A Third of Washington’s Congregations Have Sold Their Buildings Since 2008. One Deacon Calls It “Sad but Necessary”

• DC’s houses of worship fell from 763 in 2008 to 511 by the end of 2023
• About a third of congregations have sold their worship spaces, a conservancy says
• Mount Bethel Baptist Church sold to developers for $5.7 million in 2022
• St Phillips Baptist Church sold for $3.2 million in 2017

Washington, DC is losing its churches to the property market. The number of houses of worship in the city fell from 763 in 2008 to 511 at the end of 2023, an average loss of 17 a year, and about 33 per cent of congregations have sold their worship spaces since 2008, according to the Sacred Spaces Conservancy, The Washington Times reported.

Mount Bethel Baptist Church sold its building to real estate developers for $5.7 million in 2022 and moved to Forestville in suburban Maryland, where it is renovating an older church building. St Phillips Baptist Church sold for $3.2 million in 2017. Deacon Walter Carroll, 74, a member of Mount Bethel for 65 years, described the move as “sad but necessary”. “When you take the church out of the city, there’s nowhere for people to go and worship,” he said.

Evan Sparks, treasurer of the Sacred Spaces Conservancy, said the pressure comes from where members now live. “Congregations are struggling because their members don’t live nearby anymore,” he said. “We’ve had a wave of economic and demographic change, and we are a more secular city than we used to be.” He warned that once buildings go to the private sector, uses such as polling places, food banks, day care and homeless services become “vastly more expensive for the community to access and use”.

Denominations are selling too. The Rev Freeman L. Palmer of the United Church of Christ said Grace Reformed Church closed in 2016 and its board voted to list the building in 2022.

Greater Washington is home to a large Caribbean population, and the pattern is familiar to Jamaicans in other diaspora cities: rising values push members out, the building becomes the congregation’s biggest asset, and a sale funds a move to the suburbs. For churches in Kingston and Montego Bay facing their own development pressure, the question is whether to sell, redevelop, or keep a foothold in the neighbourhood that built them before the decision is forced.

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