A Conversation with Father Carl
Public Land in People’s Hands Community Festival at Queensbridge Park, Queens. (2021). Courtesy of Bagchee Architects.
As many congregations face declining membership, shifting neighbourhood demographics, and the pressures of a speculative real estate market, an urgent question emerges for the Episcopal Church and other faith traditions: How might we reimagine inherited lands, buildings, and institutional privileges to serve the common good in a time of deep social and ecological precarity? Drawing on an in-depth conversation with Father Carl, a priest working in eastern Queens, New York, this article explores what it might mean to engage in “commons-based adaptive reuse.” This concept offers a lens to examine how repurposing church property can become a form of reparative justice, communal stewardship, and theological praxis.
The Past and Present of the Parish Church Model
Father Carl’s reflections begin with a frank assessment of the traditional Episcopal parish model. “I began to realize that the existing institutional model, that of the Episcopal Church, is sort of a parish church model. There are little neighbourhood churches that really had their heyday in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Some of these historic buildings, oftentimes with garden properties, were tremendous assets, not just to the worshipping community—who are there oftentimes for a few hours on Sundays—but to the whole neighbourhood that surrounds them. In the case of the Episcopal Church, most of these buildings and properties are dramatically underutilized. The main reason being lack of imagination or bandwidth by the leadership of these parishes.”
In other words, many Episcopal churches currently exist in a liminal state: once vibrant neighbourhood hubs, they have become inert assets—physically present but socially underused. What’s missing is vision. “Just managing these buildings and these properties and keeping them from falling in on themselves,” Father Carl continues, “is a big part of what a lot of professional clergies do. The move from survival mentality of ‘how do we keep this thing from falling apart?’ to a broader imagination of ‘what could this thing be?’ is a leap that many of us struggle to make.”
Instead of treating the built environment as a static inheritance, communities might engage in acts of “commoning”: the active production and stewardship of resources, spaces, and social relations as shared goods, rather than privatized commodities. To enact commoning in church property management means seeing parish buildings and grounds as part of a relational ecology, where the physical structure supports collective well-being and not just Sunday worship.
Encountering the Commons: Community Land Trusts as Theological Inspiration
A key turning point in Father Carl’s imagination came during seminary. “When I was in seminary, I went to a weekend workshop exploring how buildings and grounds could become the means by which the church lives out its mission in the community, and how they could be integrated with one another. At this meeting, I met someone who connected me to the founders of the Western Queens Community Land Trust (WQCLT).”
The WQCLT emerged from a local struggle: residents successfully resisted Amazon’s attempt to establish a second headquarters in Long Island City, a move that would have accelerated displacement and inequality. After this victory, organizers asked, “What are we going to do now?” They formed a community land trust as a way to legally enshrine the values they had fought to protect.
Community land trusts (CLTs) introduce a model of holding land in perpetuity for communal benefit. They challenge speculative markets and ensure affordability, local governance, and stewardship over time. For Father Carl, this represented more than a legal tool; it spoke directly to the Gospel’s vision of justice. “I thought, well, the work that the WQCLT is doing is so exciting, and it feels so resonant with how I understand the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is a different way for us to organize ourselves as a community, in which all people have what they need to grow and flourish.”
Here, Father Carl draws a parallel between today’s urban context and the Roman occupation of Jesus’s time—an extraction model where wealth and power concentrate at the top. If the Kingdom of God suggests a radical alternative—communities arranged for the common good rather than elite profit—then CLTs and similar models offer practical mechanisms for living out these values. “My question became, what are the new and creative and life-giving ways that the church can live out the mission of Jesus, which is to bring about this new way of being… Land and our stewardship of land for public good and not private profit could be a pretty great way to get on board with the stuff that we talked about on Sundays.”
Adaptive Reuse as Reparative Practice
Father Carl’s current appointment in eastern Queens provides a living laboratory. He describes a now-closed church building on 46th Street with a garden space: “It’s been used by a daycare that serves 65 families. The kids use the garden but basically nobody else. On Saturdays, a drum corps rehearses, and a Spanish-speaking church rents space there in the afternoon.”
While these uses matter, the garden remains largely dormant as a community asset. This highlights a central challenge: how to move from piecemeal leasing to an integrated vision where church land anchors community resilience. “I’m now in the process of restarting a ministry in Sunnyside,” Father Carl says. “I’m trying to build relationships and discern what a new Episcopal ministry could look like in this neighbourhood, as it really is in 2024. This stewardship of the building and garden space is one of the most exciting and important ways of enacting the vision and values that the church should be organised around.”
Central to his approach is connecting with grassroots groups who have already demonstrated “vernacular adaptive reuse”—local composters and gardeners who transformed a vacant lot into an accessible, thriving community garden during the pandemic. Now that the lot will be developed into affordable senior housing, Father Carl invites these composters to move their operation to the church garden. He envisions Sunday morning compost drop-offs, turning church land into a literal site of resurrection. “The tagline of the new ministry I’ve begun comes from the Book of Common Prayer: ‘That things which have been cast down are being raised up and things which have grown old are being made new.’ I can’t think of a more concrete example than composting.”
Through this lens, adaptive reuse becomes moral and spiritual, not just architectural. It is reparative: acknowledging historical injustices, the Church’s entanglement with colonial legacies, and racial hierarchies, and redirecting privilege toward communal uplift. As Father Carl notes, “My own understanding of priesthood and my understanding of the mission of the church has been shaped by community land trusts and community gardens… Being connected to these folks has enlivened my imagination about what the church should be.”
Vulnerability, Speculation, and Market Pressures
Yet the path is fraught with obstacles. “The third space between public and private that church buildings and church land occupy is extremely vulnerable to the cross pressures of land speculation,” Father Carl warns. With membership decline, many churches instinctively cash in. He mentions St. Paul’s in Woodside, sold to the highest bidder. Without his timely installation in Sunnyside, the property he now stewards might have suffered the same fate.
This tension underscores that while adaptive reuse and commoning bring communities closer to moral imperatives, they operate in a context where governments and dioceses often default to market logic. “The current paradigm of government involvement, the city, are here to feed the beast of growth, understood within the market economy as unimpeachably good,” he says. He expresses disappointment in civic and ecclesial leadership for lacking a constructive vision “rooted in an understanding of what human beings, human communities need, desire, not just to survive but to flourish.”
Theologically, this scenario recalls the dual inheritance of the Christian tradition—once anti-imperial, later co-opted by empire. “The Christian tradition has both of these inheritances,” Father Carl muses. “The imagination of what public good could look like as a form of resistance to private profit and what if we just got on that train and became rich and powerful along those well-greased tracks?” The Church stands at a crossroads: align with communal needs and the Gospel’s anti-imperial vision, or yield to wealth and status.
Critical Praxis and Prefigurative Politics
Father Carl’s approach exemplifies critical praxis: weaving theory and action so that practical engagements reflect ethical and political insights. He doesn’t simply critique the Church’s inertia; he experiments, forging alliances with gardeners and CLTs, reorienting the Church’s spatial resources toward justice and sustainability.
This resonates with “prefigurative politics”—enacting desired futures in the present. By composting on church property, hosting community activities, and imagining CLTs as templates for ecclesial stewardship, Father Carl models a different world. In this world, the Church’s assets contribute to reparative and racial justice, ecological resilience, and economic solidarity.
Inheritance, Moral Reckoning, and Choice
Father Carl acknowledges the complexity of dealing with an inherited institution. The Church’s legal status, property tax exemptions, and historic wealth pose dilemmas. “How are we going to receive our inheritance of special legal status accorded to our property?” he asks. “Are we going to just hang on to this tax-free status because it’s convenient? Where are we going to try to leverage that for the good of the community?”
This involves “selective remembering”—honouring traditions worth retaining and shedding patterns that no longer serve. Father Carl likens it to personal moral growth: “We have to deal with the consequences of those choices [made in the past]. That’s not optional. But we do have choices about what we’re going to do with that in the present.”
He compares this moral labour to parenting. He appreciates aspects of how he was raised but recognizes patterns he won’t pass on to his young daughter. This analogy underscores that institutional transformation is also personal, spiritual work. It’s not just “mission strategy” but a daily moral struggle—facing history’s residue, empire, white supremacy, and asking: “How am I going to receive that past?”
Commons-Based Adaptive Reuse as Theological Praxis
By linking land stewardship to the Kingdom of God, Father Carl offers a theological rationale for commons-based adaptive reuse. This goes beyond good social policy, embodying Christian discipleship. Early Church practices of shared property and monastic traditions of common life find renewed expression here. The practice confronts scarcity and extraction, highlighting abundance, reciprocity, and care.
Regarding reparative justice, commons-based adaptive reuse acknowledges that land ownership has been racialized and colonial. By introducing community governance and long-term affordability, CLTs and related models counter longstanding inequities. If churches adopt these models, they effectively engage in a form of reparations, redistributing land use to those previously excluded.
Moving Beyond Sunnyside: A Priest’s Broader Vision
Interviewer: How do you see your work moving forward beyond the Sunnyside project? How might we encourage more faith communities to recognize their role in building resilience?
Father Carl: “Most of my energy for the next few years will be in cultivating, sustaining, and protecting a positive case study that I hope could inspire other churches who are in a similar situation.”
Father Carl’s story challenges faith communities beyond Queens to ask: What if we saw underused parish buildings not as liabilities but as commons? How might that reorientation breathe new life into neighbourhoods facing economic, ecological, and social pressures? By partnering with community gardeners, activists, and local residents, Father Carl hopes to show that even limited resources, when stewarded collectively, can inspire models of resilience and reciprocity.
In the end, this is an invitation to shift from “keeping the lights on” to “becoming a resource for the neighbourhood.” Father Carl’s example serves as both a personal vocation and a communal experiment—rooted in spiritual conviction yet attuned to pressing urban realities. It suggests that when faith communities dare to break from preservationist mindsets and embrace adaptive reuse as commons-building, they can rediscover a vital calling: bearing witness to a more equitable world, one garden bed, compost bin, and transformed church hall at a time.
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