Mora appears to be good at his juggling act. Primera Iglesia Cristiana now sees 50-60 attendees on any given Sunday, which amounts to a comeback: The church, which was founded in 1899, experienced something of a heyday in the mid-century, then saw a precipitous decline from the 1980s forward. By the time Mora arrived in 2011, Primera Iglesia Cristiana consisted of four old-timers who would gather for Sunday worship behind closed doors.

Mora shakes his head at the memory. “I say to them, ‘Why you no open the church doors to the community?’ They say, ‘Because we need to save money for air conditioning.’”

***

Primera Iglesia Cristiana may be 118 years old, but it’s essentially a startup, or a start-over. That makes it something of a unicorn: Most church startups, known as “church plants,” do not happen in neighborhoods like this one. San Antonio’s West Side, a colorful, historic Mexican American community adjacent to downtown, has for generations been a distressed area, with high rates of poverty, joblessness, and high-school dropouts. While that description may make it sound like the kind of place faith leaders would target, church planters tend to focus their efforts on areas that are higher-income.

Churches are not just faith institutions; they are economic institutions, too. And church life in general seems to be falling along economic lines: Churches of all sizes proliferate the suburbs and the tonier parts of America’s urban cores, while in lower income, economically stagnant neighborhoods, churches tend to be very small, very old, and in general, not as active in their community.

Sociologists, like Robert Putnam and Ram Cnann, have shown that religious participation is in its steepest decline among lower classes. Church attendance is correlated strongly to higher levels of education and income. Working class and poorer families are less likely to participate in a religious community than any other socioeconomic group. Religious faith and practice is a reflection of human beliefs, but it is also a marker of economic realities, including the gap between affluent and distressed neighborhoods.

Putnam has argued that involvement in religious groups is associated with a variety of positive outcomes for youth—including better mental and physical health, lower levels of substance abuse, and high educational attainment—in part because religious groups provide strong social connections and a sense of identity. Plus, faith communities provide significant assistance for struggling families, from rental and food assistance to after-school care and mentoring of both kids and single parents.

Communities that are arguably in most need of the social supports churches provide are the communities where churches seem to be vanishing—and where new, upstart church activity is not happening. In 2016, a Barna Group study of 769 church start-ups found that half of them were in wealthier locations. Brooke Hempell, the senior vice president of research at Barna Group, noted that church work in economically disadvantaged or economically mixed areas presents a higher degree of difficulty. “Churches in urban areas tended to be extremely financially strapped,” she said. “Not only is it more expensive to operate but they are also serving more needy populations.”