As children, Day Edwards and Emmanuel Brown understood the difficulties involved in serving one’s faith. Edwards saw her pastor mother’s struggles as she built her congregation in Austin, Texas, moving from one location to the next, laboring to cover the overhead and pay rent. Meanwhile, the pressures that Brown’s pastor parents faced tending to their congregation and the needs of their family would stay with him for ever.
“A lot of people can’t handle the stress that many church leaders are under,” Edwards, 36, said.
Such pressures have only intensified over the last few decades. A decline in church attendance in the US was already under way before the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the evangelical research firm Lifeway Research, about 4,500 Protestant churches closed in 2019, with only about 3,000 new churches opening. And social distancing has had a profound impact on religious life in the US. Twenty per cent of respondents to a 2022 Pew Research poll said they were showing up to church in person less often, and 15% said they were attending virtual services more often.
Originally conceived in 2019 by Edwards, who lives in Houston, Texas, ChurchSpace began as a way of utilizing the church she belongs to when it otherwise would sit empty. ChurchSpace, whose motto is “More Than Sunday Morning”, adopted an Airbnb-like model that allows churches to bring in extra income by hosting groups and events at times when they would otherwise be vacant.
Edwards partnered with Brown, 31, whom she met on an LA Urban League Zoom call. The two have raised $500,000 for their venture, including $100,000 from the Google for Startups fund and $125,000 from the Amazon Web Services impact accelerator.
Edwards and Brown’s startup became even more vital as churches struggled to stay afloat during the pandemic. ChurchSpace allowed church buildings to temporarily transform into co-working spaces and meeting rooms – netting participants up to $38,000 a year. The network, which started out with 24 members across the nation, now has a waiting list of churches looking to join.
The four-year-old business plans to redirect its efforts with more targeted partnerships later this year. While trying their hand at things such as a faith-based WeWork-like business was fun, Edwards and Brown said, they found that churches could earn far more by serving as facilities for both restaurants that lost their bricks-and-mortar locations in the pandemic and upstart chefs looking for a temporary base, tapping into the “ghost kitchen” industry that’s estimated to be worth $43bn.
In its next phase, ChurchSpace will also tighten its geographical focus. The network will home in on churches in the Dallas and Houston regions, drawing on the local connections and outreach that Edwards initially made when coming up with the concept. “We’re trying to innovate in a way where the church can have a significant impact, a measurable impact in this community,” Brown said. “One that can really empower locals to do the community well and to live good lives.”
What makes churches such adaptable spaces?
Brown: It’s two things. Number one, when you think about the mass of real estate for this country, there are so many churches – almost 400,000 churches across the US. They are in every neighborhood in every city, every state. So from a real-estate perspective, it’s just so much supply that it makes it a very accessible rental option for just about everyone. I think number two is the diversity of the space. A lot of churches have fellowship halls, and those fellowship halls can have commercial kitchens. They have great event spaces. Some churches have gymnasiums and auditorium-style seating. There’s just this interesting kind of mesh and blend of all these unique-use cases under one roof, under one ownership.
How were the spaces at churches used during the pandemic?
Brown: The pandemic highlighted and provided an opportunity for a national conversation among church leaders to ask themselves, “What do we do with all this space that we have?”
It caused this conversation with pastors and churches to start to think about their buildings as exactly that. It is a house of worship, and that’s really important, and also, it’s an asset that can be shared and can be leveraged.
A lot of innovation is happening in the faith ecosystem with church buildings – some from a real-estate perspective, where people are buying church properties that are in foreclosure and they are doing some development and they’re changing them for more urban-space use and for local community usages.
Edwards: Churches started to realize that, especially when attendance started going down, they have to reach out to their community. It kind of made them more accessible and open to more than just church events and just operating for their congregation. They realized that they have to start making some attempt to connect with their community and to actually see that every church is different because every community is different, and ask themselves, “What is it that we can do specifically in our neighborhood to help them with their needs?”
There are churches that are in food deserts that are going to have different caterers come in and partner with Uber Eats or DoorDash. And now locals have access to different juice companies and organic foods.
Why move away from things like co-working spaces?
Brown: A lot of churches aren’t optimized in terms of their space setup and infrastructure for co-working in a very saturated market for co-working that already exists. For example, someone could go to a Starbucks and set up their laptop and get free wifi.
What we learned about commercial kitchens is that the kitchen space of churches is by far one of the most underutilized spaces that churches possess. So from that perspective, it was a really good fit for upstart chefs who had challenges finding local commercial kitchen spaces. And additionally, for that, we found that there was an uptick in revenue by sharing the commercial kitchen space [with other chefs]. We were able to provide value in a unique way that wasn’t really easily found through competitors.
We still have an events platform, and that’s a great revenue stream for us. There’s a lot of use cases that happen organically on our platform. So weddings, funerals, local events – these can happen without us having to do much work. But as a company, we really want to narrow our efforts on settling down the commercial kitchen opportunity.
What were the most difficult challenges you faced early on?
Brown: In the very early days, like a lot of startups, we did spend a lot of our personal finances to get the business off the ground. I think the macroeconomic environment didn’t help at all, but specifically, the fact that there’s not a lot of capital deployed specifically to women and to Black founders made it extremely difficult.
And pitching and connecting with VCs was challenging because we didn’t go to tier-one colleges like Stanford or Harvard, where we’d have those communities and relationships that were already built-in. Programs like [Amazon Web Services] and Google certainly helped to bridge that gap.
What are the lessons you’ve learned that are going to help you go forward?
Edwards: I think, ultimately, we learned that church real estate is something that’s often overlooked, and we want to change that narrative – change how people look at church real estate, how they connect with the use of the local church.
Our goal is to develop trust between people who are not necessarily interested in your ministry, but they’re interested in your space. I think as founders we’ve learned how to build a company that breeds trust. What does that look like, for a stranger to come into your space and for each of you to trust and support one another?
