(Image source: BlackEnterprise.com)

Smoke City: A Question on Sacredness

In East Coast cities, stoops are the small sanctuaries of urban life—thresholds where people pause, exchange stories, catch their breath, or simply exist between destinations. At one historic Black church in Washington, D.C., the stoop has earned a different kind of reverence. A longtime neighbor calls it “Smoke City,” a place where people gather throughout the day and night to sit, smoke, and linger. Plumes of smoke announce when people have congregated on the stoop.

Most of the smokers do not live on the church’s block. According to neighbors and church members, some seem to come on foot while others stop by after riding the city bus. It’s not quite loitering and not quite fellowship. It’s something in between. The smokers do not cause a disturbance, exactly. But they are not the vision many neighbors once imagined for this corner, a block that used to feel like “a suburban street in the middle of the city” with plentiful parking and a lighter traffic flow. Now that street has turned into a “speed racing” corridor with bike lanes and few parking spaces.

The neighbor who coined the phrase “Smoke City” explains that, while people on the steps don’t bother her, she preferred when there weren’t random gatherings there, and says, with a shrug, “it’s a church, so…” Her meaning was clear: churches are widely understood as places that must remain open, welcoming, and accommodating—even when that openness creates discomfort. To object too strongly would risk appearing inhospitable, or worse, opposed to the very purpose of a church. This unspoken assumption shapes not only how neighbors view the stoop, but how church members do as well. Congregants frequently ask themselves how to balance hospitality with care, welcome with stewardship, and sacred space with visible boundaries.

The Smoke City church stoop is not simply about who gathers on the steps of a house of worship. It is about how people reimagine and repurpose sacred space in real time—through visibility, neglect, care, and ambivalence—when a historic Black church sits on a prominent corner of a neighborhood that is changing around it.

Today, the congregation gathers roughly two dozen people in the sanctuary on Sundays, with another fifteen to twenty joining online. The pastor’s compensation comes from modest tithes and denominational support, an increasingly common arrangement among historically Black congregations with aging and geographically dispersed members. Indeed, this church’s story unfolds within broader transformations in Black religious life. Across the country, Black congregations are navigating declining attendance, suburban migration, generational shifts in affiliation, and the lingering effects of COVID-19. While Black Americans remain among the most religiously committed groups in the United States, regular participation has steadily decreased in the twenty-first century, especially among younger adults. In rapidly developing neighborhoods, rising property values and demographic turnover intensify these pressures. The Smoke City church is not an outlier. It is part of a wider reckoning within urban Black religious life.

As these transformations unfold, communities must decide what to preserve, what to release, and what to reimagine. That is the situation facing the Smoke City congregation.

As a Black woman professor whose research centers religious congregations and their community impact, I came to this block in Washington, D.C., not simply to document decline, but to study how people envision, contest, and care for sacred space when institutional presence no longer matches its once thriving historical legacy. Over the course of a year, as I walked the neighborhood, frequented local establishments, and interviewed congregants, business owners, and neighbors, the church’s stoop appeared to me as a kind of theological threshold: like countless other churches in cities across the United States, it reveals a congregation wrestling with perception and purpose, as congregants navigate who they are called to be when their most visible ministry is no longer happening in the sanctuary, but on the steps.

What is happening on this corner is not simply a story of decline. It is a congregation mourning a version of church life that no longer exists. Behind redevelopment plans and merger conversations sits deferred grief— lament for sanctuaries once filled, for choirs that no longer gather, for constant programming, for neighborhoods that no longer resemble the ones that built these institutions. Indeed, this church is likely a harbinger of what is to come for many others.

Inside the Church: Sacred Community Space

Before I met the congregants, I had already fallen in love with the building. Its stone façade, the stained glass catching mid-morning light, the wooden floor-to-ceiling pocket doors from an era long passed. While the interior was beautiful, it didn’t take long to learn that the building could not be separated from the block around it. The church’s “openness” on a prominent corner allowed for everyone walking past to have an opinion on whether it looked tended and whether people were actually inside. In a neighborhood reshaped by new development, rising property values, and a faster rhythm of foot traffic and commerce, that visibility became a kind of pressure. When mentioning the church, some people responded: “Are they still open?”

Inside, the congregation was already living with constraints that made weekday presence difficult. The membership had shrunk and aged; many no longer lived nearby, and fewer were available to staff the building during the week. And like many religious congregations, COVID-19 accelerated what was already underway.

During the pandemic, when the church was not being staffed regularly, church leaders authorized a contractor to remove a section of a stained-glass panel and install a mail slot inside a piece of wood so envelopes could be received even when the doors were locked. The decision was meant to keep the church functioning while protecting people and property. But the grief it produced was palpable among the members most closely tied to the building’s care. Several elders and long-term stewards lamented having spent years cleaning, fundraising, and tending the sanctuary as an act of devotion and did not want to see its stained-glass cut.

On a tour of the church building, congregants talked about that single cut for almost 15 minutes. They called it “an indignity,” “a scar.” For them, the building is not just a facility; it is a vessel of legacy. Altering it in a way that made it look boarded up or compromised, felt for some congregants, like conceding something about who they were. They worried that passersby would see damage rather than devotion to the building. But the truth, at that time, was that people were hardly ever there.

That’s where the neighborhood and congregation stories overlap: the same conditions that made weekday staffing difficult inside the church also shaped how people outside the church perceived it. When a prominent corner building looks unoccupied most days, neighbors don’t only wonder whether it is open. They wonder whether it is being cared for, whether it is safe, whether it is still a living institution or a relic waiting to be repurposed. In this light, a church with a dwindling congregation becomes, to its neighbors, a building that reads as vulnerable.

And the stoop became the surface where these pressures billowed, because it is one of the most accessible parts of the property. It is where the boundary between public and sacred overlap without anyone naming it as “ministry.” When people gather on the steps, neighbors read it as loitering or neglect, but congregants read it as an act of stewardship and safety. Meanwhile the stoop signals how open the church has become, even when it is largely closed.

Emotional Architecture: The Building as a Living Being

During a listening session I conducted with the congregation, one member described the years he spent cleaning the building alone on Sunday mornings and tearfully whispered, “You don’t hurt what you love.” He was expressing his frustration that others were not as attentive to the church’s care. For him, neglect was not logistical. It was relational. The building could be hurt.

What struck me most during my year with the congregation was not deferred maintenance or stalled zoning conversations. It was the “emotional architecture,” the invisible set of memories, fears, affections, and obligations that hold the building upright.

Another member, reflecting on the congregation’s time away during the pandemic as well as after water damage repairs, said, “She was sick. She needed rest. She needed help.” The building was always “she.” Always animated. Always beloved, even when crumbling.

For many elders, this building is an ancestral home. “The old folks paid for this.” It is not simply property. It is sacrifice made visible. When members recall seasons when the sanctuary overflowed with people and neighborhood children filled the classrooms, they are not merely reminiscing. They are measuring the present against a moral inheritance.

Every conversation returned to legacy. Decisions about fencing or historic designation were filtered through the responsibility to honor what previous generations built. This was not romanticism for its own sake. It was caution. To move too quickly toward reinvention felt, to some, like betrayal.

After my time with the congregation, I began to understand that what was missing was not vision, but grief work. Many congregations like this one are carrying the institutional and emotional weight of a past that cannot simply be restored, while still being unsure of how to welcome what might come next.

Sacredness and Visibility: What is Seen and Unseen

On the street in front of the church over the past decade—and especially in the years just before and after the COVID-19 pandemic—new bike lanes replaced much of the street’s parking, nearby row houses sold for prices that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier, and storefronts shifted from long-standing local businesses to cafés and bars that catered to newer residents.

Despite decades as a community anchor, several nearby business owners had little knowledge of the church. A bartender at the corner bar shrugged when I asked about the congregation: “They’re cool. I don’t really hear from them.” A restaurant owner described church members as being like “my children,” an affectionate nod to years of familiarity that no longer translated into regular interaction. A smoke shop employee, whose business had become a steady gathering place on the block, said he would be open to partnering with the church, “but I don’t know if they want that.”

From both inside and outside the congregation, the boundaries felt muddled. Without regular weekday activity, signage, or outward-facing programming, the building’s stillness was read not as serene, but as absence.

The stoop reflected this ambivalence most acutely. Concerned neighbors didn’t frame the gatherings there as a threat, but rather as a sign of neglect. “It just doesn’t look cared for,” one said. Another worried that the property might appear abandoned—an especially charged concern in a rapidly developing city, where buildings that look unattended are often the first to be eyed by developers or overtaken by wanderers.

And yet, the people sitting on the steps seemed to understand something no one else had articulated: that the stoop was a place of shelter. A place where one could stop moving without being pushed along. It functioned as a kind of third space the congregation had not consciously created but was nonetheless hosting.

And, so, what does it mean when the holiest place on the property is no longer the sanctuary but the stoop?

Theological Question: A Smoke Signal

In my time with the church members, I found that nearly every conversation carried an underlying question, sometimes asked explicitly and sometimes only implied: Who are we called to be, now?

This is not just a question of survival. It is a theological question about presence and approach. In my notes, I wrote: Smoke City feels like a smoke signal. Not a warning of danger, but a sign of unresolved longing—people still want to gather on this block. And the members still want the building. The community folks are gathering where the building is most accessible, even if the sanctuary/meeting rooms are not.

As the neighborhood changed, the congregation wrestled with the pressure to secure the building through fencing and new surveillance. Some felt a fence would protect the sacredness of the space. Others feared it would visually seal the church off from the very ministry opportunities they hoped to rekindle.

Historic designation raised similar contradictions. It would honor the building’s past, but some worried it would compromise their control over the future. “We’ve seen what happens when we give over our legacy,” one member said, invoking the long history of Black properties lost to bureaucratic processes framed as preservation. But their dilemma was not only architectural, procedural, or financial; it was theological. How does a congregation steward sacred inheritance without giving up control? How does it serve its neighborhood while staying solvent enough to survive?

Across the country, Christian congregations are facing similar demographic and economic shifts. Congregations are forced to pursue various adaptive strategies that range from renting out fellowship halls to community groups and leasing spaces to other organizations, to hosting social events, planting community gardens, or converting portions of their property into affordable housing or community centers. In cities with rising real estate values, congregations increasingly weigh whether to subdivide, redevelop, or enter shared use agreements to offset maintenance costs.

This D.C. congregation considered some of these possibilities, but largely remained tethered to their traditional forms of gathering. In fact, during my year of fieldwork with the church, there was little structured programming that translated the regular stoop presence into sustained participation or revenue. Members greeted those who lingered and cleaned the grounds after gatherings. There was care, but no infrastructure to create coordinated relationship-building efforts.

The stoop is emblematic of a broader 21^st century struggle within Christian institutional life. Many congregations retain their moral vision and justice commitments, while wrestling with attendance decline, oversized buildings, and shifting social expectations about church participation. Countless congregations confront the stark reality: people may still believe, still gather, still seek meaning—but not necessarily in the “butts in the seats” patterns that once sustained congregational life.

What this church and many like it reveal is not failure, but cautious discernment in a moment that demands reinvention. The longing for community and relevance remains, even as congregations wrestle with how to sustain that life with limited people and resources.

A Final Word on Fire

Across the country, historic Black churches are navigating the compounded weight of aging buildings, shrinking attendance, and neighborhoods reshaped by gentrification and uneven investment. In response, some congregations have entered shared-use agreements, while others have leased space to companies like childcare providers. Others are redeveloping excess land into affordable housing, merging with nearby congregations, or placing properties into community land trusts to preserve both mission and memory. Still others are discerning what a dignified closure might look like, stewarding legacy through archival preservation or strategic transfer rather than prolonged decline.

These decisions are rarely only financial. They are emotional. Even the most pragmatic strategies are often shaped by unresolved grief.

But this story is not merely one of loss. It is a story of reckoning that presses a sacred question: Who are we called to be, now?

The stoop offers one possible answer. It is not a capital campaign or a strategic plan. It is a threshold. At a time when historic churches are experimenting with new forms of partnership, redevelopment, and community engagement, the stoop reminds us that legacy is not only preserved in buildings. It is carried in practice.

Marquisha Lawrence Scott, PhD, MSW, MDiv, is an associate professor at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Social Work. As a community and religious congregation researcher, Scott has served as a Congregational Data Associate and Listening Lab Director for the Center of Religion and Cities (Morgan State University), as well as a Research Fellow with the Center for Church Management in the Villanova School of Business (Villanova University).