In Metro DC, churches sell, build, renovate for innovative ministry

Creativity, courage and the willingness to make tough decisions are traits churches need to navigate the challenges posed by aging buildings, declining memberships and shifting demographics, according to those living this reality.

But it also requires the fortitude to work through the emotional pain that often comes with leaving or significantly redeveloping sacred space, said Austin Almaguer, lead pastor of Vienna Baptist Church in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

“Our church buildings are more than brick and mortar, they are vessels of memories, memories of baptisms and weddings and funerals,” he said. “For any church, the most heartbreaking thing is this thought of who is going to be the last person to turn off the lights.”

Vienna Baptist is in active contract negotiations to sell and eventually leave its 4.5-acre property near Washington, D.C. “All of this has come about after a long and thorough period of discernment, but the decision to sell our property has also been very much of a grief process,” he said.

Costly maintenance and shrinking attendance are squeezing more and more U.S. congregations into similar predicaments, Partners for Sacred Places said in a recent report. The nonprofit said at least 52% of congregations experienced drops in worship attendance during the past five years. Two-thirds now have fewer than 100 people in attendance for worship.

Nationwide, more than a quarter of congregational budgets are devoted to building maintenance, the report added. “The threat to the sacred places which have for so long been a part of the landscape of community life has reached a crisis level, but addressing it is beyond the capacity of individual congregations, religious denominations or any one organization — it requires a complex response involving many players.”

The Metro D.C. area offers multiple examples of how churches have responded to such challenges with imaginative approaches to financing and building design for a new era. Among those are Vienna Baptist; Riverside Baptist Church in D.C.; First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C.; and Church at Clarendon in suburban Virginia.

Vienna Baptist

Churches must honestly assess their situations before it becomes too late to make complex decisions, Almaguer said. “When you have 75 people in a sanctuary for 500 people like we have, it feels like no one is there. It feels like the church is dying and it’s not something that’s attractive to visitors, and the temptation can be to look the other way as long as possible.”

But stark reality kicked his congregation into gear and into a methodical discernment process that culminated in an October vote to sell the property to another congregation and enter a shared-space agreement with yet another congregation in the area.

“We spent a year listening to the congregation and community and concluded we could either spend the next 10 to 20 years devoting more and more money to this facility or spending that time and money ministering to the community,” Almaguer said.

A key driver in the decision was the desire for the church to remain true to its calling of service by maintaining its longstanding partnerships with local schools and nonprofits. And that meant not leaving the immediate area.

“We had a number of options before us, but through our discernment we constantly reaffirmed we want to remain rooted in this community where we have been since 1957,” the pastor said of the congregation affiliated with American Baptist Churchess, the Alliance of Baptists and AWAB.

For example, the church has “a robust partnership” with a local elementary school that includes a weekend grocery program for food-insecure families. Church members also want to explore how to be more helpful to neighbors struggling with the rising costs of housing and food.

“We will be able to go from budgeting for building to budgeting for resources that can go to our partners.”

“When we are free from all the time and energy that goes into repairs, we will be able to spend more time listening to principals and nonprofit directors about what our community’s greatest needs are,” he said. “We will be able to go from budgeting for building to budgeting for resources that can go to our partners.”

But congregations should not underestimate nor seek to avoid the pain that accompanies even the best of decisions, he added.

“We realized if we make a decision now, we will have agency in the decisions we make, but if we wait too long, then decisions will be made for us. This is especially important for us because we want these properties to continue in some sense to inhabit the spirit of the people who lived their lives worshiping and living here.”

Riverside Baptist

On the south side of Washington, D.C., Riverside Baptist Church leveraged its waterfront location to participate in a mixed-use concept blending faith with housing and educational spaces.

The designer describes The Banks Apartments and the new Riverside Baptist Church as a “unique development,” but Riverside Senior Pastor Mia McClain said it is simply the expression of a congregation intent on being relevant in its social and cultural context.

“This is a streamlined model of church, in form and function. It is set up so the church has a future. There will not be expansions of the facilities, but there will be re-imaginings of how to use the space.” Riverside is affiliated with the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists and the Alliance of Baptists.

The congregation sold part of its property to the developer of the Wharf mixed-used project featuring a 173-unit apartment tower and The Goddard School, concert space and multiple restaurants. Riverside’s 1968 building was demolished in 2016 and the congregation moved into its new, smaller facility two years later.

The church invested the proceeds of the sale into building a new downsized facility on its remaining property on Maine Avenue. The 11,000-square-foot building includes a stylized bell tower topped by a cross, a 250-seat sanctuary, two offices, one multi-purpose room, one conference room, a caterer’s kitchen and upper and lower atriums — much less than its previous space offered, McClain said.

But the design is as Baptist as it is modern, GBR Architects explained.

“The worship space is represented by a wall of glass formed to represent water — a reference to one of the most fundamental ideologies of the Baptist faith. The wave-inspired roof form is an expression of the significance of water in the Baptist tradition while simultaneously rooting the church to its neighborhood along the waterfront.”

The historic church was motivated to change by many of the same pressures American houses of worship have been facing for decades, including dwindling attendance, unused spaces and escalating maintenance costs, McClain explained.

Shedding space enabled Riverside to create an endowment that provides grants to organizations serving the community. The arrangement also inspires the congregation to be strategic in its use of space and to keep its focus on mission.

“That’s forced us to be creative and efficient in the use of space, like using our meeting and multipurpose rooms as Sunday school classrooms,” McClain said. “There might come a time when we need to decide how we reimagine our space, perhaps turn my office into a nursery and rent office space across the street or next door.”

In the process, Riverside Baptist has forged partnerships with neighborhood organizations, including music and arts groups. It has become the site for yoga and gardening classes with the goal of expanding to ecumenical gatherings and other community events.

“This is what it means to be an urban church,” McClain said. “Those who want a suburban setting can certainly still find those congregations with campuses with multiple buildings. But we are very much an extension of the wider Wharf community and we want to continue to grow as a church outside of these doors — and the building actually helps with that.”

In March, Riverside Baptist hosted the Alliance of Baptists’ 2025 annual gathering, which used every square inch of space in the facility, McClain added. “We didn’t have to worry about providing lunch because there are 10 restaurants across the street, including outdoor eating and coffee shops.”

The new building also is helping forge intergenerational relationships within the congregation as groups are forced to combine Sunday school and newcomer’s classes. Affinity groups that want to meet privately are being encouraged to do so online when physical space is unavailable.

“The sanctuary is mostly full on Sundays, but not to overflow. We run out of parking pretty quickly, but that comes with the territory in D.C.,” the pastor said. “But for us, the building is the gathering space, but it is not the ending point.”

First Baptist

Creativity and patience in reimagining facilities have fostered a thorough transformation at First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C., Senior Pastor Julie Pennington-Russell said.

“Before, everything was in a state of decline. People were put off entering the sanctuary. People told us if it hadn’t been for the warmth of the people they would have likely visited and moved on. Our buildings were falling down around us.”

But not anymore. In May, the church — located six blocks from the White House — celebrated the completion of a new Community Building complete with welcome center, meeting spaces, youth lounge and offices.

The project was the latest in a multi-phase construction plan spanning more than a decade, beginning with the 2011 opening of an apartment tower on leased church property, followed by the demolition of a child development center and education building to make room for additional apartments, underground parking and renovations of the sanctuary and Fellowship Hall, all completed by 2023.

Implementing these changes often required making difficult emotional and ministry decisions, Pennington-Russell said of the congregation affiliated with the Alliance of Baptists, American Baptist Churches in the USA, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, BWA and the District of Columbia Baptist Convention.

“The situation required discernment. The church’s child-development center operated for more than 30 years for preschoolers and infants, but we had to close it due to construction and the building coming down. So, we decided not to revive the school.”

It also required a good deal of vision, especially in financing and the selection of developers, said Dave Ryder, executive director of operations.

Rather than selling off property, the church opted to go with competitive bidding for ground leases to cover the commercial projects, which provides for debt-free operations going forward.

“The revenue stream did two things for us. It stabilized the operating budget and it allowed us to deal with the $7 million in deferred maintenance we were facing,” he said.

A second ground lease was signed to demolish and replace the education building with a structure mixing residences, offices and community spaces connected to the sanctuary through a welcome lobby. Proceeds from the sale of the education building were used to renovate the sanctuary.

“We don’t get revenue from the second project for the first 25 years, but we own what we built,” Ryder said. “Our contribution to the deal was the equity in our land.”

The projects also required clear and open dialogue between staff and congregation, especially because the designs and financing plans were often very complicated. Newsletters, workshops, town halls, Zoom calls and quarterly meetings were employed to educate church members and generate support.

“It takes a lot of effort, but don’t underestimate for any congregation the importance of communication and transparency about putting the deal together, the financial package, selecting a developer, all of it,” Ryder said. “The business aspects take a lot of work, but the hard part was bringing the congregation along.”

Communication also was crucial in reminding the congregation that all the demolition, construction and renovations enable the church to better share the gospel and be “a different kind of Baptist” in the nation’s capital, Pennington-Russell added.

“Our commitment to justice continues in a way that hadn’t really been named in a prominent way before we could offer these more welcoming spaces,” she said. “We have boiled that down to six words: love, belonging, authenticity, justice, joy and hope.”

Church at Clarendon

A Baptist congregation in nearby Arlington, Va. decided to move up instead of away to address the challenges of declining church membership and aging facilities.

“In 2004, we looked up to the sky and saw all this space above the church not being used, so it was proposed to build housing on top of the church space,” said Robert Ryland, a deacon and trustee at the Church at Clarendon, a congregation affiliated with the Baptist General Association of Virginia and Baptist World Alliance.

“We didn’t want to leave because we felt God had called us to keep the church right there where it has been since 1909.”

To do that, the church took the strategic step of selling the air rights above its property for construction of a 10-story structure with the congregation occupying the first two floors and the remainder containing 116 apartment units.

“The church was rebuilt in the process and completed in 2012 as a multi-use building with a two-floor sanctuary, a welcome hall, offices and classrooms. A nonprofit corporation owns everything above the second floor,” Ryland explained.

The entire project occupies a triangular piece of land with the church in the forward-facing sharp end of the parcel. While the parcel lacks a lot of parking, it is situated near a Metro public transit station serving a community with a dearth of affordable housing.

“As part of our commitment to our community, 60% of the 116 units are designated as affordable housing for low-income tenants,” Ryland said. “The original church steeple remains in place as a beacon that shows the building is a place of worship.”

Located behind the structure is the church’s original but heavily renovated education building with classrooms, offices and space for the John Leland Center for Theological Studies, a nondenominational seminary with Baptist roots.

But the planning and preparation to reach the 2009 groundbreaking and demolition took years and often stretched the church’s patience and finances. The congregation worshipped at nearby First Baptist Church of Ballston during the construction phase.

“We had to choose between selling out and putting all our chips on the table, and what commenced was a series of off-site retreats followed by a 10-year process that included interviewing architects,” Ryland said. “There were multiple setbacks that kept pushing the project back.”

Those setbacks included lawsuits filed by neighbors opposed to the height of the building, its proximity to their properties and the rezoning required for the inclusion of affordable housing on the site. The church prevailed in those actions and against federal actions accusing the state and county of endorsing religion by providing subsidies for the project.

Construction costs, meanwhile, escalated throughout the delays but the congregation never wavered in its commitment to the plan. “It died a dozen times and we could have lost everything, but God came through for us,” Ryland said.

And the new facility has enabled the church to come through for its neighbors by hosting Ethiopian, Hispanic and Vietnamese congregations and providing meeting space for grassroots organizations.

“We have been able to expand our ministry to the community because we have this building.”

“We have been able to expand our ministry to the community because we have this building. The new church space and the housing make up part of that ministry,” he noted.

The facility also has met the congregation’s needs with a 350-seat sanctuary, a second-floor baptismal, a music room, library, parlor and nursery. From top to bottom, the property is more welcoming than ever before. The former sanctuary, built in 1950, seated 800 but it and the rest of the facility had outlived their usefulness.

“We had an aging structure that was too expensive to maintain. It was a building impervious to anyone in a wheelchair,” he said. “So, we had to have a modern structure easier to get in and out, and we wanted to maintain a daycare, a place to host ethnic congregations and we wanted to host the John Leland center.”

Keeping the steeple also was key to the church’s mission, Ryland said. “I was originally against it. I thought it was too expansive and odd. But now, having a steeple visible from the Metro station is important in communicating we are a church.”

Market trends

The strategies churches are using to deal with their physical and financial challenges is as varied as the congregations themselves, said Carlin Beekman, vice president of the mission property group Foundry Commercial, the Florida-based real estate firm working with Vienna Baptist.

“The market is evolving day to day and the situation facing each church is as nuanced and varied as their individual missions and vision of what it means to be the local church,” she said. “Each congregation should let their vision drive their real estate decisions.”

The solutions they are finding are also as unique as each congregation, Beekman said. “We encounter people using any number of creative approaches. Some are looking to buy property in industrial parks, others are looking to stay right where they are through mergers (with other churches) or selling some of their property to finance renovations or new construction.”

But she urged congregations to get started on the visioning process as soon as possible to avoid letting financial emergencies limit their options.

“Building the right real estate strategy takes a lot of discernment because it affects not only where a congregation is going but who they may be selling to. Most churches want their property to be used in ways compatible with their values.”

 

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