As organized religion declines, nonprofits and philanthropy are confronting questions about how much faith matters to their work — and the common good. Here we offer three examples of declining churches transformed into engines of social good.
1. Diapers, Cabbage, and Music
Each afternoon, when the doors swing open at S.S. Conner Elementary in East Dallas, dozens of children head out for the short walk to a large red-brick building topped with a white steeple. Once inside, some attend music lessons provided by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Others go to an after-school program that teaches reading and helps children develop social-emotional skills. One day before the holidays arrive, dozens will show up with their families for a toy giveaway.
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All this represents a small part of the social engine created from the ashes of a closed church. In 2017, down to about a dozen members, the 94-year-old Owenwood United Methodist Church shuttered and turned its property over to a nearby sister church, White Rock United Methodist. Six years later, the Owenwood Farm and Neighbor Space is home to an eclectic array of programs serving the high-poverty neighborhood.
The nonprofit Aspire provides career training and education programs that include GED instruction and English-as-a-second-language classes. Hundreds of families rely on a food bank and diaper service. Staff and volunteers from the nonprofit Grow North Texas tend to rows of broccoli, cabbage, kale, mustard greens, peppers, and more. The organization also runs a weekly farm stand with fresh produce — a rarity in what is a Dallas food desert — and teaches essentials like how to grow fruits and vegetables in an apartment.
While the Methodist church is gone, one of the building’s new tenants is a small church that serves the LGBTQIA+ community.
White Rock church acquired the Owenwood campus with just such good works in mind. It was in the midst of rejuvenating its own fortunes by deepening ties to its neighborhood and its service to the broader community — including a co-working and makerspace. North Texas Methodist leaders agreed to let White Rock take over Owenwood after one of its officials visited the church just as S.S. Conner let out and kids streamed by on their way home. “I said to her: ‘Are you seriously going to tell me the church doesn’t have a mission here?’” remembers Neil Moseley, who was then White Rock’s director of community outreach.
Jessica Hernandez, Owenwood’s executive director, was previously a teacher at S.S. Conner. When Owenwood opened, she cajoled her colleagues to clean out their kitchen cupboards to fill its community refrigerator, where neighbors donated food and took what they needed. That simple gesture was one of the organization’s first offerings. Next year, Hernandez is looking to open a computer lab and an everyday food pantry.
“God wants you to serve others, take care of others, love them,” Hernandez says. “And you can tell people that all day long through scripture. But how are you really showing his work if you’re not really doing the work?”
2. Ministry Seven Days a Week
The end was near for St. Peter’s United Church of Christ. Or so it seemed.
Founded by German immigrants in the mid-1800s, the Louisville, Ky., church had routinely filled its 1,000-seat sanctuary for much of the 20th century. But when the Rev. Jamesetta Ferguson arrived in 2006, she preached to a congregation of about 15.
Ferguson knew the neighborhood well: Her great-aunt, who helped raise her, had lived in the public-housing apartments across the street from the church. As a child, however, Ferguson passed by St. Peter’s almost daily without realizing it was a church. She was Black, the church’s congregation largely white.
“This church was invisible to the people in our community because we were not invited in,” she says.
Ferguson moved quickly to change that. Within a few years, St. Peter’s was serving 1,000 people a week through meal and after-school programs, substance-abuse treatment, mental-health offerings, and more.
In 2011, Ferguson created the MOLO Village Community Development Corporation to provide services including childhood education, job skills, financial management help, and food and health support. MOLO, an acronym for “Making Our Lives Ours,” is also one of the official languages of South Africa and Zimbabwe. The word itself means “welcome.”
The church began to grow, with many new members coming from what is now a predominantly Black neighborhood. Ferguson turned to the denomination’s Church Building and Loan Fund to help renovate St. Peter’s property, but together they created a plan to build a mixed-use commercial complex on the church’s parking lot.
In 2021, Molo Village opened the Village @ West Jefferson with a credit union, a coffee shop, a day-care center, a health-care facility, youth programs, and the street’s ’s first sit-down restaurant in a half century.
Church membership now tops 100, Ferguson says. “We are growing because of our community engagement. When I’m at the Village, it’s very easy to meet someone and say, ‘Well, now that you’re here, come on to church.’”
3. ‘The Downtown Church’
A massive Gothic Revival church stands on the corner of 9th and Market streets in downtown Tacoma, Wash., not far from the mayor’s office and in the heart of the theater district. With its sandstone exterior and castle-like bell tower, it’s a powerful expression of religion. The bustle of activity inside, however, speaks of service to the city.
The building opened in 1925, a new home for the First Baptist Church, which had opened a half-century earlier. The congregation quickly swelled to more than 2,300, but by the early 2000s, the number had dwindled to only a few dozen — this when its three-story sanctuary seated more than 800. Other downtown churches had pulled up stakes and moved to the suburbs in search of growth, but the congregation recommitted to downtown. Working with community and religious leaders, First Baptist in 2005 agreed to close and reconstitute as Urban Grace, an interdenominational church that pledged to deep service to the neighborhood, particularly through the arts.
The church’s new leaders made over the building to include rehearsal space, studios, and offices for area nonprofits — including the city’s farmer’s market, which provides fresh produce at four sites in the city as well as to a community food program for low-income families. The Tacoma Symphony was one of the first tenants and stayed for more than 15 years. Today, more than half of the 17 tenants in the building are artists — painters, music teachers, dance instructors.
Rents now cover more than 80 percent of the budget for the building’s upkeep. In a capital campaign, the church told the story of how it was innovating on the Baptist’s congregation’s long history of community service. It netted $1.3 million — $800,000 more than projected. In Tacoma, it’s known as the “Downtown Church.”
Membership is up to more than 100 members. That’s thanks to Urban Grace’s ecumenical approach and its new connections to the community, says the Rev. Liliana Da Valle, Urban Grace’s pastor. “It’s the only church I know where about 80 percent of the congregants are millennials — professionals, well-educated couples with children.”
Worship services showcase the talents of its congregation and neighbors. “We bring in folks to do either music or dance, or we’ve had painters that work on a piece during the service,” says Jennifer Dean, director of operations. “We’re trying to expand the idea of what faith is and where and how people encounter God. It’s not just through scripture reading or preaching.”
