Old church closing

[lpetrich]

How Bad Should Anyone Feel About an Old Church Dying Out? - "The First Presbyterian Church of Bellefonte is closing after 200 years. Oh well."
By Hemant Mehta

That's Bellefonte PA, near State College PA, where I spent most of my childhood.

"The First Presbyterian Church of Bellefonte, in Pennsylvania, just held its final service on Christmas Eve, 221 years after it first opened."

Noting
Bellefonte: Church to close after more than 220 years | Centre Daily Times

The church that was organized at a time when there were only 16 states had no shortage of movers and shakers throughout the years. It was established by the same men who founded Bellefonte, while other members included two former Pennsylvania governors.

…
[Church elder Candace] Dannaker estimated the church had about 40 members before the pandemic, a number that is down to about 25. Only about a dozen attend services in person. The church did not have in-person worship from March 2020 until Easter Sunday.

Attendance is down even more sharply from when Dannaker joined 34 years ago. She estimated there were about 200 people in attendance then.

...
“We have classrooms that haven’t been used for years. We have a nursery with items for babies that hasn’t been used for quite a few years,” said Robert Dannaker, elder of the Bellefonte First Presbyterian Church. “Now in 2021, we are closing our doors.”

Hemant Mehta:

If you watch the final service, it’s not hard to see why people aren’t rushing to join. I don’t say that to mock them, only to point out what’s already obvious. It’s an old-fashioned church that clearly didn’t adopt to a digital world or make any real attempt to get new young members to join at a time when more young Americans are drifting away from organized religion. This is a place designed purely for in-person worship, as if its size and history should outweigh everything else. If tradition is your primary selling point, and there’s no other reason to make it the center of your life, it’s not surprising that they're struggling with membership.

(I’m not kidding about the lack of digital outreach: The church’s website has been down for a while. There’s no YouTube channel. There’s no microphone for the preacher.)

...
The final service was more like an optimistic funeral, with lines about how “challenges aren’t anything new to humanity” and “hope is ours once more.” It can be sad when old traditions die. I doubt the previous generation had to spend a lot of time worrying about drawing in new members. The fact that it's a serious issue for churches like this today isn't a bad thing at all. But let’s be clear: The building should never be the most important aspect of church anyway. The people who still belong to this institution can always find a new place to worship — or just worship on their own.

The fate of the church building is not settled yet.

On a side note, I find it incredible that the major articles written about this church’s closing focus so little on its beliefs. They’re just completely irrelevant to the story — which says something about the faith itself. No one seems to be attending because they care about the message. No one’s bragging about it anyway. No one's saying the preaching was stellar, or this church helped solidify their views about various controversial social issues.

 

[lpetrich]

Articles | Europe is Closing Many Churches

The Church of England closes about 20 churches per year. Approximately 200 Danish churches have been deemed non-viable or under used. The Roman Catholic Church in Germany has shut about 515 churches in the past decade. In Europe, the Netherlands appears to be the hardest hit according to a January 3-4, 2015 Wall Street Journal article by Naftali Bendavid, with Roman Catholic leaders estimating that two-thirds of their 1,600 churches will be out of commission in a decade, while approximately 700 of the nation's Protestant churches are expected to close within four years. Europe has historically had lower church attendance than the United States and with an aging population, many European churches are no longer viable. In Germany and France only 10 or 11% of Christians report attending church services at least once a week and in Denmark it is only half that.

The US also.

More Churches Closed than Opened in 2019. Then Came the Pa...... | News & Reporting | Christianity Today

Protestant Church Closures Outpace Openings in U.S. - Lifeway Research

Study: More churches closing than opening
noting
Redeveloping Houses of Worship | icma.org

That study, published in April, estimated that in the decade ending in 2020, 3,850 to 7,700 houses of worship closed per year in the United States, or 75 to 150 congregations per week. It also projected those numbers will double or triple in the wake of the pandemic.

The biggest reason for church closings is a decline in church membership. A March poll from Gallup found that fewer than half (47%) of Americans say they belong to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from more than 70% in 2000.

That is about 1.7% per year closing, or about 16% or 1/6 per decade.

Churches Are Closing. It’s a Challenge for Local Governments.

Sad, vacant, derelict houses of worship at the hearts of our cities and towns will become more frequent sights as more of them shutter their doors. The next few years could see as many as 100,000 of the nation’s estimated 384,000 churches and other houses of worship close, too often deteriorating into neighborhood eyesores.

For municipal governments, the wave of church closings is good news and bad news: good in hot real-estate markets where billions of dollars’ worth of now-tax-exempt property may be redeveloped and returned to the tax rolls; bad in cold real-estate markets, where thousands of closed churches will remain unused or underused and human services operations may lose their longtime homes. Either way, it will fall to cities and counties to lead and guide the process of finding new and better uses for buildings that have long anchored communities and neighborhoods.

 

[lpetrich]

 Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States

Starting from small numbers in the late 19th cy., the number of US nuns rose to 180,000 in 1965, then declined. In 2014, there were only 50,000, and at their rate of decline, they should reach "none" in 2035.

"In the early 1960s, 7000 young women a year joined the orders; by 1990 there were only 100 a year."

Keeping the sisterhood from extinction: The struggle to save nuns in America | Fox News - in 2019, 31,350.

A linear decline means nuns becoming "none" in 2027.

I'd come to similar conclusions with some demographic models that I'd constructed a decade ago.
The Vatican: American nuns are too feminist - Secular Café Archive
Catholic Nuns becoming "None": Dwindling and Aging - FRDB Archive

 

[lpetrich]

Now we’re killing the nuns – Joe Sharkey

In 2019, the number had declined by over 75 percent, to about 42,000, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), a Catholic research center at Georgetown University.

The average age of all nuns is 74.

That makes the "none" date 2045.

That number was from FAQ - Frequently Requested Church Statistics - Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate - Placing Social Science Research at the Service of the Catholic Church Since 1964

A fit to its numbers and the numbers I'd found earlier gives a "none" date of 2037, while using the last two points gives 2048. Those are 2015: 48,546 and 2020: 41,357.