: Rabbi Julia Appel beautifully captures the opportunities for congregations of all faiths to view declining memberships as chances to revision their futures with courage and creativity.
These thoughtful congregations are actively discerning how best to live their faiths in a shifting culture and reimagine their houses of worship as a new kind of “third place,” to use sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s famous description: not public nor private and neither home nor workplace, but spaces where people can gather to support civil society, civic engagement and a sense of place.
Religious institutions can work with municipal governments to provide underused spaces for affordable housing. These institutions presumably have moral imperatives to help the homeless, so this can occur right in their own backyards. The congregation was on the verge of closing in the 1980s because of shrinking membership, but survived by daringly transforming itself from an Orthodox community into one that is egalitarian in its religious practice, meaning that women and men could sit together and have equal roles in leading worship.