Churches Losing Their Sanctuaries
The lead-in from today’s Wall Street Journal, Churches Find End is Nigh:
ROSEVILLE, Calif.—Residential and commercial real-estate owners aren’t the only ones losing their properties to foreclosure. The past few years have seen a rapid acceleration in the number of churches losing their sanctuaries because they can’t pay the mortgage.
Just as homeowners borrowed too much or built too big during boom times, many churches did the same and now are struggling as their congregations shrink and collections fall owing to rising unemployment and a weak economy.
The article is informative, but badly titled. The loss of a building is not the end of a church. Fortunately the final quote in the article makes this statement.
This is not a very well written article. The facts are that there are over 335,000 churches in America. If only 200 have been foreclosed since 2008 that fractional number is minute. One church is sad but to extrapolate from this very small pool of foreclosed churches that a “surge” is occurring or is about to occur is to hyper inflate the facts. On top of this the fact is that giving to religion only slightly declined in 2009 according to Giving USA by only 0.1%. Many of these churches that are facing foreclosure are in this problem for a multitude of other issues besides the economy. For another view on this go to www.http://TheCharisGroup.org/blog
Very true. The church is the people. Not the place.