Future for Church Buildings

Abstract

All across the Netherlands more and more church buildings are abandoned as a consequence of secularisation, declining church attendance and ageing of the population of churchgoers. However, finding a new future for a church building is not as easy as it sounds, as it mostly result in protracted and complex processes in which involved stakeholders can hardly come to an agreement. In order to increase clarity, this article identifies different stakeholder perspectives on determining a future for church buildings in The Netherlands. By using Q methodology three shared perspectives could be identified, as well as areas of agreement, in dealing with vacant church buildings. The perspectives named: A) “church building as house for the public”, B) “making well considered choices” and C) “church councils in control”. The perspectives share awareness of the importance of church buildings for society and are all willing to retain those buildings for the future. However, they disagree on what possible future is preferred and how the process of defining a future should be shaped. Where perspective A mainly focuses on culture-historical values, perspective B has more eye for financial feasibility of reuse and perspective C stresses the importance of the religious meaning of the church building. The differences between those perspectives together with the secrecy of stakeholders is therefore seen as one of the most deciding bottlenecks in reuse processes of church buildings.