Biltmore United Methodist Church in Asheville, North Carolina is for sale. Already financially strapped due to shrinking membership and a struggling preschool, the congregation was dealt a crushing blow by the coronavirus.
Attendance plummeted, with many parishioners staying home or attending other churches that remained open full time. The revenue from the church renting out its space for earlier events and meetings also went away.
"Our maintenance costs are enormous," said the Reverend Lucy Robbins, senior pastor. "And we don't have the resources financially to be able to do the kind of ministry work that we want."
The Biltmore is one of an untold number of gatherings across the country that have struggled to stay financially afloat during the pandemic and minister to their flocks, though others have managed to weather the storm, often With the help of the federal government's Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, and continued levels of member donations.
The coronavirus hit at a time when fewer Americans were already going to worship services – at least half of the nearly 15,300 congregations surveyed in a 2020 report by Faith Communities Today reported a weekly attendance of 65 or less - and exacerbated problems in smaller churches, where low budgets often prevented them from doing things like hiring full-time pastors.
"The pandemic didn't change those patterns, it only made them slightly worse," said Scott Thumma, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and co-chair of Faith Communities Today.
Low souls in pews
Attendance has been an ongoing challenge. As faith leaders moved to worship in person, the previously highly permeable Delta version and now the even more rapidly spreading Omicron have thrown a wrench in such efforts, with some churches going back online. And others are still reporting low spirits. ,
For example, at Biltmore, attendance numbers at weekly services have dropped from about 70 pre-pandemic to about 25 today, counting both in-person and online worship.
After voting last May to keep church property — a two-building complex on a veranda off Interstate 40 — on the market, church leaders are still figuring out what comes next, including the congregation homes. Will call But they hope to use some of the proceeds from property sales to support causes such as marginalized communities and affordable housing.
Unlike the Biltmore, Franklin Community Church, about 20 miles outside Nashville, Tennessee, does not have its own sanctuary, instead holding services at a public school. This proved to be a boon during the pandemic, with no need to worry about mortgages, maintenance, insurance or utilities.
The Reverend Kevin Riggs, pastor of the church, said, "If we had all that, we wouldn't have survived."
Virtual public, online giving
Nevertheless, it has been a battle. According to Riggs, during the 15 months when services at Franklin became online-only, some members moved to other circles or fell out of the habit of giving. Weekly attendance has dropped from around 100 to less than 40, and an Omicron spike recently forced the church to go virtual again.
The impact is felt in the collection plate: The money coming in now is about a third of what it was before the pandemic, the pastor said. The church has cut spending where it can, turned to grants to try to make up the difference and raised more money from community members who do not support the church's ministries, such as those of the homeless. to serve.
"We're alive. ... but we've felt hurt," Riggs said.
Another struggling congregation, the Friendship Baptist Church in Baltimore, is essentially living week after week. The predominantly black church received a PPP loan of more than $55,000, but it barely made a dent in expenses. The Reverend Alvin Gwynn Sr. has given up his pastor's pay and for now is staying away from his other jobs in Social Security checks and construction.
As elsewhere, declining attendance has hurt the bottom line there. Friendship Baptist counts around 900 active members, but only 150 of them are visible, making their charity particularly significant.
The church "survives because of the sacrifice of 150," said Gwyn, who doesn't intend to start paying salaries again until the church is stable. "They personally give way more than the usual offering each Sunday."
As Faith Communities Today reports, during the pandemic, experts said that many congregations embraced online giving, which could increase contributions per person to $300 annually.
Broadly speaking, several other surveys and reports nationwide paint a mixed picture on mass charity.
According to an annual report by GivingUSA, gifts to religious organizations rose 1% to more than $131 billion in 2020, a year when Americans also donated a record total of $471 billion to charities. Separately, a September survey of 1,000 Protestant pastors by the evangelical firm Lifeway Research found that nearly half of the churches were getting 27% less than estimated and 22% higher than they budgeted for the previous year.
Incentive checks donated
Hope Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, a largely upper-middle class congregation of about 400, is among those who have enjoyed relative stability despite the pandemic.
Reverend Josh Robinson expected contributions to stop when personal services were halted for more than a year, but they remained stagnant. So members pledge for the gifts to come in 2022. Some in the congregation also donated their government stimulus checks to the church, which used them to set up a fund to provide direct financial assistance to those who have lost income due to the pandemic.
All this prompted the pastor to re-examine his approach to the pandemic.
"I needed to step back and think, What did this mean for me as a spiritual leader, as I was anticipating a meltdown?" Robinson said. "Here were church members moving in—I had to lean into that. And rightly so, I was able to do so with great pleasure."
Even before this, the church has adopted austerity to pay off its debt, which has fallen from $2 million in 2013 to less than $300,000 today.
When services went virtual, savings on utilities and other costs helped keep the budget balanced. PPP loans of about $290,000 were also important to retain employees on the payroll and to offset lost revenue from renting out space and other services.
some perform better than others
Another church in Franklin, at West Harpeth Primitive Baptist Church, is giving but only a little. Hewitt Sawyers, pastor, is credited with low turnover among members of the more than 150-year-old historically Black congregation, many of whom are committed to financially supporting the church and working in sectors of the economy that are were less damaged. pandemic than others.
"We are wonderfully, wonderfully blessed," Sawyers said.
This year's budget estimates are good enough that the leaders of West Harpeth hope they can tackle a necessary building renovation.
"We are extremely optimistic about that," Sawyers said. "We plan to try to do that in '22, and we feel very, very, very comfortable about trying to accomplish that."