A congregation tears down its church to expand its mission

In 1922, when the First Presbyterian Church of Astoria moved to the wilderness that is now Queens, it was on the cutting edge of community development.

Today, the congregation is leading a new kind of church renewal, one that entails downsizing physically as it expands its mission spiritually.

By the 1950s, the church was thriving with more than 1,200 congregants. It even hosted a basketball league, as a dusty case of trophies attests.

But today, like many urban churches, Astoria's First Presbyterian has a dwindling number of parishioners – less than 50 on the books. The church operates in the red, its grand buildings are decaying, and the Rev. Donald Olinger spends much time just figuring out how to keep the doors open.

So he and his flock knew it was time for something radical. In an emotional decision, they have agreed to tear down the elegant old buildings and replace them with more than 90 units of affordable housing for senior citizens.

The church will end up with a sanctuary room in the new building for its Sunday services, as well as a $4 million endowment that it can use to expand its spiritual mission.

"It's kind of a bittersweet time because on the one hand, we're losing something very special to all of us," says Dr. Olinger. "On the other side, it's a very exciting time because we're getting to reinvent ourselves and to provide the type of church that can be appealing and meet the needs of today's world."

Many urban churches that have closed in the past few decades have been turned into affordable housing. What's unusual about this project – and 10 similar ones in the pipeline, mostly in New York City – is that the churches will remain open. With the income from the development and use of their land, they'll be able to focus more directly on serving the needs of their communities rather than their decaying buildings.

The idea came in part from Enterprise Community Partners, the nation's leading purveyor of knowledge about how to leverage financing to build affordable housing. Working in conjunction with the Faith Center, an ecumenical resource in New York for spiritually oriented community development, they're working to turn the First Presbyterian Church's experience into a national model.

"We're trying to formalize an initiative so if you're a church [congregation], no matter where you are, with excess property or obsolete facilities, and you think there might be development potential, we want Enterprise and the Faith Center to be the first place you think to call," says Kirk Goodrich, vice president of the Northeast Region at Enterprise. "The goal is to create a system that dispenses timely and trusted advice to churches no matter where they may be."

In New York, as in most other cities, the housing boom of the past decade has made it even harder to create more affordable housing. In the past, affordable-housing advocates were able to work with abandoned properties owned by the city. But that stock of land is mostly gone, and they have had to look for alternatives.

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