NEW HAVEN -- St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in New­hallville is confronting questions about its very existence, but it is not alone.

Eight Episcopal parishes in New Haven have been engaged in talks at the diocesan offices in Meriden about their future. Like all of the so-called mainline Protestant denominations, the Episcopal Church is dealing with the decline in churchgoers while many parishes are weighed down with expensive, if beautiful, churches.

"We have until Dec. 4 really to resolve several issues that we have to address," said Lou Campbell, senior warden of St. Andrew's. These include "a deficit that accumulated over many, many years ... and also we don't have a priest so we have to start moving toward getting a priest."

St. Andrew's last pastor, the Rev. Tracy Johnson Russell, left in December 2014 to take a position with St. Monica's Episcopal Church in Hartford.

Since then, the parish has been hiring priests on a week-to-week basis, or holding morning prayer on Sundays, which doesn't require a priest to lead the service. Campbell, who said St. Andrew's has had seven or eight priests since he joined the parish in 1968, said the parish would be looking for a part-time pastor.

The main problem, with "dwindling parish membership," has been paying both the priest's health benefits and property insurance. The parish also had to spend precious funds to bring its property up to code.

"We've done all that work. We've completely renovated the hot-water system," Campbell said.

The consequences of not becoming financially stable and not being able to support a priest would mean that the parish would have to close or at least sell its property on Shelton Avenue, which includes the church and a large parish hall.

"We can continue as a parish with the proceeds of the sale," Campbell said.

The parish will meet June 12 to try to come up with a plan to present to the diocese in December, he said. "I think this is an opportunity for us to get some clarity and have a timeline to address the problem rather than kicking it down the road."

"The diocese will be doing what they have to do to start the process ... and really assisting us in whatever we decide, but it is a decision that the parish has to make."

Teddi Glover married her husband, Arthur, at St. Andrew's in 1948 (his family had been members for years before). She said the parish wants to save the church, which has been a mainstay in Newhallville. Glover said she started the first day care center in New Haven in St. Andrew's hall years ago, but since then the parish has grown older and smaller.

"We have not been able to get the young group involved in the church like we had been," she said. "We have a job to do.

"We want to stay there and we want to build the church and we want to get the youth in there," she said. It won't be easy, but, she said, "I think that we are stimulated enough to know that we have a responsibility to save the church ... and we have to come up with how to do that."

Bishop Ian T. Douglas, bishop of the Diocese of Connecticut, said of the meetings of the eight parishes, "We're actually doing something new in New Haven. ... When we got together we talked about the new times we're living in post-Christendom," referring to the current era when the church has lost much of its influence in society.

While the diocese has ended the longtime practice of subsidizing small, poor parishes (once called "mission parishes"), Douglas said $100,000 has been designated in the diocesan budget "for parishes in communities that are 75 percent of the median income of communities in Connecticut ... and who are current with their bills and which don't have large endowments and are doing effective and important ministry."

Douglas said the parishes and the diocese are "really trying to say, OK, people of God in New Haven ... How do you want to parse this? How do you want to do this together as the Episcopal Church?"

The old model of "eight independent parishes sailing alone is not going to be of the future," Douglas said. But he said it will be up to the parishes to decide how to move forward.

Almost all are in some form of transition, either getting along with fill-in priests or changing from full-time to part-time clergy. Only Trinity Church on-the-Green, which has two priests, and Christ Church on Broadway, which recently named a new rector, have full-time clergy.

"So with all these changes, that's a very opportune time to ask the question ... Who are we, where are we going and how do we want to be the church in that city?" Douglas said.

The other parishes are St. James' on East Grand Avenue, St. John's on Orange Street, St. Luke's on Whalley Avenue, St. Paul and St. James on Olive Street and St. Thomas's on Whitney Avenue.

It's possible that number will shrink, although merging with another parish is "the hardest to do," Douglas said. Each has a distinct ministry, making combining more difficult to contemplate. For example, St. Thomas's operates a school, St. Luke's serves a large West Indian community, and St. James' has a band that plays in the community as well as at services. (The Episcopal Church at Yale, which has an independent board and a new chaplain, is "happy to participate in the conversation," Douglas said.)

"I do think the exciting thing is people were saying, 'Wow, we can actually think in these terms ... and it's actually a liberating change of reference. ... Some parishes might choose to go out of business rather than be renewed in the Easter experience. But that's the choice," he said.

Susan Yates is warden at St. Paul and St. James in the Wooster Square neighborhood, which also runs the Loaves and Fishes food pantry and clothes closet. She said the conversations among the parishes is "an exciting one because we all have big old buildings that are hard to heat and congregations that are not as big as at the turn of the [20th] century or at mid-century, 1950."

The members of "St. PJ's," as it's known, "are in a discernment process to see if they can repurpose part of their building," using the church's large parish hall as "housing for the elderly or low-income housing," Yates said.

"We're looking at whether it's economically feasible, whether it's something people are willing to put time and energy into," she said. The parish has been led by a temporary priest since the Rev. Alex Dyer left to become interim rector of Old St. Andrew's Church in Bloomfield.

Yates said she would be "very, very sad" if St. PJ's closed. "My husband was our warden for 15 or more years. My daughter has known no other church," she said. "There are people there whose parents were married there and many whose families have been buried from there. We've had at least two pastors who've gone on to become bishops, so it's a fine old place."

The Rev. Barbara Cheney, priest-in-charge of St. James (and former rector of St. PJ's), which serves Fair Haven and Fair Haven Heights, said of the city's Episcopal churches, "All are having economic problems in one fashion or another ... Nobody is feeling absolutely comfortable economically and several of us are determining whether we have a future or not, whether it's a storefront or part of our building gets sold."

Often, keeping up old, larger-than-needed churches is of "significant concern because of their affordability," Cheney said. But "we're not duplicates of each other."

Besides leading services, Cheney is the drummer in the parish band, which plays at neighborhood events, including a farmer's market, and "has actually become [St. James'] neighborhood outreach." There were more than 100 children at a neighborhood Christmas tree lighting and refreshments were served in the church hall. Local musicians sometimes will play with the parish band as well.

St. James, which at one time had a large Latino populations, is "trying to get past survival, because that church has clearly been challenged," Cheney said. The previous priest left to start an evangelical parish, taking many of the Hispanic members with him. Now, about half the parish is from the neighborhood, with others coming from as far as Woodbridge and Cheshire, Cheney said.

Of the future, Cheney said, "I wish I knew and I mean that honestly. Right now the congregation is highly challenged and we have walked right up to the edge of leaving the building."

The parish has been helped out by sharing its space with St. Joseph of Arimathea Independent Catholic Church, which paid the heating bill last winter.

"God isn't done with us yet," Cheney said. The congregation "does not have a sense of dispiritedness about it at all."

Douglas, she said, "keeps using the word 'experiment.' Just try something on, just try it on and think of it as an experiment."

Call Ed Stannard at 203-680-9382.

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