https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers
I've known several atheists/agnostics that go to both locally and the few times I've gone to either the meetings tend to be quite low in dogma. Not my thing, but if you crave that sort of community might be worth taking a look.
Meeting decisions have to be unanimous. It's a real source of frustration at times trying to convince the last holdout.
Instead of a minister, they have a clerk. The clerk is elected and coordinates the church for a year.
Before we were married, we had to meet several times with a clearance committee that had to say that we were ready to marry. I understand many ministers do something similar but this was a great thing. One of the members said it used to be a way that parents could stall a marriage - things were different 200 years ago with teenagers wanting to get married. (My wife and I were 33 and 39.)
I remember reading an article about calling "root" "clerk" as a way to deter your boss from asking for root privileges.
Participating in a healthy church is way too much work if all you get out of it is the community benefits. Healthy churches:
* feed and clothe people
* take care of the abandoned people in society (foster kids, shut-ins, people with personality disorders, the homeless, people with immigration problems, addicts)
* talk people into apologizing to each other (yeah, like your mom and her sister after all these years)
* educate themselves about local issues (homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.) with a mind towards helping somehow
* mentor and provide structure for prisoners and ex-prisoners
* are involved in global relief... they've been doing charity-water-style projects for millenia
* do all the normal boring stuff involved in maintaining and funding an organization with facilities
* do intense critical analysis (including studying dead languages) of the Bible and related resources
* provide educational opportunities to underpivileged children
* put on an 90-120 minute A/V production once a week
* provide huge amounts of child care services, including background checks, training, instilling best practices to ensure safety of children, etc.
* provide therapy for people that need it (techniques here vary a lot but every church does it somehow)
* provide mentoring and care for people entering new life stages (newlyweds, new couples, divorcees, recently widowed, etc.)
That is to say it only makes sense to explore if you are interested in God. If you aren't, consider looking for something else and good luck on your journey.
Yes, there are people (many of them) who just show up sometimes for the A/V portion of the weekend, but that's pretty much missing the point. Unsurprisingly, they tend to have a rougher time 'getting' the whole church thing.
I've heard good things about Unitarian Universalist churches.
I know there's plenty of meetup groups, for example, that have a hard time finding spaces that can host 40 or more people at a time, that doesn't cost like $50 to reserve ahead of time or have to be reserved almost a year in advance. I've been wanting to do a meet and greet for my group for months and haven't been able to find a good space for it.
Also, as far as I can tell, there's not really a marketplace for these kind of "single-day activity space" rentals, so I mostly trawl through Cragslist and pound pavement looking for HOA clubhouses and cheap hotel conference centers. There's your next start-up idea: AirBNB for temporary office space on the weekend.
In the burbs there is an entire division of the govt called "parks and rec" or whatever and I live far from the coasts in an area with a hyperactive parks and rec dept. All you need do is convince one parks and rec functionary that you should run game night and you've got your choice of parks and rec owned rooms for free. If you can't convince them, then you get to pay rent which is of the $100 class you mention and the city self insures.
There are issues, like no dogs or alcohol in the parks and park facilities. And there are first come first serve issues, you are not getting the pavilion on monday nights because thats projection screen movie night, tuesday nights because thats free cover band night, thursdays are free community orchestra concerts, and every friday night the streets are blocked off for a block party. Aside from festivals and holiday events. Of course that's just one busy park, but wednesday nights are open right now.
With respect to "things to do" the problem is defining things to do. If thats defined as drink until 2am and throw up in the street and take some beer googled person home, thats fun but its city only and nothing to do in the burbs. If you want to play a different intermural parks and rec sport every night with the general public in organized games, or have what boils down to club meetings or block/street parties or park concerts or festivals for the heck of it, there's nothing like that to do in the city because corporate has priced the recreation out, yet the burbs are incredibly active, because the burbs are where sober people go for fun. Recreational tree climbing, Adult tae Kwon Do, Learn to Kayak, every sport imaginable...
Only pavilion I'm aware of is at the local arboretum, and it's $12 a person just to get inside there.
I will look into it, though. I also tried to get rooms at one of the local libraries, but they kept saying their rooms could only handle about 25 people. Last meet and greet we had, 45 people showed up (it was at a local coffee shop that has since gone out of business).