So what do we do with underused, empty churches? Turn them into “Lifehouses”, suggests Adam Greenfield, and make communities resilient

Photo by Sasha Lebedeva on Unsplash

Here’s a wonderful proposal from the technology thinker/critic Adam Greenfield, for a kind of self-shaping community organisation called a Lifehouse. We are obviously exploring this field with our CANs concept (and we also proposed something similar with the Makar House). Thanks to Adam for the cross-post:

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this piece in the Guardian, from the usually egregious Simon Jenkins. It concerns, of all things, the decline of organized religion in these isles, and the opportunity it presents us to repurpose underutilized churches and restore them to active benefit of the local community.

What occupies Jenkins here are the 51,000-odd church buildings scattered across the land — each of them generally “the most prominent, not to mention magnificent, building in almost every English town and village” — and what becomes of them in a time when the profession of Christian faith is in precipitous decline.

His primary worry seems to be that, with neither an active congregation to care for them nor meaningful links to the lives unfolding around them, these buildings face abandonment, decrepitude and eventual collapse into terminal disrepair, even as the communities they’re embedded in still have want of the functions they once served.

Jenkins thinks there’s life in them yet. His argument starts from the observation that throughout history, “these buildings have offered their publics ceremony and memorial, peace and meditation, charity and friendship, quite apart from faith,” but that modern communities, by contrast, often lack a place in which they might pursue these very ends.

And this is where he perceives the opportunity: church buildings, he says, “must be wholly or partly seculari[z]ed” and repurposed, not merely to fill “the gaps in an increasingly dilapidated welfare state” but to “reconnect them to the surrounding communities from which the decline in worship has distanced them.” 

What may or may not surprise you, depending on the degree to which you’ve heard me rant over the years about Simon Jenkins and his manifest uselessness, is that I agree with him completely.

In fact, his column reminded me of an idea I’ve been nurturing for the past decade or so now, going all the way back to Occupy Sandy, taking in my enduring love for Clifford Harper’s "Visions" illustrations, and building on lessons learned in the course of Nurri’s work with our local food hub here in Newington Green.

Here’s the crux of it: local communities should assume control over underutilized churches, and convert them to what I call “Lifehouses,” facilities designed to help people ride out not merely the depredations of neoliberal austerity, but the still-harsher circumstances they face in an extended period of climatic chaos.

This means fitting them out as decentralized shelters for the unhoused, storehouses for emergency food stocks (rotated through an attached food bank), and distributed water-purification, power-generation and agriculture sites capable of supporting the neighborhood around them.

Jenkins is, in the first instance, absolutely right that communities need places to observe the rituals of lifestage and season that bind us together. Such observances are a considerable part of how we invest places with meaning, and there is no reason why church buildings, suitably desacralized, cannot serve that purpose into the indefinite future, as parish churches have done in this land since time immemorial.

But what strikes me is that underutilized houses of worship are also well-suited to provide an entirely new set of distributed infrastructural capacities demanded by our age of climate system collapse.

The fundamental idea of the Lifehouse is that there should be a place in every three-four city-block radius where you can charge your phone when the power’s down everywhere else, draw drinking water when the supply from the mains is for whatever reason untrustworthy, gather with your neighbors to discuss and deliberate over matters of common concern, organize reliable childcare, borrow tools it doesn’t make sense for any one household to own individually, and so on, and that these can and should be one and the same place.

As a foundation for collective resourcefulness, the Lifehouse is a practical implementation of solarpunk values, and it’s eminently doable.

Formally, the infrastructural services I imagine Lifehouses offering have a distributed topography, which makes them robust to the failure of reticulated grids. In Ours To Lose, Amy Starecheski’s wonderful social history/ethnography of squatting on the Lower East Side, she tells the story of the electricity-generating stationary bicycle belonging to the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space that was set up on the sidewalk outside C-Squat at E 10th Street and Avenue C, and used to power a bank of phone chargers during the extended Con Ed outages that followed Hurricane Sandy.

This is the model I have in mind for Lifehouse-as-community-infrastructure: when the grid goes down, or the water from the pipes isn’t safe to drink, every cluster of a hundred or so households has a place it can fulfill its needs.

This feels like it might be particularly useful, as the long-term process of intentional disinvestment that David Harvey and Ruth Wilson Gilmore call “organized abandonment” increasingly intersects with the unfolding reality of climate system collapse. Essential service infrastructures that have been undermaintained for all too long fall before the intolerable new demands imposed upon them by an enraged atmosphere.

Again, though, the value of such a place extends past the material to the psychic and affective. If a Lifehouse can be somewhere to gather and purify rainwater, the hub of a solar-powered microgrid, and a place to grow vegetables, it can also be a base for other services and methods of self-provision — a community workshop, a drop-in center for young people or the elderly, and a place for peer-to-peer modes of care like Cassie Thornton’s hologram to latch on.

It can be all of those things at once, provisioned and run by the people living in its catchment area. If mutual aid needs a site, and so does robustly participatory power, then that site should draw out and strengthen the connections between these ways of being in the world together.

And of course, in longer-established neighborhoods, there will often already be a building or physical site that organically serves many of these functions – the neighborhood’s naturally-arising Schelling Point, or node of unconscious coordination. Whether church, mosque, synagogue, high-school gym or public library, it will be where people instinctively turn for shelter and aid in times of trouble.

What I believe our troubled times now ask of us is that we be more conscious and purposive about creating loose networks of such places, each of them provisioned against the hour of maximum need.

The notion of a loose, federated network of Lifehouses presupposes that each be run by and for the people in a specific neighborhood or district, and that means that many of them will necessarily reflect distinctly local values. And that’s fine! That’s as it should be!

But it also suggests that the network itself can maintain a set of stated values — primarily oriented toward inclusion, I’d think — that are arrived at consensually, and that local Lifehouses would have to observe these principles if they wanted to federate, and derive all the benefits that attend upon federation. You can maintain whatever principles you like as a pragma, or local agreement, so long as they don’t come into conflict with the principles of the network.

Your Lifehouse is strictly vegan? Observes Ramadan? Asks for a 1% tithe from businesses operating in its catchment basin? Go nuts – but do it as a pragma. Who has the standing to tell you how your community should show up for itself?

The neat bit is that just about every neighborhood that’s been subjected to organized abandonment, and treated like a sacrifice zone under late capitalism, will have one or more underutilized spaces perfectly suited to use as a Lifehouse.

Virtually by definition, places where the market for land has cranked up property value to the level where there are no such underutilized facilities don’t have acute need for the things a Lifehouse does. They’re already adequately cared for by the market, and most likely prefer it that way.

The rest of us, though? We will increasingly have need of places where we can come together, to care for ourselves and for one another, to decide from among the courses of action available to us, and to bolster our collective capacity across all of the many registers implicated by the rigors of life in this difficult new dispensation.

For now, I’m developing these ideas in the last part of Beyond Hope [Greenfield’s forthcoming book in 2024], and am as well considering breaking this material out as a stand-alone pamphlet — but really I dream of helping to establish a network of Lifehouses, and of living to see the map dotted with them. Your thoughts along these lines are warmly solicited.

Subscribe to Adam Greenfield’s newsletter, “Speedbird: The Dispatch From London”, here.