Over the past few decades, Western nations have witnessed a steady decline in church attendance and financial support, leading to an increasing number of church closures that impact communities both emotionally and socially. As churches shut their doors, communities are left to grapple with not only the loss of sacred spaces, but also the challenge of repurposing these properties in ways that align with their historical and spiritual significance. Although the demographic decline may show signs of slowing here in the U.S., we are still a far cry from experiencing a thriving, vibrant use of church properties.
The closure of a church signifies more than just the elimination of a place of worship. It represents the loss of a community gathering point where generations celebrated sacraments, found solace in times of grief, and fostered deep-rooted connections with one another. The potential loss of social services without which people most in need may be left to fend for themselves. The loss of an opportunity for evangelization through the architectural and physical transcendence of that sacred ground.
This means that it is crucial to thoughtfully grapple with whether and how to close church properties. Community members currently negotiate underutilized church properties in one of two ways: temporarily abandon use of the property to minimize expenses or sell it. But as I will argue, there is a third option: create a new mission-aligned and, ideally, income-generating use for the space.
By approaching these challenges with creativity and sensitivity, there lies a profound opportunity to breathe new life into these properties, while honoring their legacy and responding to the call of the gospel. By taking a prudent, faith-grounded approach in stewardship of church properties, we can respond to a timely prodding from Pope Francis: to find innovative ways to address the financial struggles of the church.
Churches are a Patrimony of Our Faith
No one will be shocked to hear that we are living through a crisis of faith. For the majority of the last half century, Christianity has been on the decline, accelerating in recent years, starkly illustrated by an increasing number of people who report having no religious beliefs. Simultaneously, we are witnessing the (re)emergence of what could broadly be referred to as “neo-pagan” beliefs, a medley of thinly constructed belief systems that group distant and often historically inaccurate understandings of past spiritual practices. Widespread social values prioritize individualism over communal worship.
The upshot of a refusal of Christian beliefs, vis-à-vis a refusal of the sociological implications that Christianity comes with, is that our pews remain empty, and coffers are quickly running dry. Tithing suffers from a decrease in parishioners, while our places of worship dilapidate, placing an even greater strain on razor thin budgets. If we had any doubt about the movement of Satan against our Church, the fact that our churches, the patrimonies of our faith, are slowly turning into major liabilities, should be proof enough.
The hard truth that we must also face as a Church is that our evangelizing efforts need to include new and innovative ways to reach people. Only the Holy Spirit can ultimately change hearts and lead souls to repent and turn their lives over to God, but we can make a bigger effort to make encounters with Christ more prevalent and impactful. Church properties are a crucial part of this effort.
We must realize that just as people are longing for a deeper connection, the world has become adept at selling multitudes of distractions that keep that longing hidden. We inescapably yearn for an encounter with God, a relationship with Christ, to be filled with the joy and manna of the Holy Spirit. But most lack the language to understand that yearning, the space for thoughtful discernment, and the will to dislodge themselves from the attachments that make life comfortable, predictable, and safe.
It takes courage to follow Christ in an age where the sheer idea of God is a laughing matter. As someone who joined the faith in adulthood, after a lifelong attachment to what I would have described as atheism, I can attest to a circuitous and thrilling road of conversion—filled with discovery of the intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church, the historical significance and the moral-institutional relevance of the faith in constructing our society, and the shocking reality of the personal invitation to conversation with God.
But for others, the path to Christ could simply start with walking past a beautiful cathedral every day on their way to work, and one day, when the door was open, to wander in. It could be an invitation by a friend to come to their child’s baptism and an encounter with the aching beauty of the gospel played out in stained glass. Or it could be a family member inviting you to adoration before dinner, where you experience a resounding presence in the richness of the silence.
Sometimes cradle Catholics fail to realize just how weird the whole Mass experience can be to people that have never been to church before. I still remember the first few Masses I was invited to. I had no real understanding of what was happening at the altar, and even less so about the meaning behind it. What kept me entertained were the windows depicting Jesus’s passion, Mary’s surpassing beauty, and the lives of saints. I liken these first Mass experiences to what a child must experience: a sense of wonder and curiosity, without yet possessing the epistemology to describe the awesome mystery of what I was witnessing. The physical spaces in which we worship matter because they draw out our yearning for more; they themselves serve a pedagogical purpose. For people who are steeped in secularism, churches are a constant reminder that faith remains.
Let us also be mindful of the difficult lives of those who are most in need, and the role our churches play to assure some modicum of stability. Across the nation, faith communities play a life-saving role in the lives of people experiencing vulnerability, ensuring that the bare necessities of human dignity can be grasped. People experiencing homelessness routinely rely on a combination of state and faith-run services; given the changing landscape of government funding, faith-run organizations are going to become pivotal for the survival of thousands of our neighbors across the nation. These lifegiving services often rely on church properties.
Further, our churches are one of the few places with open arms—not just services—to the most vulnerable in our midst. Those turned away from other doors, whether from a lack of ability to pay or to perform, are welcome in the doors of the Church. Her pews are a place of rest for all.
It is not just those often left out that rely on the sociality that is offered at our churches. Families, young adults, children and elderly—all people benefit from being part of a community centered around Christ. From spaghetti dinners to summer festivals, from men’s nights to school plays, parish life has more vibrant intergenerational opportunities than anything the secular world has to offer. The community which we offer is enough to pique curiosity, and through that small opening, the Holy Spirit can stir souls into action. But how are we expected to keep the door ajar, to celebrate our community, to draw closer to our neighbors, if we have no places to gather?
A church, in short, is not just a building—it is the accumulation of lifetimes of care, of love, of ceremony, of sacraments. God’s grace has moved inside her walls. Christ’s divine forgiveness has saved lives in her cramped confessional. His Body and Blood has fed generations for the struggles they face beyond her doors.
We Can Be Better Stewards
The quagmire we face as a faith community trying to maintain church properties is the lack of financial resources due to donation shortfall. Our first response is that we need more people in the pews, i.e., we need to evangelize better. And we do. But the hard truth is that evangelization is a Holy Spirit-led process, and not a programmatic one. Even with perfect OCIA execution, there is no guarantee of more resources flowing in anytime soon, nor, arguably, should evangelization be thought of as a method with which to fix our finances.
Yet when we search for ways to fund our evangelizing efforts, our attention turns to the assets we have at our disposal: namely, our churches and other real estate. By selling our costly and underutilized church properties (so goes the logic), we can lower the cost of operating empty buildings, refocus our efforts on evangelization with the income generated, and if in the future we grow again, we will raise the money once more to build things as needed. Of course, this plan depends on being able to convert the sale of assets into more faithful—we have been selling churches for decades now, and the faithful are still walking away.
Selling church properties is not going to bring them back. Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate provides data which paints the picture: as of 2023, we have 71% fewer religious vocations than in 1965, 772,305 fewer people were baptized in 2023 than in 1965, and marriages were down by nearly 236,000 in 2023 compared to 1965. Meanwhile, the parishes without a priest in residence have grown from just over 500 in 1965, to 3,430 in 2023. These numbers clearly articulate a deeper crisis of faith, and our church properties, left empty because of these changes, would arguably accelerate decline if they were sold off, not push against it. Perhaps we should revisit the assumption that we should minimize our costs and retrench our institutions.
What if we frame the empty rectories, convents, schools and churches not as liabilities, but as opportunities to show the world that the Catholic faith is not retreating from society, but boldly solving contemporary issues in smarter, faith-uncompromising ways? How would we go about changing the landscape of the built environment, to capture the hearts of those in our society by living out our faith in practice? How could we leverage our assets to find income-generating ways to fund our ministries, secure funding to renovate our places of worship, and serve those in need?
Every faith community has the potential to make meaningful contributions to solving social problems without compromising on the call. The key is to align real estate assets with their mission. In other words, finding ways that the underutilized properties they own can better serve their neighbors. This is the goal of good stewardship of God’s gifts to us: finding ways to glorify him as we seek to use our resources with prudence, charity, and love of neighbor.
The process must always start with prayer, followed by a thorough understanding of the financial state of an organization. Grounded in thanksgiving, gratitude should lead into honest dialogue about finances. By self-auditing, faith organizations can identify points of weakness that need to be addressed, as well as points of strength that can be leveraged. The next step is to identify the condition and potential use of real assets. Some parishes may have an empty school, others may be operating half empty, others still may have large swaths of land.
Equipped with the confidence of being grounded in prayer, a robust understanding of organizational financial capability, and of the real assets at their disposal, a faith organization can move on to mission selection. In every community, there are people that are in need, and people who are able and willing to help—finding those people can help identify where assets can be used to make meaningful impact. Ask your local Vincentians: are there single-parent households struggling to find resources? Talk to your local Catholic Charities: are there people with disabilities struggling to find housing? See if your school has information on the needs of families.
It all depends on the needs of the community. The needs that surface during the discernment process should be sorted into two categories: needs that the faith organization can solve directly, and needs that others are working on already but could use financial resources to improve, grow, or stabilize their operations.
Housing is a common problem in nearly every community. Paying for housing remains a primary challenge nationwide, and will likely remain the central economic struggle in the years to come. There are many kinds of housing precarity: some experience homelessness, others are rent cost burdened, while elders on fixed incomes face increased taxes and operating expenses from dramatically increased housing valuations. Faith organizations with vacant land, underutilized rectories and convents, and the willingness to work through the development process, may be well equipped to turn their underutilized assets into housing units which could bring in an income while serving people in need.
Many Catholic parishes are in prime locations, meaning that their excess real estate could be used for increased density projects that would yield significant income were they turned into housing. In such cases, where taking on a major development project is financially out of reach of the faith community, mission-aligned stakeholders capable of taking on larger projects could be partners to develop a site as a joint venture or limited partnership. By turning these underutilized assets into income generating products, the faith organization could take the income generated and cover operations, ministries, or supporting those in need.
In short, through innovative real estate solutions, church-owned properties can serve the mission of the gospel while supporting the church's operations. Instead of selling our assets to fund ministries that we hope will bring people back into the church, why not put our money where our mouths are, spending to serve those in need, funding ministries that serve the poor, and creating beautiful places that encourage an encounter with Christ?
The Hidden Cost of Selling Churches: The Seen and the Unseen
We need to address the hard economic truth behind selling underutilized properties instead of finding alternative solutions to their utilization. There is a cost to selling property.
In the market, the value of any real asset is determined by what income it can generate and what others are willing to pay for it. If the income is zero and the property is completely undesirable, then the value is theoretically zero. If a property can keep growing income over time and people are willing to pay anything to have control of it, the value is theoretically infinite. In practice, location, vintage, amenities, even color of a property, can impact value. These are just some of the thousands of inputs to the valuation function that define what is and is not a valuable property. So where do churches fit within this paradigm of valuation?
Churches do not generate income since they do not lease out spaces. Sure, the occasional wedding or Christian denomination renting the hall while they build their own space, technically sells temporary use of the space. But neither are sizable nor stable income. Moreover, churches are designed to fulfill a denominationally specific function and therefore are not easily transferable to other uses. Church buildings also have immense replacement costs. Materials used on historic buildings are largely out of favor, expensive to acquire, and in many cases, we lack the specialized skills to reconstruct these structures. The valuation process is thus going to frame church properties as an inferior type of use, devaluing the asset.
The offers dangled in front of faith institutions can seem large and, in some cases, appear to be a financial lifeline. The figures can leave us with a significant sticker shock. But the price offered is derived from changing the use of the parcel to non-religious use. In other words, the market unlocks value by erasing the church from the built environment.
By entertaining the sale of church properties, we receive the lowest option of income while bearing the brunt of opportunity cost; meanwhile the buyer gets to unlock the value of the asset by eliminating the church building and placing an income generating asset in its place. By letting this process unfold time and time again, we are letting our places of worship be decommissioned, razed, and speculated on for a short-term payday, while others benefit from the purchase of our patrimony.
Safeguarding the Patrimony of the Faith
Shouldn’t we make a bigger effort to gain control over the destiny of our properties? I like to think that such a question was what spurred the University of Notre Dame to start the Church Property Initiative. In helping moderate a panel at their yearly conference, it occurred to me that what we need as a faith community is a specialized firm that can operate within Catholic spaces, bringing commercial real estate practice closer to the mission of the Gospel. I founded our firm, San Giuseppe Real Estate, to perform that exact function. By helping faith organizations identify their needs and assets early, construct plans to support long-term stability, preserve the organization’s mission, and support those in need, we can turn these assets into engines for good.
Instead of sacrificing the physical patrimony of our faith for a quick payout, let us leave space for God to surprise us, to lead us into a future where we do not liquidate our assets, but retain control over the built environment and unlock value to fund ministries that serve our neighbors. Let us be good stewards of God’s assets, and safeguard the patrimony of the faith.
The future of Church properties depends on proactive strategies that balance financial sustainability with spiritual and community needs. To achieve this balance, it is essential for laypeople, diocesan officials, and other faith organizations to explore innovative and creative solutions that protect these sacred spaces while simultaneously adapting to the modern challenges that arise in our fast-paced society. As faith communities, we need to identify our strengths and weaknesses, squarely frame our assets through a lens of stewardship, and lean into the courage that comes with our faith, to be in the world but not of it, to grasp the complexity we are facing by the horns, and through the grace of God, find solutions to our economic and social problems by unlocking and retaining the value of our Church-owned real assets.
Our commitment to good stewardship has the power to evangelize if put into practice. We need to ask the Lord for courage and wisdom to discern what is true, define what is good, and build what is beautiful.
