- December 12, 2025
- By Maggie Haslam
For the past few decades, the pews at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in New Carrollton, Md., have been slowly emptying. Weekly attendance at the once-thriving, multicultural congregation has dwindled to around three dozen. Frequent flooding of the sanctuary chapel has damaged its foundation and floors.
Leadership could scrape together funds to fix the building, but would anyone be there to notice?
It’s one of three local churches facing similar existential challenges that University of Maryland graduate students worked with this semester to reimagine their next chapter. From multigenerational housing to a hub for emergency services, their transformational proposals tap into the potential that underused religious properties hold for the surrounding communities, while preserving their fundamental mission as places of worship.
“The complexity of these properties means they cannot be treated like typical real estate,” said Sarah Hoffman M.C.P. ’26, “but we can reframe them as a chance to secure the property’s mission for the next generation.”
The proposals for each of the three Prince George’s County properties—St. Christopher’s, the Carolina Missionary Baptist Church in Fort Washington, Md., and a Chillum, Md., Pentecostal church that congregational leaders asked to remain unidentified—cap a three-month research and community engagement effort by students in UMD’s Urban Studies and Planning Program to explore the feasibility of ideas already in discussion by church leadership, as well as possible alternatives. The proposals and findings will be shared Friday evening with leadership, congregations and stakeholders at a public presentation in the Anacostia Building in UMD’s Discovery District.
Church closings are on the rise in the United States, fueled by declining attendance, aging congregations and steep maintenance costs; according to Axios, an unprecedented 15,000 houses of worship are expected to shutter in 2025. When a church folds, it has both economic and social reverberations across the communities they serve; according to Partners for Sacred Places, churches provide over $1.7 million in economic impact per year to their communities through social programs, from addiction support groups and childcare centers to food pantries and clothing closets.
Despite their community and spiritual value, religious properties are often subject to rigid zoning rules and historic building protections. Church leaders are frequently ill-equipped to navigate the intricacies of zoning law, funding sources and redevelopment.
“St. Christopher’s is very concerned about their finances moving forward, and they’re interested in potential development and community partners that could help get this proposal built,” said Dejuan Johnson, who is pursuing master’s degrees in urban planning and architecture. “But they’re not quite sure how to do it.”
Students met with parish leaders and congregants to understand their vision and goals, toured each site and attended their services. Then they looked at successful redevelopment examples nationally and dug into where these institutions could play a vital role in filling unmet community needs.
The students also examined current zoning restrictions, land value assessments, assets and site problems; for example, while one parish is within a mile of three Purple Line stops, the area lacks sidewalks and other pedestrian infrastructure needed to take advantage of the new transit line. Some of these issues, the teams discovered, potentially put the churches' goals in jeopardy, requiring the students to craft alternative proposals that would sustain them for decades to come.
Urban planners are in a unique position to help congregations realize their visions, said urban studies and planning Professor Clara Irazabal, but in a way that is both realistic and sustainable.
“It can be an enormous challenge when groups of people have their own ideas of how they want this transformation to happen, and the students are bringing new ideas that might challenge those preconceptions,” she said. “But it opens up opportunities for them to think differently.”
Proposals centered on creating much-needed housing and services for the churches’ surrounding communities, ranging from supportive housing and job training for homeless single mothers to compliment the ministry of Carolina Baptist to multigenerational housing on the expansive land owned by Church of the Living God not far from its campus, which could potentially make a broader community impact for lower cost.
A concept for St. Christopher’s, which also hopes to retain its ministry on site, reimagines the property as a “resilience hub”: an ecologically friendly community space that offers social services like a food pantry and natural landscapes for the public, and can serve as an emergency shelter during heat waves, power outages and other disasters.
The proposals not only offered a glimpse of each parishes’ future, but a roadmap for getting there—from how to file for zoning exemptions to funding sources ranging from rebates to grants. With some of the properties in “opportunity zones” within Prince George’s County, they’re eligible for significant tax credits. With many successful examples popping up across the country, the students see not only the potential for these properties to change and thrive, but to retain their spiritual legacy.
“The main opportunity for transitioning religious properties is vision alignment,” said Hoffman. “It must honor the mission of the congregation, but it can also be catalyst to drive broader change in communities.”