One of the congregations I worked with early in my ministry, Saint Paul’s Baptist Church, served communities across Virginia. To keep the church’s mission at the center of everything it did, congregants would recite the mission statement together, in unison, week after week: 

“Finding needs and meeting them; finding hurts and healing them; finding problems and solving them.” 

It has been years since I worked alongside that congregation, but those words still resonate with me. They capture something essential about how faith communities understand their mission in the neighborhoods where they are planted; not as bystanders, but as active participants in solving the problems their neighbors face. 

Today, one of the most pressing problems affecting communities across the Commonwealth is the lack of affordable housing. 

According to a 2021 study released by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, Virginia faces a shortage of 200,000 affordable housing units. That number continues to grow each year, deepening the challenge for families across the state who are simply searching for a safe, affordable, quality place to call home. It is a serious, urgent problem and, encouragingly, one that congregations throughout Virginia are stepping up to help solve, using the most tangible resource they already have: land. 

An Untapped Opportunity 

In 2024, Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy and HousingForward Virginia released a joint study estimating that faith communities across Virginia own more than 20,000 individual properties, totaling over 74,000 acres. At the very moment when many congregations are facing declining attendance and wrestling with questions of purpose, they find themselves uniquely, almost providentially, positioned to help close the housing gap. 

Of course, recognizing an opportunity and acting on it are two different things. When congregations begin to consider building affordable housing on their land, they quickly run into a familiar set of obstacles: uncertainty about whether the timing is right and where to start, difficulty securing buy-in from their own members and surrounding neighbors, challenges lining up funding, and confusion about which developers to trust. 

And then there is perhaps the steepest hurdle of all — navigating a zoning process that can take anywhere from six months to five years to complete, with no guarantee of approval. These uncertainties and challenges make congregations hesitant to start the process, even when it aligns with their mission. 

This is precisely where Virginia Interfaith Center’s work makes the difference between a congregation that gives up and one that breaks ground. 

How We’re Helping Congregations Move Forward 

Resources

In 2025, Virginia Interfaith Center released “Virginia Congregations Building Affordable Houses: A Match Made in Heaven,” by Sheila Herlihy Hennessee, our director of faith organizing. She gathered firsthand testimonials from congregations across the Commonwealth, chronicling both the setbacks and the breakthroughs of their journeys building affordable housing. The publication also includes a practical resource guide, giving congregations a clear starting point as well as trusted references to turn to at each stage of the process. 

Relationships

Building strong partnerships with developers, funders, and other stakeholders matters. But it is equally important to keep the voices of the impacted community at the center of the process. We seek to train congregations in equitable engagement practices and help them create listening sessions where neighbors have real opportunities to share their thoughts and hopes for what gets built. 

Reform
Zoning remains one of the single biggest barriers that congregations face when building affordable housing, with the process often stretching across years. That is why Virginia Interfaith Center led the advocacy effort behind two policy wins passed in this year’s legislative session: one bill gives localities the option to create an expedited zoning process for affordable housing projects. The second bill streamlines the permitting process for tax-exempt nonprofits, including the vast majority of faith communities, to build affordable multifamily housing on their own land. 

Congregations across Virginia are ready to answer the call — to find the need and meet it, to find the hurt and heal it, to find the problem and solve it. But turning 74,000 acres of goodwill into homes for Virginia families takes more than mission and motivation. It takes sustained resourcing: for training, for advocacy, and for the on-the-ground support that helps a congregation move from vision to groundbreaking.