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Walk into Augustana Lutheran Church in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood on any day of the week and you might mistake it for the neighborhood community center. Seniors attend a memory café in the fellowship hall; a new refugee family meets their caseworker for the first time in the hallway; a neighbor donates new food items to the “Love Fridge”; a local theater troupe rehearses in the library; an inspiring art installation is displayed in the sanctuary—and that’s just on the first floor.
Over 60 community groups use Augustana’s facilities every year on a regular basis, each serving local residents of different ages, backgrounds, interests and needs. Nearly everyone in Hyde Park knows Augustana because it has opened its doors, its rooms, its offices and every space possible to connect with its community. Every corner of the building lives up to Augustana’s mission to be “a place to learn, work, share, find fellowship, and build peace.”
This wasn’t always the case. Augustana is located only a couple blocks from the University of Chicago, in the same neighborhood as five seminaries (including the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago). Many members are in transitional stages of life and don’t stay more than a few years. Apart from hosting Lutheran Campus Ministry (LuMin), Augustana had trouble sustaining community-service programs it started. When Nancy Goede was installed as pastor in 2016, the building was almost empty and the congregation was struggling to keep up with occupancy and mortgage expenses. The members were exhausted, with little capacity to even think about outreach and mission.
Goede and a few lay leaders realized that the key to both congregational vitality and mission impact might be the building itself, that even though the congregation couldn’t provide services to the community from its building, other groups could.
“There was a growing realization that our call as a Lutheran church in this neighborhood was to build partnerships,” she recalled. Starting with Chicago Hyde Park Village, a local senior services organization, Augustana began inviting neighborhood groups to use its facilities for workshops, meetings and other programs.
Word spread, and the church received more requests to use its space. “We didn’t really have a vision at first,” Goede said. “My inclination was just to open up the building to anyone who asked to use it.” That was a big ask for Augustana, which, like many congregations, remembered a few negative experiences with past space-sharing partnerships. But they continued saying yes to outside groups and have seen how that allows the church to serve hundreds, if not thousands, of people each year.
The congregation continues to say yes to requests—most recently to an urgent ask from the Hyde Park Refugee Project to host its kids’ day camp in the building after the planned-on location fell through, just weeks before the start of summer. “It will be tight, but we’re going to make it work,” said Jim Vondracek, Augustana’s parish and facilities administrator. “It’s an important program for this community.”
The parish administrator is largely responsible for coordinating the groups that use Augustana’s facilities. Vondracek estimates that he spends 60% of his time supporting Augustana-led programs and activities and 40% supporting the space-sharing ministry. The congregation realized that it needed to dedicate a large portion of staff time to the management of partnerships in the building—a lesson that Goede hopes others will take to heart. There needed to be staff support for managing both the worshiping community and others who call Augustana home.
“Your building and what you do with it is a tangible witness to the community.”
The attention to space-sharing partnerships has allowed Augustana to expand both its presence and its mission in Hyde Park, and to sustain that mission by creating a revenue stream to maintain the facilities. The church collects $60,000 a year from its partners, who contribute a small fee, much lower than market rate, for their use of the facilities. That $60,000 accounts for 88% of the church’s annual building expenses. With those expenses mostly covered, more of the parishioners’ gifts can go toward parish programming and operations.
Community partnerships can pay off in unexpected ways. In early 2025, Augustana was awarded a competitive grant from the City of Chicago to replace its roof and install solar panels. In its application, the congregation pointed out that the solar panels would benefit not only its 200 members but all the programs and participants that the church supports through its building.
Though many congregations might see sharing their space primarily as an opportunity to increase revenue, Goede advises them to look at it differently. “You’ll make some money, yes,” she said. “But the primary reason to share the building is to partner with and serve the community.” She has seen how opening the church doors has changed the Augustana’s profile and possibilities; now the wider Hyde Park community knows about the congregation and what it cares about. “When they need to call upon a church, we’re there.”
Goede understands the desire of some smaller churches to sell their buildings, but she urges them to consider what they might be losing. “Your building and what you do with it is a tangible witness to the community—what your church is about, what the ELCA is about,” she said. “Our mission is to ‘serve God and serve others.’ The building helps us do both.”
Learn more
- No congregation is alone in this work. Many ELCA congregations find themselves with buildings and land that no longer fit their programming or capacity.
- Congregations looking to embrace the next chapter of ministry in their space can contact the Church Property Resource Hub team with questions or resource requests at cprh@elca.org.
