Give Away Your Church Building

Seriously.

In a typically excellent post, Makeesha Fisher questions the niche “ministries” that so many churches have. To which “thinker” responded:

“Just reviewing the twenty plus years of research by George Barna shows a definite trend line that the institutional expression of church is dying. Given a few more decades I suspect most, if not all, will be gone. Small de-institutionalized, decentralized, networked communities of the ecclesia in some form is more likely in the years ahead.”

I’ve been thinking this myself for quite some time. I’ve also been thinking that one of the best ways to bring this about is for churches that own buildings to give them away. After all, if we want to stop people confusing the church with the church building, why not sever their attachment to “their” church building by giving it to others?

Think about the possibilities: Some church buildings could be turned over to the local “church” as it exists in various forms (house churches, outreach ministries, “Third Place” communities, etc) within a certain raidius of the building. Everyone could have use of the office facilities (copy machines, phone lines, A/V equipment) plus the meeting rooms, private office space for counseling, classrooms for teaching if that is what that particular church needed. The building could be used as much or as little as necessary by individual churches, but would likely end up being used all the time in order to meet the needs of the local church.

In other cases, particuarly if there are more buildings than the local church needs, the buildings could be sold with the proceeds going to support the churches and their mission(s). Still other buildings could be repurposed into new Monastic communities/intentional communites, “third place” outreaches, mission businesses, homeless shelters, etc.

So what do you think? Are there too many church buildings out there? Do we associate churches with buildings to the point that we make one dependent on the other? Could different church bodies (even those with differing doctrines and practices) share a building? Are buildings themselves a bad idea?

Inquiring minds want to know.

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