Convert to condos or stay put: How churches are responding to their changing neighborhoods

A nearly 90-year-old Nashville church building now stands across the street from a new luxury apartment complex, illustrating how redevelopment has altered the neighborhood.

It also shows that places of worship, like First Baptist Church East Nashville, are not immune to the changes their communities are undergoing.

The church’s predominately black congregation once mirrored the neighborhood’s demographics, but today the hip and eclectic East Nashville with its rising property values and trendy restaurants draws a number of white millennials, said the Rev. Morris Tipton Jr., the church’s pastor.

Given the neighborhood’s sizable shift, is Tipton worried about the church’s future?

"If I think about it outside of the confines of God, I am," Tipton said. "Most of the black churches in this community are leaving. They are selling their churches to land developers who are turning them into restaurants and bars and condos and apartments and any number of things."

Similar stories are playing out across the USA. Buildings that once held worship services have been repurposed or bulldozed and redeveloped into bars, restaurants and other secular spaces.

Like in Washington, D.C., where a 120-year-old church in what was once a working class black neighborhood has been converted to condos selling for up to $1 million.

Or in Springfield, Mo., where a church was razed to make way for a Walmart and in York, Pa., where the city bought a former house of worship to use as a possible event space for a nearby hotel.

Then there's the struggling Norwood Baptist Church in Knoxville, with its aging and dwindling congregation, that merged in January with a larger, thriving congregation in the suburbs.

The impact of gentrification on churches

Churches need to decide how they're going to react to their changing neighborhoods, said Alvin Sanders, the interim president and CEO of World Impact.

"It makes a church reexamine its call. Every single church is called to make disciples," Sanders said. "It has to decide, is it there to reach its community even if its community changes? That's really the biggest pressure."

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Neighborhoods are changing in cities across the USA. For about 40 years, World Impact, a Los Angeles-based urban missions organization, has trained pastors working in impoverished communities across the country.

Many of those same neighborhoods are in transition, shifting demographically from low to high income, Sanders said. The attitudes, beliefs and values of residents in the neighborhood change dramatically with the shift.

"To simplify this, I jokingly say that you know a neighborhood gentrifies when it goes from baggy jeans to skinny jeans as a fashion statement and with that all of the culture that comes with those fashion statements," Sanders said.

Gentrification tends to send churches down one of four paths, Sanders said.

Do you stay or do you go?

One route is relocation. The church follows the neighborhood's displaced residents. Or a church stays, but tries to change the makeup of its congregation by reaching a multi-ethnic group across social classes.

Tipton strongly believes that a church should be a part of its community. He said First Baptist Church East Nashville's congregation is healthy and about 75 people fill the pews every Sunday. But he also is trying to reach the people who live next door, both those in the luxury apartments as well as the resident in a Section 8 housing complex behind the church.

"I’m a firm believer that heaven is not racially segregated and so because of that I think it’s not a good thing for churches to be," Tipton said. "I just feel led to try to bring back that whole community spirit."

That outreach manifests as community forums, back-to-school drives and a biweekly door-knocking campaign inviting all of the neighbors to attend a service. So far, only about five white people have accepted that invitation, Tipton said.

"They come and they generally don’t come back because again more times than not this is not the flavor of worship they’ve grown up with," Tipton said.

Another response to a gentrifying neighborhood is for a new church to start up. Suburban churches open a campus or plant a church in the urban core to reach the new residents, Sanders said.

Finally, a church can die.

In Sanders' experience, gentrification isn't typically the direct cause of a church's demise. But the deep pockets of developers can tip a congregation toward closure.

"It's that they were struggling anyway and gentrification sort of hastened the whole process," Sanders said.

Gentrification is far from the only factor affecting the life cycle of a house of worship.

Internal issues like pastoral turnover, church politics, aging buildings and limited finances can harm a congregation. Cultural trends, including the drop in membership at mainline Protestant denominations and the increase in people who do not identify with any religious group, can affect a church's longevity, too.

Other factors at play for churches that struggle

The stories of churches across the country illustrate those challenges.

The luxury condo building in Washington D.C., now called The Sanctuary, was previously the home to the Way of the Cross Church of Christ, an African American congregation that sold the building in 2014 and built a new one in the Maryland suburbs.

It is one of dozens of church buildings that have been converted to commercial uses across the city.

That transformation is part of a dramatic change that has swept across D.C., which was a majority black city for decades. But more than 100,000 new residents have arrived in the past 20 years and blacks now make up just under half the population.

In Springfield, Mo., the former Calvary Temple building was razed in 2015, and a Walmart Neighborhood Market went up in its place. Members of the congregation migrated to other Assemblies of God churches in the city of 167,000 people.

Over the decades, the size of Calvary Temple's congregation had waxed and waned. The church was impacted by pastoral turnover and aging facilities as well as the hollowing out of the city's downtown due to new development elsewhere.

The sale of the building didn't surprise the Rev. Phil Hastie, who served as the pastor of Calvary Temple from 1980 to 1989, long before change swept the church away.

"People more times than not will not come to a drive-in type of church," Hastie said. "They tend to find a congregation close to where they live, where their kids go to school with other kids."

Yes, location matters

In downtown York, Pa., a long vacant, former church building could experience a possible revival. Its former, dwindling congregation decamped in 1995 for the suburbs, which were poised for growth. The move likely saved the congregation, which numbers around 1,300 members today.

"To think that a small group of committed people had pulled this off," said the Rev. Stanley W. Combs, Zion Lutheran's pastor from 1994 to 2014. "It was a prudent move."

The York County Industrial Development Authority bought the church's former home last year. As the surrounding neighborhood becomes more upscale, the authority is considering redeveloping the building, potentially turning it into an event space for the historic Yorktowne Hotel next door.

In Knoxville, the struggling Norwood Baptist Church merged in January with the larger, thriving First Baptist Church of Powell.

Norwood Baptist had suffered from an aging and dwindling congregation as well as changing neighborhood demographics.

Children’s rooms were so empty "it looked like the rapture had happened," said Kemp Wynn, who previously led the church and became the associate pastor following the merger.

The once predominantly white neighborhood surrounding Norwood Baptist is now home to a number of Hispanic residents and refugees. In April, First Baptist Church of Powell moved its Hispanic congregation to Norwood Baptist.

"When someone walks in now and it’s a person of color… they are going to look around and say, 'Hey I’m not the only person of color in this room,'" said Tim McGhee, the elder for missions and evangelism at First Baptist.

If Norwood Baptist keeps growing at its current pace, church leadership think it may become a standalone church again in a couple of years.

Fending off developers

In rapidly growing Nashville, some churches are trying out mergers, too. But developers also are snapping up old church properties in the midst of the city's booming real estate market — including a United Methodist Church that will soon become an event space, meaning the new owner had to decide what to do with an 112-year-old pipe organ.

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But some places of worship, the money from developers won't matter. They're staying put.

The Islamic Center of Nashville has fended off offers to buy their property in the heart of the city’s now trendy 12South neighborhood for years, said Rashed Fakhruddin, the president of the Islamic center. The mosque moved in a couple of decades before redevelopment transformed the crime-prone neighborhood and property values shot up, which have made it hard for its members to live nearby.

"People started coming to us asking if we would sell and offering a boatload of money. Until this day, it still happens now and then, but I think most people know we’re not moving anywhere," Fakhruddin said. "They could offer us the world but we love our roots here."

Tipton has received those calls too. But he tells solicitors he’s not interested in meeting with them, nor does he want to know how much they’re willing to pay. First Baptist Church East Nashville has survived tornadoes and floods as well as neighborhood crime and redevelopment. It’s not leaving, Tipton said.

"I don’t think God did all of that for us then to say well let’s just go on and take the highest bid and we’ll go find something else," Tipton said. "I just don't think that’s what God has for us."

Contributing: Paul Singer, USA Today; Greg Holman, Springfield News-Leader; Gary Haber, York Daily Record; Amy McRary, Knoxville News Sentinel.

Reach Holly Meyer at hmeyer@tennessean.com or 615-259-8241 and on Twitter @HollyAMeyer.