In the next decade or two, we are going to see an unprecedented number of churches close their doors.

Unprecedented for North Americans churches, that is.

We know this is coming because we’ve already seen it happen in Europe. Many of their historic church buildings are as likely to be museums, offices, stores, apartments or empty shells as active places of worship today.

These losses will not just be among small churches. In the next 10 to 20 years, a lot of of big and megachurches will be gone, too. Especially those that have been built entirely on the talents and personalities of celebrity pastors.

In fact, it’s already happening. And the pace will increase.

Thankfully, many of those shuttered churches will be replaced by church plants, church restarts and so on. But, even so, when a church does close its doors, we need to do it well.

The church will last forever. Jesus promised that. But that doesn’t apply to individual congregations. History shows us that congregations have a finite life span – as I wrote about in 9 No-Fault Reasons Some Local Churches Close Their Doors.

The decisions about how to come to the end of a church’s life span need to start long before the final “sold” sign is on the lawn. Unfortunately, we have not been doing this well.

We need to downsize better.

Today I want to take a look at this difficult, but necessary topic by focusing on just one area that we could be making much better decisions in – what to do with the physical assets (mainly the land and building) of a dying church.

What Not To Do

There are three mistakes I constantly see being made by dying churches when it comes to property management.

First, the slow fade.

Some call it faith. Some call it hopefulness. I call it denial. Everyone can see that the church is dying. But no one is doing what needs to be done.

The congregation is graying. (This is not automatically a problem, as I’ve written about here). The focus is on the past instead of the future, maintenance rather than mission.

Then the bills start piling up.

Too many churches have lost their facilities and their congregations because they won’t accept the reality that the congregation is at the end of their life span.

Second, the multiple mortgages.

By the time a church needs to take on a second or third mortgage simply to pay the bills, the writing is on the wall.

I’m sure there is some story of a dying church that used the money from a second or third mortgage to buy extra time to figure out how to turn their congregation around, but I’ve never seen it.

Third, the piece-by-piece sell-off.

As with a mortgage, I’ve never seen a church sell off a portion of their land to pay bills, then keep the church alive beyond how long the money from the sale holds out.

If your church has to mortgage the property or sell off pieces of it to pay the regular bills, you’re at the point of no return.

(I almost added “barring divine intervention” in that last sentence. But God doesn’t intervene to fill a leaky bucket. I’ve never seen him step in to save a congregation that keeps making bad stewardship decisions. Jesus told us a pretty strong parable about that.)

There are better options.

They’re not easy.

Some of you may not like me after reading some of them.

But they’re better than the inevitable loss of the church and all its assets.

Here are 6 of them.

1. Give The Property To A Healthy, Thriving Church That Needs It

Yep, just give it away.

Before loading a dying congregation down with (more) debt, before selling of so many chunks that what remains isn’t worth much, find a healthy, thriving congregation or other ministry and give it to them.

Keep it in God’s kingdom work.

Instead of watching your property get chiseled away, sold by the bank, torn down and turned into condos or a mini-mall, you can participate in the joy of seeing it supercharge a healthy, but needy ministry.

2. Sell The Property And Donate The Proceeds

In many situations, the church property is no longer in an ideal ministry location, but is well-suited for other purposes.

If so, the best course of action may be to sell the property to whomever will pay top dollar, then donate the money to effective ministries that can carry on a portion of the church’s mission and passion.

3. Sell The Property To Another Ministry At A Huge Discount

If you can’t give it away for whatever reason (debt payments, denominational restrictions and so on) sell it to another church or ministry for as little as you can.

Near where I live, Teen Challenge owns a castle for exactly this reason (yes, an actual castle – in California!) The castle was built in 1919. After passing through a couple of owners, it was bought by a Christian ministry. When they could no longer use it, they sold it to Teen Challenge (the best Christ-based recovery ministry I know of) for a massive discount off its market value.

Instead of being sold or lost to a bank, it has been used for decades to help change thousands of lives through the power of Jesus.

4. Invite Other Ministries To Share The Use (And The Bills) Of Your Property

When you find other churches or ministries that can use your property during your empty hours, they get a blessing, your church gets help paying the bills, and the property gets used for more ministry.

Plus, after working with them it can become a natural launch-point for giving the property away to a ministry that your church members already know and love.

5. Partner With Another Church As A Multi-Site Campus

If your reaction to multi-site is to bristle about it being a “takeover” by another bigger church, I have three responses:

First, I understand. I’ve seen some predatory behavior in this arena, too.

Second, it doesn’t have to be predatory. Plenty of multi-site churches are truly collaborative. And many are happening from the partnership of small and medium-size churches, not just one big church consuming the others.

Third, even if it is a church takeover, how is being taken over by another church worse than being taken over by the bank? As long as the church is doing good kingdom work, we should be grateful that a strong church is using our former property, even if they do it differently than we did.

This is not the old-school church merger in which two dying churches try to salvage what they have left. That just prolongs the deaths of both. For a church partnership to work, at least one of the congregations must be strong and thriving.

If there’s a multi-site church anywhere near you, or within your network or denomination, sit down and talk with them before refusing to consider it. There may be a lot more good news there than you realize.

6. Close Your Church And Give The Property To A Church Plant

Yes, there will be a lot of churches closing their doors in the coming decades.

But there will also be a lot of new churches starting up.

Probably not enough to make up for the closures, but we can help increase their odds of survival by helping them with one of the hardest aspects of a church plant – a place to meet.

A Good Church Deserves A Respectful Farewell

A dying church that has done good work for the kingdom of God deserves more than to be forgotten or sold off piece-by-piece. If its hard-won assets can be kept in Christ’s church, we have an obligation to do so.

I have a marker on my driver’s license that says I’m an organ donor. If my body parts can be used to bring life to someone else when I’m done using them, I’m more than happy to do that.

Our churches should do no less.

Just as my identity is not in my body, a church’s identity is not in its building – or it shouldn’t be.

The building is a shell, a home, a vehicle. If it can be used by another church or ministry under another name, we should be thrilled to help that happen.

Congregations may die, but the church never will. That's what we need to invest in.

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