An artist’s rendering of the new Central United Methodist Church apartment complex. Courtesy of APAH

Religion & Real Estate

From The Ground Up

Sarah Harrison-McQueen helped her congregation reimagine their church—by tearing it down to build affordable housing

In April 2014, Sarah Harrison-McQueen was in the seventh year of what she expected to be a 10-year appointment as associate pastor at Warrenton United Methodist Church in Virginia. Then her phone rang.

“Would you be open to an appointment change?” the district superintendent on the other end of the line asked. A church in Arlington, Va., about 40 miles east, needed a pastor. “We’re not sending you to rearrange the chairs on the Titanic,” Harrison-McQueen (STH’07) recalls the superintendent saying. “We’re sending you to start over with a whole new ship.”

Several years earlier, the congregation at Central United Methodist, in Arlington’s Ballston neighborhood, had begun a ministry to provide food and services to people without homes. Now they wanted to launch a project that would replace the 98-year-old church building with actual homes.

Harrison-McQueen arrived just a few months after that phone call, ready to guide a complex and ambitious planning process. It took seven years, but in December 2021 demolition began. Over the next three years, an eight-floor building will go up in its place. Worship space and a childcare center, both temporarily relocated during construction, will return—and they’ll be joined by 144 units of affordable housing.

From coffee to construction

Ballston is a thriving transit hub. Metro and bus lines converge across the street from the church, and Washington, D.C., is a 10-minute ride away. Amazon’s new East Coast head-quarters are under construction nearby. Rents have sky-rocketed. Back in 2007, members of Central UMC went on a prayer walk through their neighborhood and were surprised to see so many people living on the streets.

“The members of the church would describe themselves, at that time, as being very inwardly focused,” Harrison-McQueen says. “The journey they began that day resulted in them being much more outwardly focused. It opened their eyes to the needs of the community.”

Church members started small. They began serving coffee and donuts to people without homes on Friday mornings, then they added hot breakfasts and lunches. Partnerships with local nonprofits helped them expand the meal program and provide other services, like on-site social workers and nurse practitioners. Initially, they considered a church renovation that would add space for a homeless services center and amenities like showers. They also looked into selling the property, moving to a less valuable piece of real estate, and using the profits for housing.

Fortunately for Harrison-McQueen, Central UMC’s congregation was well equipped for the journey ahead, and she didn’t need to become an instant expert on development. The building committee included two lawyers, a nonprofit CEO, a CPA, a retired engineer, and an economist. “They didn’t expect the pastor to have an MBA,” she says.

With the committee’s help, she led the congregation through a lengthy discernment process that ended with their decision to raze the church and build something new.

Building on a trend

Central UMC isn’t the first church to transform its property into housing, but, says Harrison-McQueen, “we were blazing trails in the Methodist world.”

Just within Arlington County, a Presbyterian church recently completed a development that includes 173 apartments, and a Baptist church built eight floors of apartments adjacent to their sanctuary. In California, according to a recent study by the University of California at Berkeley, religious institutions own 38,800 acres of land. Proposed legislation there would remove some of the red tape for faith- based organizations looking to develop their property.

Although Central UMC’s project was motivated by a desire to help the Ballston community, it has also strengthened the congregation, Harrison-McQueen says. Members became more active. People who sought food and services on Friday began attending the Sunday service. Thirty people would sign up to speak at a public meeting about the redevelopment plans (the average attendance on Sundays was just 70). “I was able to witness the vision of the project getting deep in the bones of the entire congregation,” she says.

That dedication served them well, as the process dragged on. To launch the project, the church had to find the right nonprofit partner to secure funding, apply for federal loans, conduct a capital campaign, and navigate development challenges like historical preservation regulations. Each step took longer than expected. And then COVID-19 hit.

Last words, first words

By spring 2020, Harrison-McQueen had already begun imagining her final sermon in the old church. “It definitely would’ve included a lot of people in the room. It definitely would’ve included the choir singing,” she says.

The pandemic ended those plans. Instead, after more than a year of remote services, the congregation returned in May 2021 to say goodbye to their church. They held three in-person services to maintain social distancing and replaced the choir with prerecorded hymns. It wasn’t the send-off anyone had envisioned.

For the next three years they will worship from their temporary home in the nearby First Vietnamese American United Methodist Church. Harrison-McQueen is now thinking about her first sermon in their new, rebuilt sanctuary, expected to open in the first half of 2024.

The pews will be replaced by chairs. Light will come in through the restored stained glass windows from the old church. The old gymnasium and chapel will be gone to save space, but a new commercial kitchen will help the congregation expand its meal program.

One other relic was salvaged from the old church’s kitchen: a 70-year-old butcher block table. It had become a focal point for Central UMC’s new ministry—thousands of lunches were bagged and hot meals prepared around that table over the course of hundreds of late Thursday evenings and early Friday mornings—and it symbolizes the journey that led the congregation from their 2007 prayer walk to construction of an apartment building. When Harrison-McQueen delivers that first sermon in the new sanctuary, it will be from an altar that includes the butcher block: “It tells the story of that community that gathered to feed others and has such a deep connection to the Eucharistic story.”