In a largely deforested landscape, thousands of small pockets of indigenous forest remain in Ethiopia’s northern highlands. These “church forests” are maintained by Ethiopian Orthodox church communities, and they serve as striking examples of centuries-old religion-based natural resource management institutions. Church forests have also received extensive attention in the literature as valuable reserves of indigenous species diversity and ecosystem services both cultural and ecological. However there are important tradeoffs between ecosystem services and community-made clearings in church forests, which provide room for church buildings, prayer spaces and burial grounds. These clearings vary in size across church forests – leading to dramatic variation in total forest cover and edge-to-area ratios, which past research has failed to incorporate into analyses. This paper seeks to establish if changes in clearing size since the 1960s has impacted church forest vegetation density, as well as if internal deforestation can be explained by socioeconomic trends across church communities. Clearing size over time is digitized using declassified 1960s spy plane imagery and modern high-resolution satellite imagery. We then analyze trends in forest clearing change as a function of tree species diversity across a sample of 28 church forests. Finally, we draw on socioeconomic data from the 2011-2014 Ethiopian Rural Social Surveys to examine the impacts of demographic variables and changes in agricultural productivity on the clearing size of over 4,000 church forests in the South Gondar and West Gojjam Administrative Zones. Findings suggest that incorporating clearings into remote sensing estimates leads to meaningfully different church forest vegetation indices. Common factors among church communities with clearing growth include wealth and proximity to roads and markets. Findings ultimately suggest that even as church forests have proven remarkably resilient over the past several centuries, they are now threatened from within – in a process that appears to only accelerate with economic development.