When a house of worship closes its doors, a sense of emptiness and melancholy can inflect the final services. By then, the congregation is often reduced to a greying trickle, easing into a quiet coda that follows a decades-long period of decline. For the Lutheran Church of the Cross, west of downtown Winnipeg, however, its last service in 2025 marked both an end and a beginning.
"When we realized the church was going to be [put] to good use, it just felt like it wasn't as sad,” says Heidi Gerrard, a property manager and longtime community member who stands at the cusp of the church’s next chapter: building affordable housing.
Located on a leafy residential block of Arlington Street, the brutalist 20th-century church will be transformed into a 30-unit residential complex for seniors. For the Lutheran parish, the decision to close followed years of declining attendance.
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“We had our annual meeting about seven years ago, and we realized that the numbers were going down,” says Gerrard. “Then the pandemic came, and although we didn’t lose a ton of members all at once, our congregation… literally aged out.”
A similar reality is playing out in cities across Canada. According to the Canadian Urban Institute, nearly a third of the country’s 27,000 faith buildings are projected to close by 2035. It’s a shift that’s rooted in both a demographic evolution and a broader secularization of civic life. Once largely dominated by Christian denominations, Canada’s increasingly multicultural population includes a growing share of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities, all while Canadians with no religious affiliation comprised almost 35 per cent of the population in the 2021 census. It all translates into shrinking congregations, emptying churches – and surprisingly transformative opportunities to tackle the housing crisis.
The Lutheran Church of the Cross has a precedent of building homes. In 1977, the congregation’s nascent non-profit housing agency, Arms of the Cross, developed a nine-storey, 125-unit affordable apartment building just across the laneway from the parish itself.
“It was originally for older church members who didn’t have a home, but soon we opened it up to everyone,” says Gerrard, noting that bachelor rents currently start at $365 per month, substantially less than half of Winnipeg’s market average.
However, a lot has changed in the nearly half-century since the church launched Arms of the Cross, and the prospect of transforming the church into housing brought big questions: how to navigate a fragmented public financing and subsidy landscape, fast-changing land use and zoning policies and the preservation of architectural heritage. Just as the questions were percolating, Gerrard’s phone rang.
“I cold called her,” says Shannon Wiebe, an architect with the local firm 5467896 Architecture, and the pair quickly got to work. Following a walkthrough and site analysis, an expert team pulled together by Shared Ground – a recently launched initiative led by 5467896 Architecture, urban planners Scatliff + Miller + Murray and Relèven, a national charity devoted to guiding the transformation of underutilized faith properties – provided a pro-bono feasibility assessment.
“It’s a modernist gem of a building,” says Wiebe. “As soon as we saw it, the potential was apparent. The structure was still in good shape, and the beautiful high volume of the church had incredible potential.”
As Wiebe and her colleagues started on the geological survey and conceptual design, Shared Ground also helped Arms of the Cross secure funding from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and Manitoba’s From the Ground Up community grant program.
“It all started to add up in little pieces. At this point, it’s a matter of finalizing the construction drawings, and securing capital dollars before we start construction,” says Wiebe.
It’s a model that allows churches to maintain ownership of the land; they’re not selling to developers, they’re developing it themselves.
“We’d been hearing from a lot of non-profits and faith organizations that wanted to be active in affordable housing, but didn’t know where to start,” Wiebe explains, noting that churches are a fulcrum of the program. Typically, she says, they’re looking at significant parcels of land, often with a lot of surface parking, and a lot of opportunities to reimagine those sites through thoughtful intensification.
Similar projects are emerging across Canada. In Edmonton, for example, the municipality’s newly launched Faith Lands Affordable Housing Incentive has much in common with Shared Ground. The $2-million fund offers places of worship across the city up to $135,000 to cover pre-construction fees for services including feasibility studies, environmental assessments, community consultation, design consultancy and permitting.
Meanwhile, the United Church of Canada has spun Kindred Works out of its real estate arm, kickstarted with a $20-million CMHC line of credit. On average, a United Church congregation shuts its doors for good once a week; properties earmarked for intensification range from a 48-storey tower springing from the preserved shell of Saint Luke’s United Church in downtown Toronto to a low-rise townhouse and apartment complex on the grounds of Portland United Church in Saint John, New Brunswick. Through this growing property portfolio, Kindred Works aims to house some 34,000 people by 2037 in projects ranging from townhouses to highrise towers.
These initiatives are not without critics. Kindred Works has been criticized for its opaque organizational structure: writing in Broadview, a magazine covering the United Church of Canada, journalist Mike Milne argues that a lack of publicly available information is “making it difficult to evaluate how money is being used.” And in general, incentive programs have been criticized by some urban planners as temporary work-arounds that mask deeper problems of excessively restrictive zoning permissions and overly costly, byzantine permitting.
As well, there’s the existential question: as churches and faith organizations begin delivering affordable housing in an increasingly secular society, the mixing of religion and civic life invites questions about the inclusion of religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ communities – even if the housing developments lack overt spiritual elements.
Yet, as Canada has evolved, so have its churches. Across the United Church of Canada, rainbows and orange flags are common, with the first openly transgender ministers ordained in the early 2010s, following decades of evolution on queer acceptance. The church has also interrogated its own colonial history, apologizing and repudiating past harms while also welcoming Indigenous iconography and knowledge systems.
When I raise the question of inclusion with Gerrard, she points to a history of youth drop-in programs that are inclusive of all sexualities, and a Lutheran congregation that flies both the Medicine Wheel and the Survivor’s Flag.
While churches across the country continuously changed with the times, past shifts pale in comparison to the secularization of Canadian life. Amid a deepening urban housing crisis, the very land that churches occupy presents a transformational opportunity to serve their communities by building homes. For congregations across the country, it is a new answer to the foundational question of what it means to be a good neighbour.
