Two years ago, the Quebec municipality of Sainte-Lucie-des-Laurentides, about an hour northwest of Montreal, bought the white-paneled wooden Catholic church at its centre for just a dollar. Dating back to the 1890s, this old church was built at a time when Catholicism was the cornerstone of Quebec’s civic life.

But times have changed. Sainte-Lucie mayor Francis Corbeil says he can’t recall when services were last held at the church. The architect who examined it says it also needs a fair bit of restoration work. Its original foundation was made from rocks and leaks a lot. The insulation needs to be redone. So do the windows. All of these repairs could run upwards of $2 million. “What did they do?” Corbeil asked himself when Sainte-Lucie first bought the church. “This is gonna cost a fortune.”

Nonetheless, Sainte-Lucie wants this church to act as a community centre for gatherings, events, and recreational activities. Sainte-Lucie already has one, but the mayor says it simply isn’t big enough for the town’s needs. (It’ll be converted into a cooperative grocery store in July.) If all goes well with the restoration work, the church will open in 2025 to mark the town’s 150th anniversary. “We want it to be the heart of the village,” Corbeil says.

None of this project could have really happened without the contributions of Graham Singh, an Anglican priest who happens to own a cottage in Sainte-Lucie – and runs an organization devoted to bringing the worlds of church and social impact closer together.

The Trinity Centres Foundation adapts church buildings to provide space for Canada’s charitable sector at a time when many Christian congregations are dwindling. Some denominations have already been grappling with the question of what to do with the old (and often architecturally beautiful) churches, chapels, and cathedrals in their possession. The United Church of Canada, for instance, announced in May 2022 it would house 34,000 people over the next 15 years converting church properties into rental housing. Other churches around the Global North have been converted into condos and even bars. “The solution to getting us out of where we are now is not going to be a religious solution,” Singh says of the crisis. “It has to be a secular solution.”

Singh, however, is turning his attention to the social impact sector. As rents skyrocket and Canadians’ need for community social services grows, the Trinity Centres Foundation plans on helping all organizations – especially those from equity-seeking communities – find a home in a church property. This process isn’t entirely religious, at least not in the traditional European Christian model, but nor is it entirely secular. “This work is deeply spiritual,” Singh says. In many ways, the Foundation’s work is re-uniting churches with concepts that run through every major religion in the world today, from Islam to Jainism to Christianity – charity, community, and the desire to better the lives of others. 

Empty pews everywhere

The Trinity Centres Foundation has something of a customer profile for the church leaders who call them asking for help. Jane – or John – is a businessperson who’s recently been appointed to the board of their church at the urging of their mother or grandmother. Except Jane or John isn’t really religious. They join the board out of a sense of familial obligation. Shortly thereafter, the mother or grandmother who encouraged them to join dies, and the church board falls apart. It is then, Singh says, that Jane or John realizes they’re in charge of a 40,000 square foot church in rickety condition. “Does he need a priest? A lawyer? A real estate agent? Or a miracle?” Singh says. “We would say he probably needs us.”

Running a church in Canada today isn’t easy. The churches themselves can be decades or even centuries old. Some have stairs or ledges that make them totally inaccessible to disabled people. Repairs can run into the millions of dollars and require specialized artisans or engineers. But one of the biggest challenges facing Canada’s 27,000 or so faith buildings has nothing to do with stonework, stained glass, or high vaulted ceilings. Quite simply, they are running out of worshippers.

Religion is far from dead. In fact, some religions – specifically Islam and Sikhism – are growing in Canada. But over the past 70 years, Christianity has gone from being the centre of civic and political life in Canada to a religion with relatively modest weekly attendance. “The people who are involved in the traditional mainline European models of church are grandparents and great-grandparents,” Singh says. “Their kids are the Baby Boomers – and they left the church in the 1960s and 1970s. Their grandkids and great grandkids are Millennials that never had any intention of being part of those churches.”

He realized just how dire it was for Christian churches when he was studying to be a priest in England, the heartland of Anglicanism. Nearly 1,000 Anglican churches have closed across England in the last 30 years alone, according to a 2022 analysis by The Telegraph. The inspiration for Trinity Centres Foundation came out of Singh’s experience in England, he says, as well as the realization that Canada was in a similar situation. According to a 2018 report by the Anglican Church of Canada, it is expected to run out of donors and churchgoers by the year 2040. After speaking with dozens of religious leaders, architects, and bankers in Canada (not to mention plenty of lawyers and accountants), Singh says they all pointed him in one direction – setting up a charity to tackle the issue of closing churches in Canada.

At the same time, community social services are having an increasingly difficult time finding space. In big cities like Toronto, the cost of suitable real estate is often well outside what a social impact organization can afford. And in small towns or villages, the lack of available real estate may mean there simply aren’t any good options for an organization to buy. These aren’t new problems, but a combination of Canada’s white-hot real estate market and the migration of city-dwellers to the country’s smaller towns are making it worse. “The cost of land has skyrocketed and organizations are already working on a thin margin,” says Matt Siemiatycki, a professor at the University of Toronto’s department of geography and planning.

Simply staving off eviction can be tough. Diane Dyson, interim vice president of research and advocacy at the Daily Bread Food Bank, says there are no protections for social impact organizations who rent from commercial landlords. “If the landlord decides to keep up with the market and, as a non-profit, you don’t have a fast-growing revenue source – you may not be able to take a 10 or 20 percent rent hike,” she says. Yet community social services like food banks, arts drop-ins, and after-school programs are in more demand than ever. In the Daily Bread Food Bank’s last survey of its 126 member agencies, a fifth said they were nervous about securing space for their operations over the next five years – and a third needed more space in their present locations for food bank use.

Singh is at the centre of all of these issues as someone who grew up around volunteerism, became an Anglican priest, studied diplomacy at the London School of Economics, and who cares deeply about putting the vast real estate portfolios held by churches to good use by social impact organizations of all kinds. “It’s almost impossible to realize how much wealth the church has,” Singh says.The Catholic Church – the world’s largest non-state landowner – owns at least 3,400 churches in Canada, according to an analysis by Charity Intelligence Canada. In Canada, the Anglican Church runs at least 1,700 churches or parishes (religious districts) that might contain several church buildings. Meanwhile, the United Church has around 2,711 congregations.

And many of these buildings will soon be – or are currently – underused. This is a huge opportunity. “We believe we’re holding these projects in trust for the equity-seeking groups who so desperately need them,” Singh says.

Prime (social purpose) real estate

The congregation of First Unitarian in Toronto had plenty of reasons to put its building up for sale. Beautiful as it happens to be, the 92-year-old church – with a khaki façade and stained-glass tower – also happens to be completely inaccessible. Karen Dunk-Green, First Unitarian’s board president, says a congregant once counted the number of individual steps or levels within the building itself. There are 27 in all, not to mention a rudimentary, doorless elevator in need of repair.

First Unitarian also wanted more space for its growing congregation. Around 250 people participate in the church’s worship services, according to Dunk-Green, as well as religious and social programming. Then there’s the question of the church’s location itself. “The neighbourhood was not really a great fit for us as an organization,” she says. It is a very wealthy neighbourhood with soaring luxury condo developments, and Dunk-Green says some members of the congregation might not find traveling there to be easy or comfortable.

Dunk-Green first heard from Trinity Centre Foundation in April 2020, about a year after they’d sold their original church building to a condo development group. They had no idea what to expect, but after an initial conversation with Singh, First Unitarian knew it wanted the Foundation’s help. Through a fee that was a fraction of what a traditional consultant would charge, Dunk-Green says, the Foundation acted as something of a social purpose Rolodex, gathering a network of architects, grant writers, and financiers only too eager to help them redevelop an old Canada Post building that will serve as their new church. “They can put us in touch with people for brief, friendly conversations that are very informative and helpful,” she says. And the Foundation also gave First Unitarian advice on how to craft a partnership proposal to woo a tenant organization.

Community organizations and congregations co-existing in the same space (whether or not it is an old church) have a couple of options. The least complicated for First Unitarian would be to have it act as a landlord in its new building to a community organization. The latter would get to use First Unitarian’s new space, so long as the congregation had it for exclusive use during services. Singh says these types of arrangements can also be easier to make on the Foundation’s end because they don’t require the church’s governance to change – it simply becomes a landlord to whichever organization moves in. And Dunk-Green says it wouldn’t be difficult for them to find willing tenants. “There’s already a huge demand for space for community groups within the Oakland-Vaughan area,” she says.

Another option – one the Foundation prefers, but Dunk-Green hesitates at – would see a partner organization co-own the new building with First Unitarian. Such an arrangement would lift a partner organization out of the uncertainties of tenancy, but requires both the community group and congregation to agree on maintenance costs, sale conditions, and the use of the building itself. Dunk-Green says it isn’t unlike a marriage. “It holds this great promise in terms of great things happening when you put good people in the same place together,” she says. “It also holds complications because property is property, and money is money.”

On the other hand, Singh says, community foundations aren’t always happy about lending grant money to a church, even if that church happens to house a social impact organization they want to support. “They’d rather see the church give a long master lease to a new non-profit, which becomes a holding company clearly governed by the original owning organization and other new stakeholder groups. That’s the cleaner version,” Singh says. “But it’s not always possible to execute that.”

Work on First Unitarian’s new building, and its potential future partnership with a community group, is ongoing. Dunk-Green says First Unitarian seriously considered a partnership with a theatre, but decided against it. Still, it – and the Foundation – is open to a wide variety of arrangements. “We would both want to say it would be some organization that would share our values and that would be looking at making a social impact similar to ours,” says Dunk-Green, “but that can happen in hundreds of different ways.” 

L’Arche Canada is taking the Foundation’s model to a new level. Through its Inclusive Housing Solutions Lab project in New Brunswick, the national charity is bringing together intellectually disabled people, their families, and other stakeholders – including churches – to build affordable and supporting housing projects. “The need for housing support for people with intellectual disabilities is extraordinarily high,” says Lori Vaanholt, director of strategic development and innovation at L’Arche Canada. “Most Canadians with disabilities live in poverty.”

Vaanholt began chatting with Singh several years ago about what a community looks like beyond brick-and-mortar buildings. Churches, of course, bring together communities of like-minded people – worshippers – to share in common values. How could church communities do the same for intellectually disabled people and their families? Unlike many of the other projects Trinity Centres Foundation is tackling, L’Arche Canada’s project is not a single church building. The prototype for its housing projects are in both Saint John and Fredericton, but Vaanholt says L’Arche Canada is looking at seven different locations across Canada to develop opportunities for “inclusive spaces” – either housing or community hub projects – alongside underutilized church properties.

The elephant in the nave

But there are complications for charities like L’Arche Canada that work with equity-seeking groups or want to make space for their community organizations – something Singh says is also a priority for the Foundation. Churches have historically been exclusionary to LGBTQ2S+ people. Canada’s abusive residential school system was mainly run by church-affiliated organizations (including the Anglican, Catholic, and United churches). Many church-affiliated institutions in Canada bear a legacy of abuse against disabled people. How can equity-seeking community organizations feel safe operating out of a church?

“It’s really important to listen to the people with lived experience about the right use for these buildings,” Vaanholt says. “It’s not always to use the existing brick-and-mortar.” She points to the Huronia Regional Centre, an institution for disabled Ontarians with a long legacy of abuse. “The survivors of the Huronia Regional Centre are very, very, very clear that they do not want that building reused as any sort of community space. And I think they need to be listened to – and I think that’s probably true for some church spaces as well,” Vaanholt says.

Singh says the Foundation prioritizes equity-seeking organizations when working with church groups. “You look at a Black charity, an LGBTQ and Two Spirit-led charity, a women-led charity, and certainly an Indigenous-led organization – and they will tell you they’re really pissed off with that big old white church on the hill,” he says. The way the Foundation approaches conversations with these organizations is simple: “We don’t have to pretend to be allies,” he says. “Our team is made up of members of those communities.” The Foundation also regularly works across the religious divide. In April, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the Foundation organized an event with the Muslim Association of Canada’s Edmonton Chapter and McDougall United Church. The two congregations prayed together in the church – a building under conversion into an inclusive community hub with the Foundation’s help. 

That said, not all denominations looking to give up their churches would welcome a community organization unconditionally. Some Christian denominations, particularly Catholicism and the Orthodox churches, explicitly oppose things like abortion and pre-marital sex. Having a feminist organization — as many social impact organizations increasingly are, regardless of whether they have an explicit gender equity purpose — that supports both in their space may be uncomfortable for everyone involved. 

At the very least, some denominations may have a traditional view of a church’s function. “Among religious communities, there are those who are very conservative,” Singh says, “and I would defend their right to be conservative. And I would also suggest they have their own building.” For denominations willing to work with community organizations, a partnership can offer a church the chance to right the wrongs of the past – and give social purpose real estate to organizations that desperately need it.

Church and circuses

The Trinity Centres Foundation is currently working on 15 local projects, according to its website, including one with the entire Anglican Diocese of Huron, an administration region of the Anglican church stretching along the eastern shore of Ontario’s Lake Huron. Singh says the Foundation also has a new project funded by the McConnell Foundation in Montreal to look at all of Montreal’s 600 churches. While progress on these projects can be slow, the Foundation’s undertaking – and the potential for community organizations – is massive.

St Jax Church in Montreal, where Singh ministers, is the Foundation’s proof-of-concept. It is both a church and community centre – Centre St Jax – where community organizations and corporate functions can book out the space when it isn’t in use as a functioning church. Le Monastère, a local circus company, performs in it. There is even a functioning bar at the church for events. It may not fit everyone’s definition of worship. Singh doesn’t expect it to. But he thinks of offering community space to organizations as sacred in and of itself.

“I personally think that the circus is undertaking quite a sacred activity as well,” he says. “I think a theatre group that meets there on Friday that explains what it’s like to be gay and living in Montreal is a deeply spiritual act. When you have a Black charity that says they’re here to talk about justice in the city, I think that’s a deeply spiritual act.”

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