This paper presents three churches in Brighton, to explore the combination of religious and secular practices in safeguarding vulnerable churches. The case studies have been selected to examine how, in the face of dwindling congregations, churches have created physical and conceptual spaces that simultaneously allow for worship, community and business use. Selection of the sites was determined by shared geographic, historical and demographic factors. Each church was built to serve a different denomination - Anglican; Methodist; and Baptist - but while the Methodist and Baptist churches have remained under religious stewardship, the former Anglican church is now operated by a private developer, offering a range of secular facilities while retaining the chancel for occasional non-denominational worship. The location of the three churches is significant in relation to religious adherence: the 2021 census returns reveals Brighton to be the least religious city in the UK. In addition, the suburb explored in the paper is populated by a high concentration of university-educated professionals - a demographic group in which religious affiliation is low. All available metrics suggest that the area is likely to have few regular worshippers and yet each of the three churches have been kept alive as community hubs and, to some degree, places of worship and spirituality. New uses, such as those captured in the case studies, inevitably emerge in tandem with the loss of both tangible (building fabric and fixtures) and intangible (worship practices) elements of the church. In its reading of the three churches, the paper explores absence and loss as agentive forces that animate dynamic relations between people and buildings. Drawing from architectural surveys, planning documents, interviews and participant observation, the paper proposes the agency of absence as a valuable critical framework in architectural history and theory.