At a recent lunch with some fellow pastors, I was asked a question about what kinds of resources would be helpful for me and my church. “Honestly,” I chuckled in response, “if you know of any billionaires who can buy us a building, that would be great.” The other pastors laughed along—at least one of them was in the same boat.
We planted our church three years ago and, as many church planters in certain communities know, space is the perpetual issue. Where are we going to go? Will it have everything we need? How much does it cost? And, will we ever be able to buy anything? Our story is not unique, and frankly, it has not even been that challenging for us compared to other church plants. We planted in East Nashville, a densely populated, urban community that stretches a few miles outside of downtown. East is a thriving, artistic, diverse community: Picture something as close to urban expert Jane Jacobs’s ideal as you can find in the South. It is also secular, increasingly post-Christian, and growing ever more expensive by the year.
For the first year of our church’s life, we gathered on Sunday mornings in an elementary school. We bumped along, setting up and tearing down each Sunday morning, storing our belongings in a $2,000 motorcycle trailer that lived in my backyard for the rest of the week. After a year, we were able to rent space from a dying mainline church just a mile up the road from the elementary school. During our two-and-a-half years there, God blessed us immensely. Our size nearly tripled, we baptized many young adults, we raised up new leaders, and we ministered to our community.
About a year ago, we began conversations with an older church in our community about the possibility of merging. From all appearances, it should have been a slam dunk: same denomination; one church growing in need of a building, the other shrinking with more building than they can handle; one church reaching the neighborhood now, the other having reached and served it well decades ago. Sadly, after 11 months of work, the merger failed. Later that same week, we learned that we had until the end of the year to leave our space.
This landed us back where we started: listing potential locations on a spreadsheet. The difference? There are fewer options today than there were even in 2021.
Finding sacred space for church gatherings in the city is increasingly difficult. It’s not a problem unique to us. And it’s not a problem that can be solved without a multi-pronged approach. Cross-denominational, cross-cultural, and cross-generational cooperation, hard work, and God’s grace are necessary to move toward a solution. Below, I make suggestions to four parties in hopes that we can start a conversation about solving this problem.
To Dying Churches
Our neighborhood—and others like it—is spotted with church buildings erected in the early or mid-twentieth century. Some are large and beautiful, having once housed hundreds of worshipers every Sunday. Most are now concert venues, co-working spaces, bars, bed-and-breakfasts, or other businesses. How did this happen?
Among other reasons, it happened because dying churches lost their vision.
Somewhere along the way, some dying churches began to believe their legacy was more important than future ministry. They began to believe that it was wiser to sell their building to a developer than to give it to another church or denomination. (To be clear, denominations may be just as at fault here as dying churches. In our city, I’m aware of a large mainline denomination selling a dozen or more church buildings to developers and business entities in the last decade, neglecting the number of growing and unhoused evangelical church plants.) They began to believe it was better to try to replant with the millions of dollars they received from a developer rather than simply to give the property to an already growing and thriving church.
Declining and dying churches need both clarity and vision. They need to know when they’re dying, and they need to determine what they’re going to do with the time and resources they have left. Leaders of declining churches need to have the courage to say, “God has used our church. We have not been a failure, but a great success.” My plea to dying churches is this: Use what you have not primarily for the sake of your church, but for the church.Ask not, “How can we best preserve our legacy?” But rather, “How can we best promote gospel proclamation and disciple-making in this community in the future?”
In our part of East Nashville, I can think of at least three growing evangelical churches, planted this century, that do not have buildings. I can also think of nearly a dozen sizable buildings belonging to historic-but-dying evangelical or mainline churches. What will become of both parties? My prayer is for a large outpouring of generosity for the sake of the kingdom.
To Wealthy Christians
Toward the end of 1 Timothy, the apostle Paul gives specific admonitions to the rich:
Instruct those who are rich in the present age not to be arrogant or to set their hope on the uncertainty of wealth, but on God, who richly provides us with all things to enjoy. Instruct them to do what is good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and willing to share, storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of what is truly life. (1 Tim 6:17–19 BSB)
One way to be “rich in good works” would be for a group of wealthy Christians to come together, pool their resources to purchase historic church buildings, and hold them until the time that growing church plants can fill them.
Barring a miracle, our church will never be able to buy a building in this part of this city at market value. But a group of wealthy Christians could. They could fill the gap and compete in the market when a normal church could not.
Absent something like this happening, what will be the future of sacred space in a city like Nashville? If we aren’t careful, and if we don’t act quickly, more and more church buildings will turn into bars and concert venues while growing church plants sit by with no resources to do anything about it. Just this week a large, beautiful, historic mainline church building was sold to developers. It was one of the last church buildings like this on our main drag in East Nashville, and now ministry will not occur in that building for the foreseeable future. To the rich among us: Here is a way to store up treasure for the coming age!
- Can't finish right now?
To City Leaders and Politicians
One important measure of a community’s well-being is its spiritual vitality. Whether we like to admit it in our secular age or not, cities and nations that are spiritually unwell are generally unwell.
Tyler VanderWeele, director of The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, has demonstrated through his research the significant mental and physical health benefits of regular participation in religious services. A 2017 study from Vanderbilt University demonstrated similar findings.
If this is the case, then government leaders—at the local, state, and federal levels—have a compelling interest in investing in the spiritual lives of their citizens. To be clear, we’re not asking the state to establish any particular religion or even to privilege one religion over the other. We are asking it to preserve the opportunity for citizens to invest in their and their neighbors’ spiritual health through meaningful participation in religious communities.
But what is clear in my city is that, when the market determines the city’s landscape, little or no recognition is given to sacred spaces as such. The almighty dollar is not concerned with spiritual health; one cannot serve God and mammon. And when push comes to shove, without specific, intentional efforts to preserve sacred space, the business interests will win every time. This isn’t only unjust, it’s unwise, and cities will pay an untold price for it in the generations to come.
To Pastors and Church Planters
Finally, a word to my fellow pastors and church planters—rather, three words. First, don’t lose heart. I felt a wave of anxiety after the rush of learning both that our merger would fail and that we would have to leave our current building sooner than I thought. I felt Paul’s words echoing in the back of my mind, and on top of it all is my anxiety for the churches! But God is sovereign. He led his people out of slavery in Egypt and through the wilderness for forty years. He was present with them and working in them the entire time. He is doing the same for us. Therefore, we do not lose heart!
Second, don’t make perfect the enemy of the good. We want our churches not to be like shiny objects, dulling over time in the pan, but spiritual pillars that will serve our communities for decades to come. As many have said, we often overestimate what we can do in five years and underestimate what we can do in fifty. Merging with a struggling church or moving into a space that needs a lot of work may feel like it would slow things down in the short-term, but there is an opportunity for long-term fruit. Don’t turn up your nose at such an opportunity, should the Lord provide it.
Finally, get creative. I’ve often told young-married couples in our church that “they” may have to adjust their expectations around buying a house in this city. They grew up in the South thinking they would get married and buy a house. Now they can’t imagine being able to ever compete in Nashville’s housing market! Churches may need to make the same kind of adjustment. Perhaps we need to be content worshiping in rented spaces and officing elsewhere throughout the week. Perhaps we need to lean into home-centered weekly programming. Perhaps we need to redouble our efforts to raise up more church planters and multiply faster, rather than simply grow larger. We must use our imaginations.
As is often the case for the Christian, we live in the tension. We don’t know the future landscape of sacred space in growing American cities. It’s hard to imagine a movement of spiritual renewal taking root without some means of housing that movement. And yet, God has done much more with much less. We put our trust not in buildings, nor in the generosity of other churches, nor in the wise leadership of governments, but in him.
Editor’s Note – An update from Taylor:
In the months since I first drafted this article, we have experienced a total reversal of our expectations. We spent three months renting space from a different declining church. They have decided to join our church, and voted to transfer leadership and ownership to us. They have been a perfect example of a church with vision for the future, and we are thrilled and humbled by how God “closed one door and opened another,” as the saying goes.
