Steeples were designed to point to God.
The concept of architecture reflecting theology and meaning is a relic from antiquity. The architectural elements of a classic church building are part of a centuries-old word picture summed up in the word “church.” “Church” symbolizes a world of benign meaning embedded in the global consciousness as a mess of overlapping, dissonant concepts about buildings, people, architecture, theology, religion, morality, place, and institution. The current state of church properties is both an indicator of, and a contributor to, the waning effectiveness of the vision and mission of American Christianity.
In making the case of keeping church property missional, this is where we must begin.
The language of church architecture may still speak to us, but its lofty message rings inauthentic in the imagination of most Americans. The very public ills of the church have caused the word picture to be corrupted. Rather than pointing toward God, people within the church perceive church real estate assets as a burden.
Does It Matter What Churches Become?
The idea of missional remaining missional stands in stark contrast to the profit-oriented uses of most commercial real estate. In markets where developable land is scarce, underused church properties represent lucrative opportunities for property sales and redevelopment. From the business perspective, if churches are in possession of an abundance of underused real estate, then churches should sell these assets and let the commercial interests find new ways for these properties to realize their “highest and best use.”
According to the Appraisal Institute, four qualifications determine highest and best use: legally permissible, physically possible, financially feasible, and maximally productive. The Appraisal Institute, commercial real estate professionals, and every good capitalist would argue that these qualifications are objective.
Churches must take a different approach to assessing the highest and best use of real estate. The first three qualifications are necessary for the proposed use of every commercial property. However, to determine the highest and best use of church-owned property, the qualification of “maximally productive” must be driven by the church’s mission. Highest and best use of church property must begin with the question, What maximally productive use of this property will best advance the mission of the church?
Businesses in the real estate industry must prioritize profit over everything when determining maximum productivity of land. Churches, nonprofits, and other organizations that prioritize mission have a fiduciary responsibility to make sound financial decisions and manage their organizations with exemplary fiscal integrity. However, churches and other nonprofits cannot choose to sidestep mission when making any financial decisions, especially large financial transactions that may affect the organizations for decades. When considering the sale, purchase, development, or repurposing of property, a church must answer the question, Does the intended use optimize the potential of the land? through the lens of their stated mission.
This is not a matter of preference or opinion but of law. To incorporate a nonprofit organization and to secure tax-exempt status from the federal government, an organization must declare in its corporate documents that advancing a mission, not generating profits, will be its primary activity. Every organization seeks to end the fiscal year with a surplus, but missional organizations must evaluate performance based on the effectiveness of the advancement of their mission.
For church leaders to assess the use of property in this way is not dismissive of the accumulated knowledge of the Appraisal Institute and the highly skilled professionals in the commercial real estate industry. It is not to claim that the industry is wrong in its manner of determining highest and best use. It is to say that owners of property are the primary decision-makers on how their property should be used within the laws of the land, and therefore can and should use metrics or methods that support and advance their purposes for owning the property. For a church to engage in a highest and best-use analysis by overlaying it with its missional obligations is a smart way to use the tools of outside experts while protecting organizational integrity.
Renewing Mission and Vision
Founded in 1853, the United Church of Christ Church Building and Loan Fund (CB&LF) is the first national church-building society in the United States. CB&LF builds stable, thriving communities that live the gospel by providing UCC congregations and other Christian organizations with real estate financing, operational resources, and expertise. In a typical year, CB&LF helps over five hundred church leaders renew their mission statements, discern new shared visions, and learn to fully deploy their real estate assets for mission. Inevitably, some church leaders will argue that prioritizing mission over money is not practical; that a church needs to make money to advance mission or that dwindling church revenues must be approached as a financial problem. Should these legitimate concerns be addressed in this manner?
Church-owned property must be dedicated toward the advancement of the church’s stated mission even when the use is not religious. This is an important distinction that many churches struggle to understand. A church is not restricted to using its property exclusively for worship, Sunday school, committee meetings, community gatherings, prayer meetings, and other uses typically associated with religious institutions. If a church has as part of its mission, for example, “alleviating poverty and promoting abundance for all,” it can make the case based on biblical theology and publicly available information that its mission calls it to help local small businesses create jobs because jobs alleviate poverty and promote abundance. This church can then create programming or launch a ministry that promotes entrepreneurship or small-business development. It can designate a part of its building as a shared workspace rentable at below- market rates for small-business owners. It can host training sessions for business owners with bankers and small-business professionals. It can host an annual business launch contest awarding cash prizes to the businesses that demonstrate the greatest impact in alleviating poverty and promoting abundance. It can use an existing property or purchase a new property, develop it and build retail space leased to local businesses, then take the surpluses from that enterprise to fund other poverty-alleviating and abundance-promoting ministry work.
Ministry ideas like those described above will likely create new uses of church property that revitalize the church and foster increased engagement with the local community. One truly transformative church-building project, the Village @ West Jefferson in Louisville, Kentucky, is a prime example of how a church with a renewed mission and a compelling mission can transform an entire community when their property is fully dedicated to advancing the mission and vision of the church.
Highest and Best Use through Missional Redevelopment
The Village @ West Jefferson is a commercial/retail facility built in 2021 by the church-affiliated Molo Village Community Development Corporation on property owned by St. Peter’s United Church of Christ in the Russell neighborhood, directly across the street from the former Beecher Terrace, one of the largest public-housing developments in the country. Prior to the Village @ West Jefferson, there had been for decades no bank, restaurant, coffee shop, or sandwich shop; no daycare center, no health facility, nor other community services in the community. The community had several industrial businesses, but very few of the jobs in those businesses were held by community residents.
St. Peter’s UCC pastor, Rev. Dr. Jamesetta Ferguson, founded Molo Village CDC in 2011 to offer a range of services, conducted in partnership with the church, to alleviate the effects of poverty on community residents. Dr. Ferguson was called to the church in 2007 when the last dozen or so remaining members, all senior citizen German immigrants who had been a part of St. Peter’s for most of their lives, finally embraced the reality that the church needed to change or die.
When Dr. Ferguson reached out to CB&LF in 2013, she led a ministry team of five committed clergypersons with a church that had about fifty members and a budget of slightly more than $100,000 annually. This small group of people was serving one thousand people each week through meal programs, health and nutrition programs, after-school programs, Alcoholics Anonymous, services for Returning Citizens, senior citizen programs, mental health programs, and other offerings.
Dr. Ferguson requested a $1 million loan from CB&LF for the most urgent repairs needed for the 118-year-old St. Peter’s UCC worship facility. Suffering from decades of deferred maintenance, the building needed $10 million in renovations to completely re-store it. But the church was not able to afford a million dollars of debt, and certainly did not have the financial wherewithal to take on a full renovation of the building. Even if an anonymous donor would have appeared with a $10 million gift, restoring the St. Peter’s worship facility to its former glory would not have equipped the church for the thriving ministries engaging thousands of local residents in the Russell community.
The St. Peter’s church building was state-of-the-art when it was built in 1895 to serve the hundreds of mostly German immigrants who attended church every Sunday, brought their children to Sunday school, and used the church building for community gatherings. To serve the predominantly African American community now living in Russell, the old mission of St. Peter’s and the former mission-advancing use of the church building were irrelevant. They no longer needed a seven-hundred-seat theater-style sanctuary with a balcony, with Sunday school rooms and parlor rooms on two floors to serve the religious, cultural, and community needs of new immigrants. The redevelopment of the Village @ West Jefferson and the continuing social impact of the work of St. Peter’s UCC and Molo Village CDC are a clear example of why church properties should remain missional. The former mission of the church had served its purpose of creating a worshiping community and a bridge to assimilation for new American immigrants. The renewed mission of St. Peter’s, created under new pastoral leadership, was inspired by Jesus’s core purpose of liberating the poor, creating abundant life for all, and enrolling others into this divine work as explicated in Matthew 28. This mission is centered on ending poverty, creating abundance, and transforming the community that the church serves. This small church demonstrates the untapped potential within many dying congregations in American Christianity today.
St. Peter’s UCC models what can happen when a church renews its mission, casts a transformative vision, and then pursues that new mission until the vision is realized. The redevelopment of this church property would not have been possible if profit was prioritized in the highest and best-use framework. The Village @ West Jefferson is an example of the social impact and financial viability that are possible when highest and best-use analysis is done through the perspective of a missional owner seeking a missional redevelopment.
Even in mission failure, churches continue to generate outsized financial impact in society. If every church renewed its mission and discerned a new shared vision, how much more could Christianity impact society for good? If most missional properties remain missional, could church properties once again point people to God?
For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land. (Jer. 32:15)
