On a recent Sunday, a mom and her three children showed up a little late for the morning service as they’d just finished a soccer game.

It wasn’t the lateness that the pastor at Ridgefield-Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Maggie Goodwin, said she noticed.

It was that the family had come at all.

“There is no shame in coming in late. I appreciate that she came anyway,” Goodwin said. “I want them to feel welcome.”

Rabbi ​Maralee Gordon, of the ​McHenry County Jewish Congregation, said sports in place if religious services was something that her congregation, which typically meets on Fridays and Saturdays, has always dealt with.

Jewish temples often hold youth religion classes on Sunday morning, Gordon said. Sunday mornings were sacrosanct – nothing else was scheduled as families were in church. But not anymore.

“Sports have taken over for religion, in terms of kids,” Gordon said.

It used to be that Wednesdays were also a no-go for events.

“That when the Catholic church had after-school religion classes. Sports stayed away from those days ... but that has changed,” Gordon said.

Whether it is due to family schedules or a myriad of other reasons, there are fewer Americans going to regular religious services than in past decades, added Dave Becker of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation. But that doesn’t mean they are not looking for spirituality, either.

“There are now ways to explore and express that outside of Sunday mornings,” including online services and focusing on other areas of ministry and purposeful faith, Becker said.

Those considerations are just some of the reasons three area faith groups – Presbyterian, Jewish and Universalist – are now sharing one building, the Ridgefield Presbyterian church.

The McHenry County Jewish and Universalist congregations have a long history together. They shared one building back in 1979, when the first group of Jewish families started meeting locally and before the congregation purchased its own building.

Then, when the Jewish congregation decided to sell that building outside Crystal Lake, they moved in with the universalists in McHenry in 2024.

Soon after, the Universalists decided they could no longer support their building either and decided to sell it, Becker said.

The Jewish congregation started meeting at the Ridgefield church in December. The Universalists held their first services there on May 10.

So far, it’s working.

Goodwin was recently hired as pastor of the Ridgefield Presbyterians; her first Sunday was Feb. 8. But it’s not her first time sharing a building. In a previous role, she was pastor of two different congregations while renting space to a third.

She’s noticed something about sharing facilities with other faith communities, Goodwin said.

When two different Christian churches share the same space but have different faith backgrounds and theologies, the groups can see each other as “not Christian enough,” Goodwin said. That attitude can cause tension between the faith communities and make sharing spaces – often the original church building of one of those sides – more difficult.

“We are a progressive church with a full tradition of LGBTQ support,” Goodwin said. “We have certain values that make it a lot harder to get along with some other Christian churches.”

That is something the three congregations have in common. All three cite social and progressive issues as important to them.

But like denominations across the U.S., the three have also seen attendance slide. As fewer Americans attend regular religious services, it’s becoming more common for different congregations to share one building. According to the website studyingcongregations.org, over half of U.S. congregations are sharing their space with at least one outside organization.

The website peerspace.com allows outside groups to rent meeting space in, among other locations, neighborhood churches. At a recent regional meeting of Presbyterians, every pastor there said they had to close at least one church in recent years, Goodwin said.

But giving up on a building – be it a church or a temple – is hard, Becker said.

“We were putting a lot of emotional and financial energy – time and resources – into maintaining a building as it became less and less realistic," said Becker, who also serves as pastor of Grayslake’s Prairie Circle Unitarian Universalist Congregation.

The Ridgefield church had space.

“We had several extra Sunday school classrooms that could be put to a better purpose,” Goodwin said. Monies from rent will not go to bills, but to their mission and outreach projects, she added.