What Is a Church Building For? A Review of Loren Richmond Jr.’s The Church as Community Hub

Churches have a lot of space.

Increasingly, they have a lot more space than they need.

That is one of the realities behind Loren Richmond Jr.’s new book, The Church as Community Hub: Sharing Spaces to Help Neighborhoods Thrive. Across the country, congregations worship in buildings constructed for a different era of American Christianity. They have classrooms that once held packed Sunday schools, fellowship halls designed for large church suppers, kitchens capable of feeding a crowd, offices, parking lots, and sometimes substantial pieces of land. Meanwhile, the neighborhoods surrounding these churches may be struggling to find affordable childcare, housing, gathering places, meeting rooms, or simply places where people can be together.

Loren’s book asks what might happen if churches began to connect those two realities.

What impressed me most was that The Church as Community Hub never felt like another attempt to help struggling congregations grasp at the straws of relevance. There are plenty of ideas circulating about how churches might become more innovative, more entrepreneurial, or more attractive to people who have stopped attending. Loren is interested in something deeper. He wants congregations to think differently about the resources they already have and to ask how those resources might contribute to the flourishing of their neighbors.

That makes this a book about church buildings, but it also makes it a book about vocation.

Martin Luther had a remarkably ordinary understanding of where Christian faith leads us. Faith turns us toward God, and then Christian freedom turns us toward the neighbor. We do not need to spend our lives proving ourselves worthy before God. Grace takes care of that. And because grace takes care of that, we are free to spend our lives asking a different question: what does my neighbor need?

I kept returning to that idea while reading Loren’s book. What would happen if congregations asked that question about their property? Not, “How do we get more people into this building?” Not even, “How do we generate enough cash from this building to keep it open?” But, “What does our neighbor need, and what has God already placed in our hands?”

Sometimes the answer may be surprisingly mundane. Maybe the neighborhood needs a commercial kitchen. Maybe it needs affordable childcare. Maybe a nonprofit needs office space. Maybe people need a place for recovery meetings or English classes. Maybe the community needs housing, and the congregation happens to own several acres of land. Maybe teenagers need somewhere to go after school. None of these uses is particularly flashy. That is part of what I find so compelling about them. Lutheran theology has always insisted that God has a habit of working through ordinary things. Bread and wine. Water and words. Parents and teachers and farmers and public servants. Why not classrooms, kitchens, parking lots, and fellowship halls?

I also found myself reading Loren alongside the late Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall. Hall, the favorite theologian of one of my theological vocational mentors, spent decades urging North American Christians to stop treating the decline of Christendom as though it were synonymous with the decline of Christianity. The loss of the church’s cultural power could certainly be painful. Institutions would shrink. Buildings would become difficult to maintain. Clergy would lose some of the social status their predecessors enjoyed. But Hall also wondered whether disestablishment might free the church to become the church again.

That seems like an important theological backdrop to The Church as Community Hub. So many of our church buildings were constructed during an era when Christianity occupied a very different place in American life. Their scale tells a story about that era. Their sanctuaries, education wings, bowling alleys, gymnasiums, and parking lots were built with the expectation that people would come. For a time, they did.

Today, many do not.

We can experience that primarily as loss. In many congregations, that loss is real and deserves to be grieved. But Hall would push us to ask whether there might also be an invitation hidden within it. Perhaps the task is not to figure out how to restore the institutional church of 1965. Perhaps we can loosen our grip on some of the things associated with that era and discover a different way of being present in our communities.

Loren gives that theological possibility some very practical expression. An empty Sunday school classroom can become something other than evidence of decline. A fellowship hall used throughout the week by community groups can be something other than an underutilized church asset. A congregation that develops some of its land for housing has not necessarily surrendered something that once belonged to the church. It may have discovered a new way for that property to serve the church’s vocation.

This is also why I hope this book finds its way beyond pastors and property committees in established congregations. Bishops and denominational leaders should read it. So should people who oversee church foundations and grant programs. And I especially hope it is read by people involved in funding, planting, and supporting new congregations.

We tend to associate these questions with old churches that have too much building. But there is an equally interesting question on the other end of the congregational lifecycle. If you have funding and denominational support to start something new, why recreate the conventional church campus in the first place?

Imagine beginning a new ministry by asking what kind of shared space a particular neighborhood actually needs. Maybe it is childcare. Maybe it is affordable housing with community space on the first floor. Maybe it is a coffee shop, coworking space, community kitchen, counseling center, garden, or arts space. Instead of building a church and eventually asking how the neighborhood might use it, what if we created something the neighborhood needed and asked how a worshiping community might live within it?

I think that possibility deserves considerably more attention, particularly from denominations investing significant resources in new starts. It also shows why Loren’s argument should not be reduced to a strategy for managing decline. There is something here for churches that are just beginning.

One question I was left with concerns the theological depth underneath Loren’s argument. Loren draws from an impressive collection of contemporary thinkers and researchers, including people like Ryan Burge, Andy Root, and Scott Thumma. Their work helps us understand the institutional and cultural conditions churches are navigating. But I would be interested to see this conversation pushed further into the Christian tradition itself. Loren’s proposal seems ripe for conversation with Luther on vocation and Christian freedom, Hall on disestablishment and the theology of the cross, and other theological voices that can help us see the community hub not simply as an innovative ministry model, but as an expression of what the church has long confessed about its relationship with God and neighbor.

I also found myself wanting to hear about a few failures.

Church innovation literature tends to feature success stories for understandable reasons. But anyone who has spent time around congregations knows that partnerships fall apart. A church can spend money creating something its neighborhood does not actually want. A nonprofit partner can turn out to be the wrong fit. Volunteers can burn out. A great idea can become unsustainable. Sometimes the faithful decision is to keep going, and sometimes the faithful decision is to pull the plug. I have seen versions of this happen here in Madison. That does not disprove Loren’s thesis. If anything, I think those stories could make the case stronger. Congregations need permission to experiment without assuming that every experiment must become a permanent ministry. I would love to hear more stories from this movement about what went wrong, what people learned, and what they did next.

Those questions came to me because I think Loren is onto something important. The Church as Community Hub offers congregations a way of thinking about decline that is neither nostalgic nor defeatist. It does not tell churches to accept irrelevance, nor does it give them another program for clawing their way back toward cultural significance. It asks them to look again at what they have been given.

There is something deeply pastoral about that invitation. Many congregations are tired. Their membership is older than it used to be. Their budgets are tighter. They remember when the Sunday school rooms were full, and they feel the absence when they walk past them today. It is easy to look at an empty classroom and see only what has been lost.

Loren invites us to look again.

Maybe the room is not empty because the church has failed. Maybe the room is simply available.

Available for a neighbor. Available for a partner. Available for an experiment. Available for a form of ministry nobody imagined when the building was constructed fifty or seventy-five or a hundred years ago.

That is ultimately why I am so enthusiastic about this book. Loren has written something practical, but he has also given the church a hopeful way to think about stewardship in a time of institutional change. He reminds us that the question facing a congregation is not simply whether we can preserve everything we inherited. The more interesting question is what all of these things we inherited might now be for.

The Surprising Connection between Time Travel and The Ascension

As I prepared to preach on the Ascension, I recently found myself contemplating time travel. As one does.

There’s a fascinating connection between time travel and theology. Somewhere beneath all of our stories about time travel is a deeply human longing to believe that love might somehow transcend time itself.

That longing shows up in everything from Back to the Future to Interstellar, where Christopher Nolan imagines time not simply as chronology, but as something fragile and permeable, something through which love still reaches. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Matthew McConaughey’s character falls into a black hole and discovers he can communicate across time by knocking books from a shelf in his daughter’s bedroom decades earlier. It is a strange scene, but also an oddly moving one. A father breaks through time to make love known.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA3Txp94pjs

Which, in its own strange way, is not entirely unlike John’s Gospel, where lectionary-following churches spend ample time each year after Easter.

John’s Gospel often feels less like reading a story and more like being swept up into a prayer already in progress. The sentences loop and spiral around themselves. Jesus speaks in these long bewildering passages filled with “I” and “you” and “mine” and “yours” until the whole thing begins to feel less like linear speech and more like language trying to stretch itself toward mystery.

In John 17, we find Jesus at the Last Supper offering what is often described as his “high priestly prayer.” He prays first for himself, then for the disciples seated around the table, and then, remarkably, for those who will come after them. For future disciples. For generations not yet born. For people somehow gathered into the life of God across centuries and cultures and history itself.

Somehow, Christ’s prayer reaches across time itself.

John’s Gospel insists upon one of Christianity’s most audacious claims: that eternity has entered ordinary human life. “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” John writes at the beginning of the Gospel, collapsing the distance between God and ordinary human life. God enters not abstract spirituality, but hunger and friendship and grief and betrayal and dinner tables and human vulnerability as it actually exists.

Which means Christianity is not fundamentally about escaping ordinary life in order to discover God somewhere else. It is about learning to recognize that God has already entered ordinary life fully.

That becomes especially important in a culture like ours, where so much of modern existence conditions us to believe that suffering, limitation, and uncertainty are interruptions to life rather than part of being human. We quietly absorb the assumption that with enough discipline, enough productivity, enough optimization, enough control over our habits and choices, we ought to be able to engineer lives relatively insulated from disappointment or grief or exhaustion. Which means that when suffering does arrive, as it inevitably does, we experience not only pain itself, but also the subtle suspicion that something must have gone terribly wrong.

The honesty of 1 Peter feels important here. “Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you,” the author writes, “as though something strange were happening to you.” Christianity does not romanticize suffering, but neither does it treat suffering as evidence of divine absence. In Christ, God has already entered fully into the vulnerability and fragility of human life, into sorrow and abandonment and physical suffering and death itself.

God does not observe human existence safely from a distance. God knows human life from the inside.

Which changes what trust means.

Christian trust is not naïve optimism or confidence that faithful people somehow avoid heartbreak. It is the conviction that even in the middle of ordinary human struggle, we are not abandoned. Jürgen Moltmann once wrote that “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with God,” and I suspect that line captures something essential about Christian hope. Resurrection is not denial. It is trust that suffering and despair do not ultimately have the final word.

This same collision between eternity and ordinary life appears again in the story of the Ascension in Acts. It is striking how little attention Acts gives to the mechanics of the event itself. Jesus is lifted up. A cloud takes him from their sight. The whole thing occupies barely a sentence. No explanation of heavenly geography. No detailed explanation at all. The real focus of the story turns out not to be Jesus ascending, but the disciples standing there staring upward while two figures ask them, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

The question matters because the meaning of the Ascension is not fundamentally upward, but outward.

The Ascension is not permission to disengage from the world while waiting for rescue from somewhere beyond it. As Douglas John Hall often argued, Christian faith is not escape from the world, but deeper engagement with the world in hope. Trusting that God has already entered ordinary human existence frees us to recognize holiness not beyond life, but within it: in classrooms and conference rooms, in hospital visits and difficult conversations, in caregiving and parenting and the quiet, mostly unnoticed work of loving neighbors well.

Which may also be why so much of genuine discipleship appears unimpressive by the standards of modern culture.

Most of the people who shaped my own faith were not celebrities or visionaries or extraordinary spiritual heroes. They were ordinary people who showed up consistently. Sunday school teachers. Parents. Mentors. Coaches. People who quietly carried the life of faith forward through patience, kindness, attention, and care.

And perhaps one of the defining spiritual anxieties of our age is the fear that ordinary lives are not meaningful enough. We fear our lives are too small, too unnoticed, too unremarkable to matter. We want to be astronauts traveling galaxies when most of life actually unfolds in ordinary acts of fidelity that rarely look impressive in the moment.

Which brings me back to Interstellar.

The movie’s true hero is arguably not Cooper, the astronaut traveling across space and time, but his daughter Murph, who remains on Earth doing the patient, difficult, unspectacular work set before her. She studies. She perseveres. She commits herself to solving a problem larger than herself without the glamour of cosmic adventure attached to it.

And maybe that is one of Christianity’s oldest and strangest claims: that eternity has already entered ordinary human life, which means God is not waiting for us somewhere beyond the world, beyond our work, beyond our grief, beyond parenting and caregiving and difficult conversations and the quiet responsibilities that fill ordinary days.

Christ is already here.

And the glory of God appears in our ordinary lives.

The Soft Tyranny of the AI Summary (And Why Redundancy Still Matters)

Can you summarize yourself to smarts?

That seems to be the quiet bet underlying so much of our current relationship with AI. Last month, a friend told me, with a mix of pride and excitement, that he had stopped reading books and listening to podcasts. Instead, he takes the books he would have read and the conversations he would have listened to and runs them through ChatGPT, generating summaries, extracting core ideas and cutting out the rest. What he gains, in his view, is efficiency and clarity, the ability to get the value of a piece of content in a fraction of the time it would have taken to engage it directly. Spend less time on more content, he argues, and you'll get smarter, and more productive.

This instinct is not isolated. It is showing up in high school literature classrooms where students are increasingly turning to AI-generated summaries instead of reading Shakespeare or Twain, and it is present in the workplace where meeting recaps, call summaries, and condensed reading lists have become standard artifacts of daily work.

To be fair, we have always had versions of this. SparkNotes existed well before AI, and executive summaries have long been part of how we navigate complexity and abundance. Even the best teachers help students step back from a text to understand its structure and themes without requiring them to master every line.

But something important has shifted since the beginning of the AI boom. Even SparkNotes, for all its shortcuts, was still grounded in literacy. Its summaries were, generally speaking, accurate. But if you ask an LLM to summarize a specific chapter of Jane Austen, I'll bet you a bitcoin it makes a mistake. SparkNotes also published in sentences and carried a point of view, however simplified. It asked the reader to remain, at least in some small way, inside the act of reading. What we are seeing now is a move toward something more "frictionless," where the goal is not simply to clarify but to compress, not just to guide engagement, but to eliminate the need for engagement altogether. The summary is no longer a companion to the work of understanding an idea. It is becoming a substitute for it. And I wonder, if we eliminate the effort that leads to understanding, what else do we have?

I find myself less concerned about what this does to Shakespeare, who has endured centuries of reinterpretation and reduction, and more concerned about what it does to us, especially in the ordinary and unfinished parts of our lives where understanding is actually formed.

Life does not unfold in cleanly extracted insights, bullets, emojis, or em dashes. It takes shape in the hesitations and repetitions that fill real conversations, in the half-formed and run-on sentences that circle an idea before finally arriving at something true, and in the long, meandering explanations that could have been shorter but would have lost their meaning if they were. Some remark that a meeting could have been an email. But maybe the monotony of the meeting was just the thing needed to spark clarity?

When we listen to a podcast guest think out loud, changing their mind as they speak and fumbling for the right words, we are not simply collecting information. We are learning how to inhabit complexity, how to hold uncertainty, and how to think in real time. Why was President Obama an effective orator? Rhetoric, to be sure. But I would also suggest that his comfort expressing "umms" and hanging on to long pauses helped him to refine and polish his core ideas, shaping and sharing his vision simultaneously.

Awkward, grammatically incorrect communication is central to everyday interactions. When a colleague explains something imperfectly, or when a friend sends a message that is grammatically uneven but emotionally clear, we are reminded that communication is not a finished product but a shared process of meaning-making. These moments carry a kind of formative weight that is difficult to measure but essential to how we learn. When we sand down the "errs and ums" in the name of efficiency, we are not just removing excess. We are removing the conversational conditions under which understanding deepens. This really ought to give pause to those who work in ministry or faith formation. Where else can faith take root besides the fragmentation and messiness of lived experience?

There is a deeper cost here that is easy to overlook because it does not announce itself as a loss. When we outsource the middle of an experience, the wandering, the wrestling, and the repetition, when we erase the grammatical gaffes, we begin to lose something more subtle than information. We lose formation. Reading a book is not only about empathizing with the author’s conclusion but about undergoing the argument itself, feeling its tension, sitting with its ambiguity, and allowing it to work on us over time. Listening to a full conversation trains a kind of patience and attention that cannot be replicated by a summary. It teaches us to remain with ideas that do not resolve quickly and to resist the impulse to move immediately to closure.

Summaries, by design, collapse time. They promise arrival without journey and clarity without the discomfort of complexity. Over time, the "cheap grace" of a summary begins to shape us in ways that are disadvantageous. We become less practiced in sustained attention and less comfortable with ideas that require time to unfold. We grow accustomed to resolution and begin to lose our tolerance for ambiguity, not because we have consciously rejected it, but because we have slowly optimized for something else.

This is why I think of the AI summary as a kind of soft tyranny. There is nothing coercive about it. No one is forcing us to summarize our way through the world. It arrives as a gift, as a tool that saves time and reduces effort, and in many ways it delivers on that promise. But it also quietly narrows the range of experiences we are willing to engage. When something cannot be easily summarized, we are less inclined to give it our attention. When an idea takes time to develop, we are more likely to move past it. When a conversation wanders, we feel the pull to compress it into something cleaner and more efficient.

Over time, almost without noticing, we begin to prefer the summarized version of reality. We start to expect clarity without process and insight without effort, and we shape our habits accordingly. The danger is not that we will stop learning, but that we will begin to relate to learning itself in a thinner way, prioritizing extraction over experience, conclusion over formation, the answer over the question.

I do not think the answer is to reject summaries altogether. They have an important role to play in helping us navigate a world that is oversaturated with information. Summaries and redactions can orient us, clarify what matters, and make complex material more accessible. But they should not replace the full version. We still need long books and unedited conversations. We need amateurish podcasts with hesitant guests. We need the Director's Cut of Lord of the Rings. We still need messy drafts and uncertain thinking. We need spaces where ideas are not yet distilled and where understanding is still in the process of becoming.

The question is not whether AI can summarize the world for us, because it increasingly can. The question is whether we want to live in a world where everything meaningful has already been reduced to its most efficient form, or whether we are willing to remain in the parts of experience that resist summary. Those are often the places where understanding takes root, where insight is not delivered but discovered, and where we are shaped not just by what we learn but by how we come to learn it.