That would be us — average attendance 50 in a building that seats 300+ comfortably. Meeting in our chapel doesn’t work (capacity 50, if we’re over our average attendance we’re sunk). Dividers mess with the superb acoustics, one of our biggest assets — and some of our people have been sitting in the same pew for generations (you know what I mean), so they won’t move anyway. At this point, we don’t have a good solution except to be even more welcoming to whomever comes in — which so far seems to be working, we saw 10% growth in average attendance last calendar year.

But really it’s a huge problem. We have a gorgeous neo-Gothic building that we don’t want to lose (fortunately we have a big enough endowment that we can keep the roof leak-proof). But yeah, from a practical standpoint we’d be better off meeting in a rented storefront space.

We have so many issues that seem unique to our congregation, though I doubt they are. Space is a big one. We were blessed with a large building donated to us, but its a mixed blessing at times, for all of those reasons you stated above.

At times it feels like we are barely floating along, and our key volunteers might sink at any moment. Sometimes I wonder if it is worth it at all, but then something always happens to show that it is very worth it.

Anyway, from one member of this tiny congregation, thank you.