BOOK REVIEW
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CHURCHES CLOSE ?
by Thomas Edward Frank
Gone for Good : Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition
Edited by Mark Elsdon , foreword by Willie James Jennings ( Eerdmans , 2024 )
The 17 authors who have contributed essays to Gone for Good call for nothing less than a paradigm shift in the way Americans perceive church buildings . Collectively , the authors challenge all constituencies that have a stake in what happens to these buildings — whether at rural crossroads , in small towns , or on urban neighborhood corners — to work together in advancing a continuing community purpose for them . And the paradigm shift begins with realizing that these constituencies include not only the congregations , clergy , and denominations whose names are on the church sign but also neighborhood associations , nonprofit agencies supporting cultural or social service activities , local governments , banks , realtors , developers , and chambers of commerce . The book asks pressing questions : What kind of community do we want to have ? What kind of place do we want this to be ? What is the role of church buildings in advancing our vision ? The need to find answers for these questions is undeniable . As several authors note , the vacating of churches or the steady diminishing of participation in them is triggering enormous changes in the built environment . The trend can be traced to the cultural and population upheavals of the 1960s . The vast majority of historic church buildings were erected by denominations with roots in Europe and thus in the European migration to North America . Eileen Lindner describes the church-planting methods of those decades of expansion , as churches bought or were given lots in growing
Mark Elsdon , editor of Gone for Good . towns and cities . Church buildings constitute a kind of map of the mobility of particular ethnic groups — English , Swedes , Germans , Italians , and so on — as they moved around and eventually across the continent .
No one has found a way to count the number of such buildings or the number that are falling into severe disrepair or vacancy . But clearly the expansive years for the historic denominations were tailing off by the mid-20th century . Today tens of thousands of churches are at risk . It ’ s not unusual for small cities to have a half dozen houses of worship for sale right in the middle of town or for a neighborhood to find a church building locked up for lack of maintenance despite , as Rochelle Stackhouse , Senior Director of Programs at Partners for Sacred Places , points out in the second chapter , an area ’ s desperate need of space for community activities .
For congregations and denominations that are striving to keep their buildings viable , the paradigm shift must begin at a fundamental level . As Willie Jennings argues in his concise and brilliant foreword , churches are ( literally ) grounded in assumptions about land . They could grow because land was available , and the land was available because the people who were indigenous to it were largely driven out . Jim Bear Jacobs and Keith Starkenburg insist in their essays that churches have never faced this heritage squarely and that they have a moral and spiritual responsibility to make recompense . More broadly , few congregations have truly considered their stewardship of the land they occupy other than as a lot arbitrarily surveyed and carved out for the purpose of property ownership . But what does “ owning land ” entail for Christians ? Coté Soerens argues that at the least it means seeking well-being and justice for the whole community and this patch of earth , not just “ members .”
A key term that recurs in these essays is “ place ”— a holistic , interconnected sense of how all community institutions and constituencies , and the natural and built environment together , make a particular place what it is . A threatened or vacant church building can be a catalyst for drawing people out of their silos to consider their communities as a whole . The last five essays provoke new thinking about how everyone from city planners to zoning commissions to realtors to developers to philanthropies can have a critical role in transforming church buildings for community purposes — but only if they work together .
Gone for Good has its limitations , as editor Mark Elsdon points out . Black Church traditions have a voice here through the inspiring scriptural interpretations of David Bowers . But their rich heritage of community-building — an example from which churches of European heritage have much to learn — is not adequately represented . Voices from the growing Hispanic and Asian church communities are lacking , as are perspectives from Judaism , Islam , and other
6 SACRED PLACES • SUMMER 2024