new era for the church. Yet for Barbara Wildemuth, who has been a member since 1988, it didn’t even feel like a new space, because she was still surrounded by the same people. 

“The church really is the people that are coming there,” she said. “And we finally got a house that would fit us.”

Associate Pastor Ian McPherson (right) and Peter Schay (left) serve communion to Dan Vermeer Nov. 14 at the United Church of Chapel Hill. Photo by Emily Caroline Sartin.

Building a church is daunting and requires a high caliber of trust given to leadership by a congregation, said Cameron Barr, who has been senior pastor at UCCH for the last four years.

“We’re not seeing a lot of building activity, because there’s no way that a congregation with only four years of experience with me would undertake such a major and ambitious project,” he said. 

Instead, its 2022 budget shows its priority — 72 percent of the budget will be spent on salaries, Barr said. 

“We are kind of making a values judgement there — we can invest in the physical infrastructure, or I would say that our mission is really being carried out by the people that we are paying for,” he said.

For Barr, the national decline in religious construction spending reveals a shift in the priorities of church members. Today, more people want to give and use their religious philanthropy toward something with a tangible output, he said. 

“You hear a lot of people say frequently these days that they don’t want to give to a building,” he said.

Alternative forms of worship

During the COVID-19 pandemic, UCCH spent 72 Sundays worshipping online away from the church it had built. As the weather permitted, the congregation began gathering outside just to be close to the sanctuary, Barr said. 

But many churches are finding that worship does not have to be tied to a traditional church building at all.

The Summit Church, based in the Triangle, has a mission to “plant campuses,” which does not always equate to a new church building. Today, Summit has 11 campuses. Two are in churches that it built from the ground up. The rest are in rented spaces or are mobile campuses.

In 2011, it introduced its first mobile campus in Cary at Cary High School. Schools are ideal for the set up of a mobile campus, said Daniel Simmons, executive pastor of campuses and discipleship.

The set-up crew shows up around 6 a.m., sets up musical equipment and technology to live stream the sermon from Summit’s lead pastor, puts up signage in the lobby for guest services and prepares classrooms for children’s programming. Typically by 2 p.m., it’s like they were never even there. 

“We set them back up exactly the way that they are, so that the teachers or faculty basically have no clue that we’re meeting in there,” he said. “Other than maybe a thank you or gift card that just says we really appreciate you.”

In addition to the mobile campuses, Summit finds worship space in pre-existing buildings to rent out. One of its first big permanent facilities was a former warehouse.

“It’s like the longest church in America,” Simmons said with a laugh.

The construction spending by Summit doesn’t tell the full story of its congregation’s growth. With its flexibility in building types and use of rented spaces, a new campus doesn’t equate to a new church building. 

“You’d have to incorporate the spending on renting a facility like a school … but the price difference is huge,” he said. “I mean it’s millions of dollars in difference.” 

Yet, long term, its goal is to turn mobile campuses into permanent facilities so Summit can be in control of those spaces and incorporate weekly programming. But it’s also just what members want, Simmons said. 

“We are still in the Southeast, and when people come to church, they have a picture of what it should look like in their mind, and a mobile site is not that,” he said.

Using pre-existing space

The last major building project was the installation of solar panels in 2015 that now power about 65 percent of the United Church of Chapel Hill building. Those are the kinds of upgrades and changes that we can make now, Senior Pastor Cameron Barr says. It’s about maintaining what we have, replacing what’s broken. Photo by Emily Caroline Sartin.

For many churches, instead of creating new spaces and structures, a priority is optimizing the space it already has available.

Congregational UCC underwent a major renovation of its sanctuary in 1993 when Julie Peeples — who is its current senior pastor — was serving in an interim position. For years, the congregation had considered renovations in meetings and discussions, but had yet to make a decision.

“When I came, I said ‘Look, I don’t care, just do it or stop talking about it, but don’t just keep talking it to death,” Peeples said. 

Then about six years ago, the church renovated parts of the building that weren’t being used. Both of these projects aimed to make the space usable for not only church members but the entire community. 

Peeples considers the church’s core value to be “radical hospitality” which consists of reflecting on who might feel unwelcome in its pews and finding ways to reach out to them, not for purposes of conversion, but to make amends for past harm. The church allows nonprofits, daycares, even theater groups to use its space.

In 2017, the church became a sanctuary church for people who are immigrants and facing deportation orders. They cleared out former classrooms in the basement, added furniture and hosted two different families until they were able to leave safely under a judge’s order. 

“That’s been an amazing and wonderful thing for our congregation to realize, ‘Hey, if you talk about hospitality, why not let people stay here?’” Peeples said.

When a church dies

Coming out of the pandemic, UCCH is gradually getting back to normal. Membership peaked in 2014 at 1,000 members, with about 400 people in attendance every Sunday morning, Barr said. Now, the church sits at a membership of about 800, with an average worship attendance of 115. 

Gallup has tracked religious affiliation since 1937. And in 2020, for the first time, religious membership was not the majority, hitting a record low of 47 percent. According to Gallup, the decline is attributable to the increase in Americans with no religious preference as well as changing population demographics. 

Inevitably, a factor in the decline of religious construction spending is that churches are just not being built  And many churches, due to dwindling attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic, are dying.

“The average life of a church is the same as the average life of an individual,” Schoen said. “Churches don’t live forever. Part of church life is that churches die. And they do every day in the United States.”

Graphic by Leighann Vinesett

But after they die, they leave a building still standing. The United Church of Christ’s Church Building and Loan Fund helps those kinds of ministries repurpose a building in a way that advances its mission to give to communities. Some loans are for the construction of new church buildings, but many are for conversions into affordable housing, schools or shelters. 

Right now, the Church Building and Loan Fund is working with 24 properties in 11 states, Duggan said. About nine of those projects involve converting a church building into affordable housing units. 

Even though the construction is not expressly for a church, UCC sees these projects as opportunities to fulfill a church’s mission of serving a community. 

“Even though it’s a hard process for churches to go through,” Schoen said, “when they can do that, they can lift that up and celebrate the difference they’ll continue to make into the future.”

1 Comment
  1. What an awesome article, video, and photos. I have noticed the same trend in my home town of Dover. Delaware. Fewer folks in attendance and less involvement in church related activities.