THE last rites are being given to hundreds of churches across rural Victoria.

Closures show no signs of slowing, with one faith alone having shut dozens of places of worship in the last three years.

Church leaders of all denominations believe a third of all remaining churches in both the country and city will be lost in the next 15 years.

"The bank manager has gone, the policeman, the post office, now the clergy ... the last thing to go will be the footy club," said Anglican Archdeacon John Davis from Wangaratta.

"We are doing our darndest to make sure there are no gaps, but we are thin on the ground in some places," he said.

Forty-four Uniting Church congregations have seen their church doors close across rural Victoria. Most mainstream churches have recorded similar figures.

Most of the church buildings have been mothballed, some have been sold and others used sparingly for fortnightly or even monthly visits from a travelling minister.

In some country towns, Catholics and Protestants are worshipping together in a bid to make up numbers.

Catholic Monsignor Francis Marriott said the Sandhurst (Bendigo) diocese was fighting to keep parishes open but small country churches were being closed.

"There is nowhere near the number of priests in the country but we deploy them differently to keep the parishes serviced, even if it is irregularly," he said.

Monsignor Marriott said many of the struggling churches were "horse and buggy distance", a hangover from settlement, and did not have a congregation to support them.

He said the bigger country centres "were holding their own" but at the expense of the smaller outlying towns.

He blamed drought, then flood, and even uncertainty caused by the proposed Murray-Darling Basin Plan as reasons for the shift in rural populations.

Moderator of the Uniting Church's Synod of Victoria and Tasmania, Isabel Thomas Dobson, said the closures were far from finished.

"We are doing a lot of planning of how ... we can continue to support these rural communities," she said.

Presbyterian Church of Victoria assembly clerk John Wilson said efforts were being made by city congregations to subsidise struggling country parishes, with the fall in the number of farms and farm jobs having hit the latter hard.

"Machinery has taken over many men's jobs and the prolonged drought has robbed farms of productivity," Mr Wilson said. "Many young people who move to the city for post-secondary education and employment never come back home."

Lay preachers plucked from local communities are filling in behind the pulpit to keep some services going. Churches are having problems luring theological graduates to move to the country, mainly because the small country congregations often also means collections are also small.

Church officials said the closures were symptomatic of a major rural population shift, particularly to the large regional centres.

Archdeacon Davis said the large number of small country churches reflected the population levels of a different time when there were more farm workers and more intensive agriculture.

One Mallee church leader, who did not want to be named, said many churches were like silos along the highways, built for a different time when transport was horse and cart.