Chicago-Toronto Project

Overview

Causes and Consequences of Congregation Closings and Transitions Across Borders

The Causes and Consequences of Congregation Closings/Transitions Across Borders project is a comparative study of Chicago and Toronto examining why congregations close, what happens to their properties, and how those transitions affect surrounding communities. Congregational closure is becoming an increasingly important issue for organized religion, yet reliable research remains difficult because it requires longitudinal information about individual congregations, their organizational characteristics, their neighborhoods, and what replaces them after they disappear.

The project brings together two unusually rich sources of data. In Chicago, the Chicago Congregations Project has developed a near-census of congregations through street-level canvassing, online verification, surveys, and historical comparison with the earlier Place of Religion in Chicago project. This makes it possible to identify congregations that have survived, closed, relocated, or been replaced over roughly two decades, while also tracking what happened to their buildings and neighborhoods.

Toronto provides a complementary Canadian case through data assembled by the Canadian Institute for Empirical Church Research at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. Using more than three decades of Canada Revenue Agency records, CIECR has constructed a longitudinal database of Canadian congregations that includes organizational and financial characteristics and can be linked to detailed Statistics Canada demographic and neighborhood data. Together, these resources allow researchers to study congregational change in two large, diverse North American cities using comparable longitudinal and spatial methods.

The study will address several related questions: What characteristics make congregations more or less likely to survive? How do demographic, financial, denominational, and neighborhood conditions shape closure? What happens to religious properties after congregations close? Are they occupied by new religious communities, converted to non-religious uses, redeveloped, or abandoned? And what are the broader consequences of these transitions for neighborhoods and community life?

A major contribution of the project is its focus on net religious change, rather than simply counting closures. Congregations that disappear may be replaced by new congregations, other religious organizations, or entirely different land uses. By identifying both losses and new arrivals, the study can distinguish between genuine religious decline and changes in the organizational or spatial form of religious life.

The collaboration also combines complementary expertise. Stephen Hewko contributes geospatial analysis, large-scale data integration, and machine-learning approaches, while Kraig Beyerlein contributes expertise in the sociology of religion, survey research, and quantitative methods. The partnership further connects the University of Toronto and the University of Notre Dame, bringing together social scientific, theological, and real-estate perspectives on the future of religious properties.

The project will involve collaborative analysis on both university campuses, presentations through workshops and colloquia, and the development of peer-reviewed publications. More broadly, it is intended to establish a comparative framework for understanding congregation closure not simply as an institutional event, but as a process with consequences for religious communities, neighborhoods, urban development, and the changing religious landscape of North American cities.