“Bats Have Taken It Over”: Rural Jamaica’s Traditional Churches Are Down to a Handful of Worshippers

• A Westmoreland Anglican church now has fewer than eight regular worshippers
• A St Elizabeth Moravian church with five members cannot afford to fix its deteriorating building
• The Moravian Church has 12 congregations too small to count as full churches
• A Baptist leader asks whether Jamaica, with about 1,600 churches, is “over-churched”

St Alban’s Anglican Church in Ashton, Westmoreland, once held harvest services, rallies and a packed calendar. When the Sunday Gleaner visited in January 2025, the gate was locked until Ralston Shakes, one of two communicants that day, arrived to open it. “Sometimes it’s only five of us, sometimes two, and sometimes just me alone,” he said. Shakes, a gardener, keeps the grounds, and the remaining members pitch in to pay the light bill. The rector, Rev Isaac Nugent, visits once a month and leads five churches in all.

The paper’s report, published in February 2025, found the same pattern nearby. Ashton, with about 1,000 residents, has four churches, and the Ashton Moravian Church, with five members, opens only two Sundays a month. In St Elizabeth, Rev Barnaba Nyrirenda said Lacovia Moravian Church was struggling because of the state of its building. “Bats have taken it over and finances are pretty difficult to come, in terms of getting it fixed, because there are just five members there at Lacovia Moravian Church,” he said. Sometimes, he added, the congregation worships outside.

Nugent blamed the deaths of older members, the church’s remote location and the habit of online worship since COVID-19, as well as young people leaving for town and abroad. Moravian Church head Rev Barrington Daley said congregations with fewer than 30 members are classed as fellowships, and there are 12 of them, but insisted: “My conviction is that the church will not die.” Rev Dr Glenroy Lalor, former head of the Jamaica Baptist Union, said many small churches have shut and put the island’s total at about 1,600. “Is Jamaica over-churched? That is a question we have to answer,” he said.

Social anthropologist Dr Herbert Gayle said Jamaicans are moving from quiet European-style worship to livelier evangelical and Afrocentric churches. “Once these communities replace the dying churches with other churches that are functional, then it is fine, the problem lies when a church dies in a community and there’s no replacement,” he said.

Behind the numbers is a property problem. A church building with five members still needs a roof, electricity and upkeep, and every year of neglect raises the repair bill. Denominations with many small rural buildings will eventually have to choose which to restore, which to share and what to do with the rest, whether that means community use, consolidation or other options; none were announced in the report. For rural districts, those decisions will shape what happens to some of the most prominent buildings and plots in the village.

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