What Is a Church Building For? A Review of Loren Richmond Jr.’s The Church as Community Hub

Churches have a lot of space.

Increasingly, they have a lot more space than they need.

That is one of the realities behind Loren Richmond Jr.’s new book, The Church as Community Hub: Sharing Spaces to Help Neighborhoods Thrive. Across the country, congregations worship in buildings constructed for a different era of American Christianity. They have classrooms that once held packed Sunday schools, fellowship halls designed for large church suppers, kitchens capable of feeding a crowd, offices, parking lots, and sometimes substantial pieces of land. Meanwhile, the neighborhoods surrounding these churches may be struggling to find affordable childcare, housing, gathering places, meeting rooms, or simply places where people can be together.

Loren’s book asks what might happen if churches began to connect those two realities.

What impressed me most was that The Church as Community Hub never felt like another attempt to help struggling congregations grasp at the straws of relevance. There are plenty of ideas circulating about how churches might become more innovative, more entrepreneurial, or more attractive to people who have stopped attending. Loren is interested in something deeper. He wants congregations to think differently about the resources they already have and to ask how those resources might contribute to the flourishing of their neighbors.

That makes this a book about church buildings, but it also makes it a book about vocation.

Martin Luther had a remarkably ordinary understanding of where Christian faith leads us. Faith turns us toward God, and then Christian freedom turns us toward the neighbor. We do not need to spend our lives proving ourselves worthy before God. Grace takes care of that. And because grace takes care of that, we are free to spend our lives asking a different question: what does my neighbor need?

I kept returning to that idea while reading Loren’s book. What would happen if congregations asked that question about their property? Not, “How do we get more people into this building?” Not even, “How do we generate enough cash from this building to keep it open?” But, “What does our neighbor need, and what has God already placed in our hands?”

Sometimes the answer may be surprisingly mundane. Maybe the neighborhood needs a commercial kitchen. Maybe it needs affordable childcare. Maybe a nonprofit needs office space. Maybe people need a place for recovery meetings or English classes. Maybe the community needs housing, and the congregation happens to own several acres of land. Maybe teenagers need somewhere to go after school. None of these uses is particularly flashy. That is part of what I find so compelling about them. Lutheran theology has always insisted that God has a habit of working through ordinary things. Bread and wine. Water and words. Parents and teachers and farmers and public servants. Why not classrooms, kitchens, parking lots, and fellowship halls?

I also found myself reading Loren alongside the late Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall. Hall, the favorite theologian of one of my theological vocational mentors, spent decades urging North American Christians to stop treating the decline of Christendom as though it were synonymous with the decline of Christianity. The loss of the church’s cultural power could certainly be painful. Institutions would shrink. Buildings would become difficult to maintain. Clergy would lose some of the social status their predecessors enjoyed. But Hall also wondered whether disestablishment might free the church to become the church again.

That seems like an important theological backdrop to The Church as Community Hub. So many of our church buildings were constructed during an era when Christianity occupied a very different place in American life. Their scale tells a story about that era. Their sanctuaries, education wings, bowling alleys, gymnasiums, and parking lots were built with the expectation that people would come. For a time, they did.

Today, many do not.

We can experience that primarily as loss. In many congregations, that loss is real and deserves to be grieved. But Hall would push us to ask whether there might also be an invitation hidden within it. Perhaps the task is not to figure out how to restore the institutional church of 1965. Perhaps we can loosen our grip on some of the things associated with that era and discover a different way of being present in our communities.

Loren gives that theological possibility some very practical expression. An empty Sunday school classroom can become something other than evidence of decline. A fellowship hall used throughout the week by community groups can be something other than an underutilized church asset. A congregation that develops some of its land for housing has not necessarily surrendered something that once belonged to the church. It may have discovered a new way for that property to serve the church’s vocation.

This is also why I hope this book finds its way beyond pastors and property committees in established congregations. Bishops and denominational leaders should read it. So should people who oversee church foundations and grant programs. And I especially hope it is read by people involved in funding, planting, and supporting new congregations.

We tend to associate these questions with old churches that have too much building. But there is an equally interesting question on the other end of the congregational lifecycle. If you have funding and denominational support to start something new, why recreate the conventional church campus in the first place?

Imagine beginning a new ministry by asking what kind of shared space a particular neighborhood actually needs. Maybe it is childcare. Maybe it is affordable housing with community space on the first floor. Maybe it is a coffee shop, coworking space, community kitchen, counseling center, garden, or arts space. Instead of building a church and eventually asking how the neighborhood might use it, what if we created something the neighborhood needed and asked how a worshiping community might live within it?

I think that possibility deserves considerably more attention, particularly from denominations investing significant resources in new starts. It also shows why Loren’s argument should not be reduced to a strategy for managing decline. There is something here for churches that are just beginning.

One question I was left with concerns the theological depth underneath Loren’s argument. Loren draws from an impressive collection of contemporary thinkers and researchers, including people like Ryan Burge, Andy Root, and Scott Thumma. Their work helps us understand the institutional and cultural conditions churches are navigating. But I would be interested to see this conversation pushed further into the Christian tradition itself. Loren’s proposal seems ripe for conversation with Luther on vocation and Christian freedom, Hall on disestablishment and the theology of the cross, and other theological voices that can help us see the community hub not simply as an innovative ministry model, but as an expression of what the church has long confessed about its relationship with God and neighbor.

I also found myself wanting to hear about a few failures.

Church innovation literature tends to feature success stories for understandable reasons. But anyone who has spent time around congregations knows that partnerships fall apart. A church can spend money creating something its neighborhood does not actually want. A nonprofit partner can turn out to be the wrong fit. Volunteers can burn out. A great idea can become unsustainable. Sometimes the faithful decision is to keep going, and sometimes the faithful decision is to pull the plug. I have seen versions of this happen here in Madison. That does not disprove Loren’s thesis. If anything, I think those stories could make the case stronger. Congregations need permission to experiment without assuming that every experiment must become a permanent ministry. I would love to hear more stories from this movement about what went wrong, what people learned, and what they did next.

Those questions came to me because I think Loren is onto something important. The Church as Community Hub offers congregations a way of thinking about decline that is neither nostalgic nor defeatist. It does not tell churches to accept irrelevance, nor does it give them another program for clawing their way back toward cultural significance. It asks them to look again at what they have been given.

There is something deeply pastoral about that invitation. Many congregations are tired. Their membership is older than it used to be. Their budgets are tighter. They remember when the Sunday school rooms were full, and they feel the absence when they walk past them today. It is easy to look at an empty classroom and see only what has been lost.

Loren invites us to look again.

Maybe the room is not empty because the church has failed. Maybe the room is simply available.

Available for a neighbor. Available for a partner. Available for an experiment. Available for a form of ministry nobody imagined when the building was constructed fifty or seventy-five or a hundred years ago.

That is ultimately why I am so enthusiastic about this book. Loren has written something practical, but he has also given the church a hopeful way to think about stewardship in a time of institutional change. He reminds us that the question facing a congregation is not simply whether we can preserve everything we inherited. The more interesting question is what all of these things we inherited might now be for.