This massive, cost-lowering shift is having far-reaching ripple effects on congregational leadership, including who practices it, how leaders train, and what forms leadership takes.

“This is really of earthquake proportions,” said the Rev. Canon Doris Westfall, Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Missouri. “That’s part of what anxiety is coming through. The earth is shifting underneath our feet, and we don’t know where we’re going to land. We don’t know what’s going to shake out, what’s going to collapse, and what’s going to survive.”

It’s an unnerving time, yet amid this shakeup, new spiritual fruit is growing. Transition officers, who support congregations in search of clergy and clergy in search of new positions, are seeing models emerge that strengthen capacities among all types of believers.

“Many of our congregations we would consider lay-led and clergy-supported,” said the Rev. Canon Liz Easton, Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Nebraska. “The lay leadership in those congregations is so mature and authentic that there is sort of an innate understanding of roles. There’s not an expectation that the priest comes in and does everything.”

Such models are providing hope in the many regions where priests are scarce. Contributing factors include low levels of interest in vacant clergy positions of various types, especially the part-time roles that comprise the majority of listings churchwide. For every cleric in search of a new position, approximately eight vacancies await, according to data from the Office for Transition Ministry.

Concurrent trends are powering the tectonic shift. For congregations, declining worship attendance and rising maintenance costs have squeezed budgets, resulting in part-time salaries instead of full-time packages. For priests, relocating can become less attractive, partly because in these times of rapid change, many find security where their spouses or partners already have stable employment and where they have networks of friends, family, and supportive cultural environments, said the Rev. Meghan Froehlich, director of the Office for Transition Ministry.

“In some areas, political and cultural violence is on the rise,” Froehlich said. “It may or may not be a safe idea for either a clergyperson or a member of their household to be in a particular location. The political context over many years has increasingly affected people’s ability to serve in a particular place.”

Challenges notwithstanding, congregations are adapting to the lack of mobile priests by mobilizing more of the baptized for ministry. They’re also drawing on relationships with the wider church to share priests and provide local training for new leaders to rise, according to transition ministry officers.

These adaptations are bringing spiritual gifts from more parts of the body of Christ, observers say, and fostering vitality in settings where it wasn’t necessarily expected.

Consider what’s happening in the hills of Southwestern Virginia. Four congregations — St. Mark’s in St. Paul, All Saints in Norton, Christ Church in Big Stone Gap and Stras Memorial in Tazewell — were out of options five years ago. None could afford a full-time priest. And recruiting part-timers to small, rural settings in Appalachia can take a long time, said the Rev. Canon John Harris, canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia.

“A key aspect has been when a lot of these places realize they need to do something. Otherwise, they’re not going to exist,” Harris said. “Then they’re more open to ideas. A lot in the Appalachian region have realized they had to be open to an experiment.”

The four congregations responded by creating the Appalachian Alliance, which involves sharing one priest as well as teaming up for mission projects, programs, and occasional joint worship services. Last year, Christ Church in Big Stone Gap withdrew from the Alliance; another congregation, Christ Church in Marion, took its place.

Each contributes 25 percent of what’s needed to fund a full-time equivalent position for the Rev. John Church. He celebrates Eucharist twice every Sunday — once in the morning and once at 5 p.m. — which allows him to visit each of his four congregations every two weeks. On Sundays when he’s elsewhere in the Alliance, parishioners gather for lay-led Morning Prayer.

The partnership has energized the congregations, Church said. The three original member congregations have grown average worship attendance by more than 20 percent since the alliance was formed four years ago. As more lay leaders fill gaps, Church sees them becoming confident witnesses and evangelists in their communities.

Vesting laypeople with leadership roles “encourages the growth quicker,” Church said. “I’m not saying they wouldn’t develop those same skills if I were there all the time. But I think the added pressure of me not being there twice a month increases their ability to see what is possible and follow in the Spirit.”

Priest-sharing among congregations is also reinforcing habits of catholicity. In the Diocese of West Missouri, for instance, priest-sharing is the norm even for the largest congregations, such as St. Andrew’s in Kansas City. That’s because those with multiple priests on staff believe it’s part of their mission to provide “clergy care” for those who have none, said the Rev. Chas Marks, missioner for transitions.

Almost every Sunday, a priest from St. Andrew’s makes the 112-mile round trip drive to celebrate Eucharist at Christ Church in Lexington, Missouri. When no priest is available, a St. Andrew’s deacon brings the reserved sacrament to Christ Church.

“That’s something they do on their own,” Marks said. “It’s just become part of their ministry of giving back to the diocese. We’ve really been trying to live into this idea of the diocese being the church of the whole. … What’s good for Lexington is good for Kansas City and vice versa.”

Now that most clergy positions are part time, vocations still happen but the approach is changing. Many future priests are agreeing to local, video-based training if it means they can keep their homes, learn in local cohorts with in-person peers, and maintain much of what already fills their lives.

One indicator is the popularity of cost-effective, local training programs. For example, the number of dioceses that are members of the Iona Collaborative has soared from 11 in 2017 to 35 today. Most have organized diocesan schools to work with video-based curricula from the Seminary of the Southwest, which runs the collaborative.

Such schools are educating not only bivocational priests but also deacons and laypeople. For the first time this year, most continuing education offered through the collaborative is order-neutral. That means people from all three orders can sign up for a course and study in cohorts alongside people from other orders. Now a layperson might be studying preaching or pastoral care alongside an Iona-trained priest and discussing what authentic, Christlike witness looks like for both.

“For small church leaders, having a community of peers that’s in mixed orders is really healthy,” said Nandra Perry, director of the Iona Collaborative. “They understand their roles really well when they are out in ministry together. They work together with a lot of respect and synergy. We consider that, pedagogically, actually a value.”

Not all that’s emerging on today’s shifting landscape speaks of spiritual fruitfulness. In Southwestern Virginia, for instance, congregations that can’t afford full-time priests are encouraged to share priests so that a cleric can receive full-time equivalent compensation. But even those arrangements can be a hard sell.

“There are not that many clergy who are willing to work part time or even do a sharing relationship” that adds up to a full-time equivalent, Harris said. “Some are [willing]. But I think a lot of priests, if they want a full-time job, would rather just have one church.” One reason: they fear that in a two-point charge, they will end up doing double the administrative work, such as attending two vestry meetings rather than one, and therefore carry more of the profession’s burdensome aspects.

As challenges get sorted out, the great adaption continues — as does the joyful work of keeping alert for new spiritual bounty. In Nebraska, whenever Canon Easton visits a congregation, she looks for a particularly engaged child, pulls that child aside and says, “I think you’d make a great priest.”

“One of the delights of this transition in ordained ministry right now comes when that child says to me: ‘I do love church and I would like to be a priest, but I really want to be a pilot,’ as kids do,” Easton said. “I can say to them: ‘Oh my gosh, you can be a pilot and a priest! Just look at Mother So-and-So over there. She’s a this and also a that.’ So there is an imagination in how we understand priestly ministry that’s going to change and will just continue to evolve. As it always has.”

That message came through December 12 at a Brookline, Massachusetts, panel discussion cosponsored by the Massachusetts Council of Churches and the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Hellenic College Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology.

At the institute, an ecumenical crowd of 100 listened to speakers with personal West Bank experience and sought ways to help. They received assurance that church-based efforts to support Christians in Palestine are just beginning.

“The experience of our Arab and Palestinian churches has been one of increasing suffering and despair at the deteriorating conditions in the Holy Land,” said the Rev. Laura Everett, executive director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, via email. “We hope this event allows the wider body to hear directly from their kin in Christ.”

Intercommunal Conflict

Gaza has only a tiny Christian remnant, who attend three active congregations in Gaza City — one Greek Orthodox, one Roman Catholic, and one evangelical. Few Christians live in this active war zone.

But the West Bank, a region under the control of the Palestinian Authority, has about 50,000 Christians, many of whom live in close proximity to about 700,000 Jewish settlers. These settlers, some of whom are ultra-Orthodox, inhabit 150 fortress-like enclaves scattered across the region, on land some say has been unfairly confiscated from its former Palestinian owners. The settler communities are an important power base for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has strongly encouraged their expansion, even though many outside Israel see this as a major hindrance to lasting peace.

Many news outlets have reported on outbursts of intercommunal violence within the region since October 7, noting that Israeli and Palestinian police forces have had difficulty keeping it under control.

A consortium of European nations publicly condemned the escalation in attacks in a joint statement on December 15, claiming the existence of “an environment of near complete impunity in which settler violence has reached unprecedented levels.” The European nations said there have been “more than 343 violent attacks, killing eight Palestinian civilians, injuring more than 83, and forcing 1,026 Palestinians from their homes.” U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris joined the European nations in calling on the Israeli government to do more to protect Palestinian civilians in a recent meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

Some Israeli news sources have argued that attacks by Palestinian civilians sympathetic to Hamas have been even more extensive. The Jewish News Syndicate reported on December 11 that there have been more than 1,388 attacks on Jews in the West Bank, which have left three dead, and 52 wounded.

Christian Testimony to Violence

Some people at the discussion were Palestinian Christians who live in the West Bank. Others have close relatives there. Nadim Khoury, an entrepreneur who owns Taybeh Brewing Co. in the West Bank with his brother, was in Boston visiting family who had emigrated. He told how settlers increasingly interfere in Palestinian Christians’ daily lives.

“I was going to harvest with my brother, and we took some of the workers to harvest the olive trees, and the settlers did not allow us,” Khoury said. “They attacked our neighbor. They hit a lady. They broke her arm twice.”

Diana Makhlouf, a member of St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, said her husband’s Palestinian relatives in East Jerusalem (part of the West Bank) don’t dare venture out anymore except to quickly buy essential supplies. They believe, as she does, that Jewish settlers were equipped with new weapons after October 7 and have received “the green light to go after Palestinians.”

“When my husband’s family was in Jerusalem, he said the settlers have been so emboldened recently,” Makhlouf said. “They are afraid to leave their homes. They feel very tense. They feel very uncomfortable and frightened.”

The Rev. Arakel Aljanian, pastor of St. James Armenian Apostolic Church in Watertown, Massachusetts, claimed that Armenian Christians, who inhabit a quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City, have been singled out for hostility. Citing a recent flare-up of a longstanding dispute over a large property in the Old City, he said: “They try to take by force. A few weeks ago, settlers came with machine guns, with trained dogs, to attack local Armenians, to have them leave the specific property owned by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. They did not [leave]. They are determined to protect their lands, their homelands.”

A Vanishing Population

Christians in Palestine are a small minority, comprising less than 1 percent of the population. That’s down from 11.7 percent in 1900. Many have emigrated in the past century to the United States, Canada, and other countries.

Feeling pressured to leave for foreign lands isn’t new for Christians in Palestine. A 2020 poll by the nonprofit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed “the desire to emigrate is much higher among Palestinian Christians than Palestinian Muslims.” Among the reasons cited: lack of economic opportunity and “occupation measures, such as checkpoints, settlers’ attacks, and land confiscation.” The poll tracked the views of 995 Christians in Palestine.

A Christian exodus would mean an end to 2,000 years of their presence in the land of Jesus’ birth. It would also deal a massive blow to Palestinian social services.

Because Christians in Palestine tend to be middle-class and highly educated, they’re key players in essential institutions. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia (2019), Christians run 65 schools in Palestine with 25,000 students. They also run nearly 30 percent of medical services and hospitals; 54 percent of all civil society nongovernmental organizations; and 80 percent of human rights organizations in Palestine.

There may be some ground for hope. The most recent report issued by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2021 noted a growth of 1.4 percent in the Christian population of Israel and Palestine. An article published in July by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association claims that Israel is the only Middle Eastern nation in which the Christian population is actually growing.

Humanizing Palestine’s Christians

Organizers hope this new push for visibility will humanize the Christians of Palestine in the minds of Americans, especially their fellow believers. If Christian solidarity can emerge, the thinking says, then Palestine might get what local Christians say has been painfully missing: U.S. support for human rights, business relationships, and defense of Christian land claims.

Palestinians at the discussion said they feel supported internationally as never before. This comes amid reports that 1.9 million Gazans (85 percent of the population) have been displaced since the war began, and 70 percent of the 18,200 killed in Gaza have been women and children, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. On the day of the panel discussion, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

“I think for the first time in history, more people now are pro-Palestine than pro-Israel because of the awareness that’s been raised,” said Jane Khoury, Nadim’s niece, who grew up in the West Bank and now lives in Massachusetts. “The young people are not going to stay quiet about it. There’s innocent life at stake, especially children. … Innocent people are dying.”

“We’re afraid that it will be us next in the West Bank,” Nadim Khoury said. He believes Israel is intentionally removing Gazans from the land and could seek to do the same to West Bank Palestinians.

Taking Action

Visitors asked panelists what can be done to ease the pressure on Christians in Palestine. Panelists encouraged prayer and doing business with Palestinian Christians. They also proposed community organizing in the months ahead and commended group travel to witness life firsthand in the West Bank.

On a deeper level, they suggested theological change might be in order.

One form of Zionism influential among American evangelicals has associated the state of Israel with a movement of God setting the stage for Christ’s return. Panelists recommended other ways of interpreting Israel’s place in God’s plan that could increase solidarity with Palestinian Christians.

“Nothing says that the Israel on the ground … with all of this equipment from America is the Israel of my gospels,” Maria Khoury said. “We are the Israel of my gospels. We are baptized unto Christ. We accepted the Messiah. We are born unto Christ. We are the new Israel.”

The Rev. Darrell Hamilton, administrative pastor at First Baptist in Jamaica Plain, said Black Christians in America can relate to the experience of Palestinian Christians. He asked how Black Christians might support their siblings in Palestine.

“You have a very good opportunity to counteract some of the narratives that have come out of the Black church,” said the Rev. Carrie Ballenger, a Lutheran pastor in Cambridge, Massachusetts and former missionary who served for eight years in East Jerusalem.

The Exodus narrative has helped Black Christians feel aligned with the state of Israel and distanced from experiences of Christians in Palestine. But that could change.

“You have a very important thing that you can do,” she told Hamilton, “which is to share those stories [of Palestinian Christians’ struggles and resistance] and help people see those connections.”

TLC Editor Mark Michael contributed to this report, and he thanks Eric Marx for his assistance.

The Lay Preacher Training Initiative (LPTI) of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation is completing a two-year training pilot program funded by a three-year, $400,000 grant from Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City. A pioneering cohort of 30 lay preachers from six dioceses will graduate in a November ceremony at Washington National Cathedral.

What’s emerging from the pilot is a curriculum that will be made available churchwide next year. Once trainers are prepared in participating dioceses, this new method for developing lay preachers will be rolled out.

“The whole point is: yes, the church staffing is changing and changing rapidly, and yes, we’re going to need new lay preachers to step up and to help us with that transition,” said the Rev. Dr. Stephen Smith, a semi-retired Southern Ohio priest who directs LPTI.

“But to say that’s the primary or only reason why we’re training lay preachers is to handicap the program,” Smith added. “It’s more than that. It’s much more than that. It’s about the full proclamation of the gospel by every order.”

Smith sees the laity order taking its place in the pulpit alongside the other orders of deacon, priest, and bishop. For laypeople, it’s about expressing the view from the pew: the gospel as it’s received and lived day to day in local contexts.

Voices that wouldn’t have been heard a few years ago are now moving hearts from the pulpit. Among them is 75-year-old Salem Saloom, an Alabama general surgeon-turned-forester and forestry educator. He gleaned sermon material one evening this summer when he was atop a 110-foot fire tower fixing his internet receiver. He looked down to see Coco, his Boykin Spaniel, climbing a narrow staircase past 16 landings to reach him at the apex.

“One misstep and she could have fallen and died,” said Saloom, an LPTI participant from the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast and a member of St. Stephen’s Church in Brewton, Alabama. “Coco’s devotion to me is like the kind I need to have for the Father. She kept her eyes focused on where she was going the whole time. … People remember the latch, the story — it’s something they can remember and relate it back to the gospel.”

LPTI comes at a time when growing numbers of Episcopalians don’t see a priest at Sunday worship. In one telling sign, 622 U.S. congregations had openings for clergy last spring, yet only 87 clergy were searching for positions, according to an “approximate snapshot” that the Office for Transition Ministry shared with Executive Council in June.

Even in churches that have priests on staff, lay sermons aren’t as rare as they used to be. Church Pension Group data from 2022 show 56 percent of active Episcopal clergy don’t serve full time in one setting. That means many are serving part time in one or multiple congregations and sharing ministry duties, including preaching in many cases, with laity.

“Are there more pulpits that are open post-pandemic? Yes,” said the Rev. Dr. Joy Blaylock, missioner for discipleship in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast and dean of its School for Ministry. “We are quickly approaching the mark where half of [our 61] congregations do not have a full-time clergyperson or are in a long-term transition period.”

Her diocese is piloting LPTI, she said, as part of its effort to develop laypersons’ gifts in this context where they’re increasingly needed. Central Gulf Coast laypeople have been eager to minister ever since the pandemic drew them into roles from IT to leading Morning Prayer. Their passion to preach fits how homiletics has been evolving, Blaylock said, which is to include more reader response and dialogic formats.

“The sermon is not based on the sage on the stage bringing one voice,” Blaylock said. “It’s based on the Spirit moving in a whole community. And so you can’t just have one voice that’s always the defining point.”

Trying out a variety of sermon types is part of the training experience. After an initial year covers such skills as identifying quality commentaries, interpreting texts, and crafting deliveries, the second year is devoted largely to practice. All that focus on the preaching craft adds up to more than the semester course or two that seminarians are able to give homiletics en route to the priesthood.

Giving feedback and responding to it is a bedrock of LPTI — so much so that its students and cohorts in their home congregations are coached in how to help preachers improve.

“It’s helping train the congregation to be better listeners to sermons,” said Beverly Hurley Hill, canon for mission and lay ministry in the Diocese of East Tennessee. “They get a glimpse of what it’s like to sit with the Scripture ahead of time and then to bring that gospel message to the people in the pews.”

Dioceses that opt to use the curriculum in 2024 will have a roadmap for training lay preachers who meet a widely recognized standard. That marks a change from today. Though many dioceses offer licensing for lay preachers, training criteria and quality controls have varied widely. Some are licensed only to preach in their home parishes. A network of reliable lay preachers who can travel and deliver consistent quality has been more dream than reality thus far.

But appetites for inspiring, theologically sound lay sermons show no signs of abating. When LPTI was announced, 33 dioceses applied for just six slots in the two-year pilot.

LPTI’s soon-to-be-graduates aim to honor the bounds of sound doctrine. In proclaiming the gospel, preachers have a mandate to steer clear of heresy, whether they’re lay or ordained. Though no training can guarantee heresy-proof preaching, Smith said, the LPTI is equipped to help.

“I have heard lots of heresies in preaching, from all orders of the Church,” Smith said via email. “I do not think lay people are more prone to it than the other orders. That said, the trainers in our program are people of substantial learning who would be more than capable of pointing out when and where a line got crossed. … We trust the Holy Spirit in community to help steer us on the right path.”

Dioceses that have schools for ministry might find LPTI adds depth to their homiletics programming, said the Rev. Mariclair Partee Carlsen, LPTI’s communications director. And those lacking funds to create and run such schools will be able to use it, too.

“This pre-existing program can be adapted for their use in a way that’s much simpler and less resource-intensive than setting up an entire” school for ministry, Carlsen said.

Support for lay preaching is bringing out people who felt called to the pulpit long ago but didn’t act on it until now. They include Freida Herron, a 69-year-old retiree who lives at the edge of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. She felt called to open God’s Word for the faithful even as a child growing up in a devout Southern Baptist home. But because she was a girl, she recalls, she wasn’t encouraged to pursue preaching, and neither she nor her parents knew “what to do with that” call she felt.

Now after successful careers in telecommunications and social work, Herron is responding to the call that never went away. That means spending part of her retirement reading books by Fred Craddock and Thomas Long, devoting up to 10 hours to prepare for an LPTI session, and preaching once a month.

“It’s been a clear point of this program that you do this because you feel a pull of the Holy Spirit — a sense of calling,” Herron said. “It’s not that you are here as the backup emergency person.”

The LPTI might not be for every layperson who aspires to preach. A small number have left the program because they couldn’t devote sufficient time to it while also working and raising kids. Others have found it rigorous but doable in retirement — more so than going back to school full time would have been.

“It’s possible to learn how to do this without blowing up your whole life and going to seminary,” Herron said.

No matter how they make time for the craft, lay preachers are modeling a way of practicing faith that many in the pews haven’t seen before, but might find intriguing.

“A lot of people see the lay preachers and they go, ‘Wow! Maybe I could do that,’” Blaylock said. “The confidence level is buttressed when they see other people doing it. … They think, ‘Is this something that I’m being called to do? Maybe not every Sunday, but a few times a year?’”

“Our problem is we’re running out of space,” says the Rev. Josh Bowron, St. Martin’s rector.

Partnering with community groups adds to St. Martin’s coffers — the preschool alone brings a net gain of $40,000 a year — but that’s not the motivation. St. Martin’s has not run a deficit in years, has a $900,000 budget, is a very healthy church, and does not need extra money, Bowron said. At least not at this point.

“What I’m trying to do is build a culture for 20 years from now,” Bowron said. “As the church continues to decline, you want to have these beautiful buildings have a ministry, and it’s going to take some time to build a culture.”

Meanwhile, benefits are already accruing in the form of friendships. Signing contracts to work together leads to “being with” one’s neighbor, Bowron said, in a way that writing charitable checks does not. It injects energy into the parish, he observes, and stirs imagination for “what cool things can we do together?”

He adopted the concept from HeartEdge, an ecumenical movement based at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in London, which helps churches reimagine themselves and society. And it constantly leads to new experiments, such as a concert for children that the preschool plans for the fall and workshops for musicians led by Folk Society members.

This type of collaborative thinking is important, in part, because new revenue models are needed, said Demi Prentiss, program director for research and development at the Episcopal Church Foundation.

“Funding your ministry through plate and pledge is no longer realistic,” Prentiss said. “The real opportunity here is for engagement. … Certainly we could supply a worship space for a congregation that’s in need of it, but what partnership might we build with that congregation beyond that?”

As a matter of stewardship, partnering helps ensure that physical spaces are not neglected. It also takes financial pressure off drawn-down endowments, borrowing costs, or generous parishioners whose giving capacity is already maxed out or nearing that point.

But seizing the missional and financial opportunities can require timely and strategic action. Congregations often know their financial situations are worsening, yet they wait to develop new revenue streams, said Kate Toth, executive director of Bricks and Mortals, a three-year-old nonprofit that helps New York City congregations find creative and sustaining solutions to their financial challenges.

“They often don’t know how dire it is until it’s actually too late to do something,” Toth said. “They’re one bill or one COVID away from having the entire enterprise collapse.”

Churches are hearing the message. Across the country, efforts are afoot to undertake “adaptive reuse” for the sake of missional effectiveness, revenue enhancement, and showing other congregations how it’s done.

In the Sustainable Solutions for Sacred Sites (S4) program, 46 churches are embarking on new projects this spring. One is creating a homeless shelter, another a food kitchen, and another has a new rental program.

Their experiences will turn into case studies and success stories with guidance from Bricks and Mortals, Partners for Sacred Places, and Hartford International University. One goal of this Lilly Foundation-funded program is to develop a set of how-to-partner insights for congregations nationwide.

In S4 and other programs, advisers help congregations learn to manage risks, rather than allow risks to prevent action. With strategies and tools, they say, churches can become both more community-engaged and more resilient.

Consider the risk of revenue becoming taxable. Though religious organizations are generally tax-exempt, congregations can lose that status if the Internal Revenue Service determines they’re generating meaningful profit from an enterprise unrelated to their core mission. Fearing this risk, congregations hesitate to diversify their revenue streams, Prentiss said.

“That’s the first thing they bring up: ‘We’ll lose our 501(c)(3) tax status,’” Prentiss said, referring to the nonprofit category in the tax code. “Well, yes, you can if you’re not precise about it, if you’re not careful.”

To protect tax-exempt status, a congregation should keep good financial records and avoid commingling funds, Prentiss said. By doing that, if any revenue becomes taxable, only the non-traditional stream is affected, not the congregation’s giving to its general fund.

What’s more, new income streams often don’t trigger taxation if they’re only a fraction of the church’s income. In Portland, Oregeon, Trinity Cathedral derives 3 to 4 percent of its revenues from non-traditional sources, such as renting parking lots for sporting events and other spaces for musical, educational, and ecumenical activities, said Jerry Brown, the cathedral’s treasurer.

“By sharing revenue through parking-lot agreement structures in place, we have not been subject to UBIT,” or Unrelated Business Income Tax, Brown said via email. Key to that structure is how the church works with a parking management company to handle lot monitoring and fee collections, he said.

Likewise in North Carolina, income from non-traditional sources has not been significant enough to require tax payments, according to Bowrun.

In situations that could trigger taxes, the church need not carry the burden alone. Dominic Dutra, a California Realtor, commercial real estate investor, and author of Closing Costs: Reimagining Church Real Estate for Missional Purposes, provides examples of how it can work.

With a triple-net lease (NNN), the tenant is responsible for base rate plus property taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs. An absolute net lease is similar, except tenants also pay for necessary improvements to make the space suitable for their needs. Both types can help congregations stop worrying and get on with using their space for powerful mission, Dutra says.

“A property tax assessment agency will come in and say, ‘Listen, you’re no longer exempt because half of your building is being operated by a for-profit, so we’re going to tax you,’” said Dutra, who founded 3D Strategies, a Fremont, California, real estate consultancy for faith-based and other organizations. “Your exemption is going to go away from a property-tax perspective. [But the tenant] absorbs that. That’s part of structuring an appropriate lease.”

Not all partnerships will make a dent in budgetary gaps, of course. For instance, renting sanctuary space to a new church plant or a congregation of new immigrants will not go far toward covering a budget deficit, Dutra said. But it can do a lot to build relationships, good will, vitality, and mission-mindedness. Likewise, providing space for recovery groups to meet is commonly seen as entirely missional, with either no fees or only nominal fees.

But closing gaps with new mission revenue streams is possible, especially with certain types of partnerships. Dutra says cash-strapped churches would be wise to explore preschool partnerships. Their services are in demand, they’re always seeking space, and churches are uniquely laid out to accommodate their needs. He suggests meeting with a mission consultant, a Certified Commercial Investment Member Realtor, and possibly an architect before circulating a request for proposal.

“Preschools in general are probably the best opportunity for leasing from a fiscal sustainability perspective,” Dutra said.

For St. Martin’s in Charlotte, running its own preschool for 70 years until it closed in 2021 under COVID pressures had come to require a subsidy from the congregation. The church-owned preschool cost $15,000 more per year to operate than it was bringing in. Only when it shifted to renting the space to a separate preschool operator did having a school on site begin generating $40,000 a year for St. Martin’s.

Congregations with robust partnerships find they can still be missional even in structuring their agreements. St. Martin’s charges the preschool operator a below-market rate, Bowron said. Trinity in Portland likewise gives nonprofits a break on rental rates.

“We use a ‘market rate’ rental schedule for the various-sized rooms/kitchen/parish hall that allows for a discount rate for nonprofits,” Brown said. “Trinity is committed to collaboration and support for our neighbors and our city of Portland. Radical hospitality is our goal; by opening our doors, our parking lots, our pantry, we challenge ourselves to satisfy our diverse spiritual missions.”

In this time, when many congregations can’t afford to do deferred maintenance work on underutilized buildings, and needs are going unmet in the surrounding community, something needs to change, Dutra said. In some cases, he said, a struggling congregation might discern a call to close and let the real estate be used for new missional purposes.

But often, partnerships can improve both a church’s mission effectiveness and financial condition, he said, as long as the church goes about it the right way.

“The status quo is not acceptable. That’s the talent being buried in the ground,” Dutra said, alluding to Matthew 25:14-30. “And the landlord wasn’t too happy about that.”

Correction: an earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the Rev. Josh Bowron.

The Small Churches Big Impact podcast debuted in December with a provocative format that lets priests challenge conventional wisdom and dispel myths about small church life. For example, 12 minutes into the first episode, two hosts took aim at an oft-repeated stereotype.

“We hear so much in the church that there’s no such thing as part-time ministry, there’s just part-time pay, and I don’t think that’s true,” said the Rev. Susie Shaefer, former part-time vicar of St. John’s Church in Clinton, Michigan. She’s now associate for transitions and local formation in the Diocese of Michigan.

Her peers on the podcast roundly agreed: the congregational work of part-time clergy really is part time. Practitioners maintain boundaries to make it fair and healthy. That needs to be understood, not dismissed.

“Part of what hopefully this podcast does is affirm people that it’s OK to call BS on the structures and the systems that tell us the untruths about the work that we do,” said the Rev. Leyla King, rector of Thankful Memorial Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the introductory episode. “Because the structures and the systems are not familiar — like, intimately familiar — with the work that we do.”

The podcast is a project of the Small Churches Big Impact Collective, which began to take shape in 2018. That’s when a cohort of Episcopalians serving small churches found each other through Young Clergy Women International. Ideas first shared in an online forum evolved to spawn the podcast with support from a two-year, $10,000 grant from the College of Pastoral Leaders at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Founding members are six female Episcopal priests who, when the podcast launched, were all serving part time in congregations with no more than 65 attending on an average Sunday. Along with Shaefer and King, founders include the Rev. Rebekah Bokros Hatch, rector of St. Alban’s Church in Simsbury, Connecticut; the Rev. Allison Sandlin Liles, priest in charge of St. Stephen’s Church in Hurst, Texas; the Rev. Kit Lonergan, former rector of St. James Church in Groveland, Massachusetts, and current priest for welcome and care at Trinity Church in Boston; and the Rev. Stacy Williams-Duncan, rector of Little Fork Church in Rixeyville, Virginia.

Founders say they’re tired of being told they’re off-track because their approaches don’t mirror the work of larger congregations. They’re eager to celebrate how small churches operate differently and effectively. For example, shrinking the vestry reduces stress and fosters better working relationships than trying to function like “baby big church” with too many seats to fill.

They’re also motivated to encourage colleagues who feel lonely, devalued, or misunderstood in a church world that lionizes the large.

“It goes back to that feeling of isolation that people endemically have when they just don’t feel like they belong to the popular group,” Hatch said in a group interview with TLC on Zoom. “That’s been a real place of resonance across generations and across lay and clergy populations.”

As of mid-February, 1,500 people had downloaded at least one episode of the podcast. Some in positions of influence are listening. The Diocese of Central New York is using SCBI ideas to shape new benchmarks for measuring congregational vitality and to inform revision of its canons, said the Rev. Canon Carrie Schofieldt-Broadbent, canon for transition and church development.

“I’m taking notes from this podcast,” she said. “We’ll be relooking at assumptions that the church has held for decades about what is helpful and what is not.”

Reimagining vitality indicators is key, King says, because conventional metrics don’t account for much of the energy and health in congregations today. For instance, hers has one of the highest percentages of children per capita in the Diocese of East Tennessee. But that important barometer, among others, doesn’t stand out in the annual report, which instead emphasizes average Sunday attendance and gross giving levels.

“What we’re trying to do is open people’s eyes,” King said. “There’s all this anxiety and fear about the church dying because we’re only using this one set of metrics. It frustrates me to no end.”

Though seeking appreciation for small-church ministry is hardly new, today’s religious landscape has brought fresh urgency to the cause. In that regard, the podcast fills a timely niche, not only for the Episcopal Church but for other denominations as well.

As worship attendance shrinks, more churches are entering the small category. In the Episcopal Church, the median average Sunday attendance declined steadily year over year from 57 in 2016 to 50 in 2020, according to parochial reports. Seventy-five percent of Episcopal congregations now have fewer than 100 in worship on an average Sunday.

Most churches across America are small: 69 percent have fewer than 100 in worship, and 44 percent have fewer than 50 in worship, according to a Faith Communities Today survey of 15,000 congregations in 2019-20.

Faced with financial challenges, congregations are using the small-church playbook by turning to part-time clergy. The Church Pension Group reports that 56 percent of active, working Episcopal priests do not serve in a “traditional” model, i.e., full time in one setting. Instead, these 56 percent serve in “emerging” ministry models that can be part-time paid, non-stipendiary, or spread over multiple part-time roles in various settings.

What’s needed now, according to SCBI members, are systems and messaging that convey what’s working and what’s possible in small churches and in part-time ministry positions.

But many who feel called to part-time ministry alongside another profession have been pressured by discernment committees to give up prior careers, said Williams-Duncan, who’s known many recent seminarians through her teaching experiences.

“They were pushed to articulate their willingness to let go of their previous profession in order to demonstrate the completeness of their call to priesthood,” she said. “We need to let go of this idea that in order to be called to priesthood, you’re only called to priesthood. That’s never been part of our story.”

She noted that Episcopal priests have always had concurrent vocations as spouses and as parents. If tomorrow’s priests were encouraged to maintain credentials and keep working in other fields, they could more readily say yes to part-time ministry positions because they’d have sufficient income to make it work.

With no shortage of canards to expose and alternatives to discuss, the podcasters plan to keep adding episodes and seasons for the foreseeable future. Fans can expect over time to hear a broader range of voices, including those of men, laypeople, and congregational leaders in other denominations. What’s not likely to change is the premise that small is beautiful and has a lot to offer to the rest of the church.

“We are trying to reclaim something that I think has always been at the heart of Christianity,” Williams-Duncan said. “I’m not sure we are creating something new. But I do think we are bringing back an emphasis on something that could be transformative and life-giving to our church.”