Summary
Churches across the U.S. are grappling with dwindling attendance and financial instability, forcing many to close or sell properties.
The Diocese of Buffalo has shut down 100 parishes since the 2000s and plans to close 70 more. Nationwide, church membership has dropped from 80% in the 1940s to 45% today.
Some churches repurpose their land to survive, like Atlanta’s First United Methodist Church, which is building affordable housing.
Others, like Calcium Church in New York, make cutbacks to stay open. Leaders warn of the long-term risks of declining community and support for churches.
Not conventions. A convention requires paying for a convention space, and that requires making attendees pay for admittance or getting sponsors to pay in their stead so they can sell products. That’s not community.
The power of churches is they are entirely free and not commodified. That’s what makes them communal. We’d need something like a communal boardgame hall, supported by donations that anyone can come to without needing to pay anything.
I think you don’t understand “Free”. They weren’t free.
Use required, at the very least, selling your soul. But more pragmatically, a flat 10% tax- which frequently funded ostentatious lifestyles of the priests and pastors; and sacrificing your children to pedos.
But sure. It created “community”…
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But since souls aren’t real it was free.
Tithes are voluntary. Taxes are enforced at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun. Quiet different.
I think they meant soul as in personhood or however you want to put it, its metaphorical speech ya pedant.
Secondly tithes are socially enforced to what degree depends on what group we are talking about but at minimum there is an expectation that you pay it, you also get fuck all out of it making it a completely empty transaction unlike taxes which gives roads, fire departments, libraries, et cetera.
Okay, but they did get something out of it. They got the Church, and the services it provided them. We can replace that with tax funded secular institutions, but it doesn’t seem like that’s happening.
Instead the church dies and nothing replaces it.
Boardgaming congregations, then.
Honestly a community hall that fills similar roles to the library as others mention would be awesome. You could get people running community brunches on weekends, you could get holiday parties and rooms for groups to meet. You could use it to host food not bombs or other food giveaways. You could let it be what churches are supposed to be, but replace the pastor and pews with a meal space and some administrators