Diocese of Pennsylvania Reopens 3 Churches in 5 Years by Rediscovering Their Communities

By the time St. John’s Episcopal Church in the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown, Pennsylvania, closed in 2015 after 202 years, the parish had around 35 members and was about $260,000 in debt.

The cost of maintaining the ornate, neo-Gothic church – the oldest place of worship in the town of about 35,000 – was rising. The church “had a lot more funerals than we had baptisms,” senior warden Bill Kilgour told The Philadelphia Inquirer at the time. “We just didn’t have any young families and children coming up through the ranks.”

But what seemed like the end turned out to be the beginning of a new chapter in the church’s life. Since its 2017 revival, the parish has been reborn, with a new community that looks more like the town it serves. In the last 20 years, Norristown’s proportion of Hispanic/Latino residents has jumped from 10% to 27%, many of them from Puebla, Mexico. Pennsylvania Bishop Daniel Gutiérrez recognized that the shifting demographics presented an opportunity to reach new people, and he enlisted the Rev. Andy Kline, who speaks Spanish, to revive St. John’s by getting to know the neighbors and celebrating their culture. Now the church has a thriving 60-member congregation, including 20 families. It hosts a consistent stream of baptisms – at least 11 this year – fiestas and weddings, in addition to regular worship services in English and Spanish. Read More

Image Credit: Egan Millard/Episcopal News Service

All three churches mentioned in the article had become completely disconnected from their communities. They did not serve the community in which they were located. This typically happens when the congregation consists of people who no longer live in the neighborhood in which the church building is located, or in the case of the Continuing Anglican church on which I did a postmortem, never lived in the neighborhood, but lived in other communities and had no connection with the neighborhood in the first place. If a church wishes to thrive in this century in needs to be "laser-focused" on the neighborhood or community in which it is located and to reflect that neighborhood or community.