#010: Repurposing empty church space
Feat. Floating Cities, Time Travel, and Thinking Unreasonably
The IdeaList is a newsletter exploring social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.
Subscribe for free to stay up to date and support my work.
In This Edition (9 minute read)
How underutilized church space could provide essential services to local communities
The Idea List, which explores smart guns, floating cities, hearing uncommon perspectives, virtual reality for chronic pain, and time travel
Why I’m embracing my lack of expertise when it comes to creative thinking
My mom runs her preschool out of a church. Her school takes up the Sunday school wings of a building that boasts several thousand square feet. When I visit or help out at the school, I’m always struck by how much space the church has – and how much space it doesn’t use. For all its real estate, the church has only a dozen or so regular members. The sanctuary is its largest room by far, but it sits empty, even on Sundays, unless my mom uses it for indoor recess.
It wasn’t always this way. This church used to have a bustling membership decades ago, and it would even put on big community events like drive-in movies. But its story of decline and disuse isn’t unique. Drive down any highway or back road in Michigan and you’ll see churches everywhere, their landscaping immaculate but their buildings empty outside of Sunday.
It turns out that empty space is top of mind for many churches right now. As overall church membership has declined, churches have faced increasing financial pressure. Thousands of churches are forced to close each year, and those that remain have more space than they know what to do with and an acute need to generate revenue. For the thousands of new churches that start each year, it might be possible to stay afloat through donations; religious giving has been increasing. But a growing movement of thinkers and leaders is warning churches to diversify their income so that they aren’t so reliant on tithing.
With so many churches teetering on closure or looking for new ways to raise funds, it seemed to me that there could be an exciting opportunity to think radically about the use of empty church space. What if there was a win-win, helping churches to generate revenue streams while providing essential services to their communities? Imagine helping local small businesses with cheap access to kitchens and office space, or providing short term shelter for local foster kids, or sponsoring programs to combat loneliness among the local elderly, or bringing affordable childcare to their community.
I wanted to hear how churches were thinking about adaptive reuse, so I talked to and visited a bunch of churches in Chicagoland. In my conversations, I learned that there are a whole host of barriers to unlocking underutilized church space. Several things came up over and over again.
Lack of demand. From what I heard, there’s no shortage of people asking to use empty church space, but space users aren’t willing or able to pay much. They want to use the space for their nonprofit board meetings or choir practice, not for lucrative, ongoing partnerships or projects. Of course, churches want to help out local organizations that need the space, but they want to make their space work for their financial situation as well.
Lack of capital. Many church buildings haven’t been updated in decades, and others are in disrepair. Since they don’t have much money in the bank, they’re stuck with space that is undesirable or straight-up unusable. One church told me that they couldn’t rent out space on their second or third floors because their building wasn’t compliant with the American Disabilities Act. Since they didn’t have money for an elevator, they had to let several rooms sit empty, even though they might otherwise be desirable to a nearby university or local businesses.
Lack of ideas. There are many examples of churches that managed to find interesting uses for their space. Churches have turned their spaces into an incubator for small business, a co-working space, and even a brewery. But the churches I talked to didn’t have a clear sense for the needs of the community, so they struggled to come up with creative uses for their space beyond food pantries. Some churches wouldn’t consider certain uses since they didn’t match up with the mission. For instance, one has been hesitant to rent their space to fraternities or sororities, and another would only rent their sanctuary to music groups. Even if they had ideas that fit within the mission, a lack of capital and desirable space severely limits the possibilities.
Legal concerns. Churches were nervous about the headaches that come with renting out their space, namely liability and taxes. For people who are strapped for time and money, the benefits of renting out space didn’t clearly outweigh the costs of getting insured or getting sued. And even if they did rent out their space, they told me that their tax bill would increase in proportion to the square footage of the rented space, which meant that they could actually lose money in a rental deal.
So, I learned that adaptive reuse of church space is complicated. As I’ve mentioned already, there are plenty of one-off churches who have cracked the code, but scalable solutions are hard since every church has different constraints. Still, there are smart people making progress.
For example, Bricks and Mortals and Missional Wisdom Foundation provide the help and connections to take churches through the entire process of adaptive reuse. Their work is exciting, but I worry that such a hands-on approach will be hard to scale. I’m hopeful about a new program through Bricks and Mortals will take learnings from the hands-on work to create a toolkit that will be usable for churches nationwide.
Faith and Finance is taking a different approach, training church leaders in business decision making. Most of the church leaders I talked to are bi-vocational, but very few had formal business training. If a lot of church space is empty because church leaders don’t know how to navigate legal concerns or financing options, business training is a great way to unlock some church space.
With the success of Airbnb, it seems like technology could play a vital role in scaling a solution to adaptive use. Platforms like ChurchSpace are trying to provide an easy way for churches to rent out their space online. I have no idea how successful these efforts have been, but I’d love to see a successful “Churchbnb” someday.
Churches need money and own a ton of real estate, and that space could be generating revenue and helping communities. Filling that space is more complex than coming up a few good ideas, but having a few good ideas could inspire churches to overcome the legal and financial concerns. Do you have ideas for using empty church space? Let me know!
The Idea List
🔫 Reduce gun deaths with smart guns (again)
Recent events have brought this country’s gun violence crisis to the forefront. Two months ago, I shared an article on smart guns as an idea for combatting gun deaths. While this solution wouldn’t have stopped the Buffalo or Uvalde shootings, it would bring a layer of security to guns so that they can’t be fired by children or other unauthorized users. The above article also links to a poll that suggests 55% of gun owners support the development of smart guns!
🌆 Make cities more adaptable with buildings that float in the air
This might be dumb, but I got excited about the possibility that city buildings could be movable. Cities are going to be forced to deal with big changes due to COVID and climate change. It would be great if we could just move Southern coastal cities away from the ocean because all the buildings were basically big balloons. Or take vacant buildings, which are really bad for violence; imagine if there were no vacant buildings because we could move them to storage when demand doesn’t keep up.
📺 Hear uncommon perspectives on this YouTube channel
Soft White Underbelly interviews criminals, addicts, prostitutes, and others you might not normally hear from. Listening is a great starting place for thinking about change, and this channel has hours of stories to listen to. Some of these stories can be absolutely brutal, so please watch with caution.
🥽 Alleviate chronic pain with virtual reality
This was a cool example of what I discussed in my previous posts on VR. The virtual world essentially takes enough brain power that patients aren’t feeling pain when they put on the headset. With an ever raging opioid crisis, could this be an alternative to pain medications? Or, for addicts, an alternative to heroin or fentanyl?
⏱️ Travel through time with Google Maps
Google Maps is much more than a tool to look for a nearby coffee shop or find your way to a friend’s house. This article talks about a new feature within Street View that lets you browse past Street View photos using a time slider. My team looked at blocks in Chicago over time to map retail vacancies caused by COVID, but I’ve been thinking that there must be other ways to use this feature. Any ideas?
One Last Thing: Thinking Unreasonably
My job requires me to think about problems that I know little about. It can be hard to look at big issues like foster care or homelessness and feel like I can come with anything new and interesting. But recently I’ve been trying to reframe my lack of expertise as a strength when it comes to creative thinking.
James Clear talked about being a beginner in his newsletter: "The gift of a beginner is fresh eyes. The longer you're in a field, the harder it is to perceive new truths. Your mind is biased toward refining what you're already doing instead of exploring fresh terrain. Take your expertise and apply it to something new."
And about 8 minutes into this interview, Noubar Afeyan (co-founder of Moderna) had this to say on exploring new ideas: “It starts as an act of imagination. It is not an act of reason…We need to be unreasonable so that we come up with leaps that eventually seem reasonable.”
Being new to a problem gives me license to think unreasonably; my imagination can run freely since I’m not constrained by expertise. And sure, a bunch of my naive ideas seem stupid after I dig into them, and I certainly work hard to poke holes in my ideas and refine them. But rather than feeling paralyzed by my lack of expertise on these big problems, I’m going to tap into my imagination and my naivety, because it might just mean that I’ll think of something that no expert would have dared to think. And that might be where the good stuff is.
Until next time,
Noah
Previous Editions
You can check out all previous editions of The IdeaList to read about other social issues and ideas for making the world a better place.