Religious life won’t be the same after economic downturn

“In 2010, I think we’re going to see 10 or 15 percent of congregations saying they’re in serious financial trouble.”

David Roozen

Researcher

By RACHEL ZOLL

AP Religion Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Organized religion was already in trouble before the fall of 2008. Denominations were stagnating or shrinking, and congregations across faith groups were fretting about their finances.

The Great Recession made things worse.

It’s further drained the financial resources of many congregations, seminaries and religious day schools. Some congregations have disappeared and schools have been closed. In areas hit hardest by the recession, worshippers have moved away to find jobs, leaving those who remain to minister to communities struggling with rising home foreclosures, unemployment and uncertainty.

Religion has a long history of drawing hope out of suffering, but there’s little good news emerging from the recession. Long after the economy improves, the changes made today will have a profound effect on how people practice their faith, where they turn for help in times of stress and how they pass their beliefs to their children.

“In 2010, I think we’re going to see 10 or 15 percent of congregations saying they’re in serious financial trouble,” says David Roozen, a lead researcher for the Faith Communities Today multi-faith survey, which measures congregational health annually. “With around 320,000 or 350,000 congregations, that’s a hell of a lot of them.”

The sense of community that holds together religious groups is broken when large numbers of people move to find work or if a ministry is forced to close.

“I’m really still in the mourning process,” says Eve Fein, former head of the now-shuttered Morasha Jewish Day School in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.

The school, a center of religious life for students and their parents, had been relying on a sale of some of its property to stay afloat but land values dropped, forcing Morasha to shut down in June.

“I don’t think any of us who were in it have really recovered,” Fein says. “The school was 23 years old. I raised my kids there.”

The news isn’t uniformly bad. Communities in some areas are still moving ahead with plans for new congregations, schools and ministries, religious leaders say.

And many congregations say they found a renewed sense of purpose helping their suffering neighbors. Houses of worship became centers of support for the unemployed.