It could have been the death of a church.

Epiphany Lutheran lost all but 175 of its 1,500 members as thousands of whites fled the city from the 1950s to the 1990s. Remaining congregants had little contact with the Chaldeans and blacks who make up most of the surrounding neighborhoods.

“We were frankly someplace where older white people came in to have their church and then leave,” the Rev. Richard Hillenbrand said.

For the church to survive, Hillenbrand knew, it would have to change. So it reached out in new directions, opening its doors for crime prevention workshops, Head Start programs, a summer camp, movies for children.

The biggest step came last spring when church leaders, who used to chase people off their spacious front lawn, turned that lawn into a community park.

“It makes it look like, hey, here’s a church where things are happening,” Hillenbrand said.

Hundreds or even thousands of vintage religious buildings throughout the country are crumbling or closed because their congregations dwindled, and those that remain no longer can maintain them.

Many others are saved. Some get entirely new lives, uses that builders of sacred structures never imagined: as a museum in Miami Beach, Florida; a bed and breakfast in Liberty, Kansas; and as an Urban League office in Baltimore.

Others, like Epiphany Lutheran’s, are preserved for worship as religious groups find additional uses for them – in the process, pumping new life into their congregations and expanding the ways they serve their communities.
-John Hughes, “New uses for old buildings,”