Church building funds - wouldn't we be better selling the damn building and meeting in a pub?

[morningpaper]

I belong to a local Church of England parish church which attracts about 50 people a week from a potential parish of 12,000 people.

We have nearly £1 million of building work required to keep the church over the next few years.

The existing parishioners are generally old and gradually dying off. But we keep being asked for more and more time and money to maintain the fabric of the building for 'future generations' (I've no idea where they expect these people to rise up from because I am the only woman of childbearing age and am therefore solely responsible for re-populating the congregation and I've only managed 2 so far)

When I suggest that our heritage is too much for us, people are grossly offended. But what can I say? I don't want to keep wasting time and money on a building that will only be in the hands of the church for a limited amount of time. Frankly I think it would be better if we did just sell it to NatWest.

Anyone else in a similar position?

Blimey QoQ, I thought you had flounced.

Our local church is also the community centre,again mainly elderly except for church parade when it is full of elderly and kids (No parents!).
The old church has been bought and the owner appears to be waiting for it to be condemed as it hasn't been touched for around 6 years and is falling down.

Our church has just appointed contractors to knock it down (before it falls down) & rebuild a fab new church with kitchen, sports hall, Junior church rooms etc. ATM we have one large room & ancient kitchen. We no longer fit in room & meet in a local school every SUnday, church used for evenings. Toddlers, Youth groups etc. It is a real community place and alot of the local Muslim Mums come in to the coffee clubs, Toddlers etc and say how safe & welcome they feel.

Our membership is £1M! We already have £650k+ and building starts in next 4-6 weeks

It is a lot of pressure on the members but it is such a blessing to the whole community and we believe God will provide. At a recent meeting a member told of the £1M budget to refurbish the St Pauls Cathedral Organ -we are getting a purpose built building for that - AND tithing 10% of everything we raise to other building type charity projects (so if you know of any...)

Join us in prayers to beat the budget

AND tithing 10% of everything we raise to other building type charity projects (so if you know of any...)

Actually yes I do. Our church hall is (hopefully) about to be knocked down and a brand new 'community' hall built in it's place, it currently provides for all the 'church' groups (brownies, scouts etc etc), toddler group, whist drives, dance class and church coffee mornings etc. But the new plans (once approved for which we need £1200 just to get the 'full' planning permission). Will be used by the local schools as their gymnasiums (local schools don't have great PE facilities), will have a fullsided badminton court on the 'floor' of the hall so will be available for many indoor sports events (our area has been indentified by the Sports Council as an area which desperately needs more sports facilties) and most importantly will have full disabled access.

Whereabouts is your church Bangers?

..........and what is your fundraising target?

I could tell you an amazing story about getting planning permission as well!

our church is in Wellingborough - inital target is £1200 - for the full planning permission (which we're 99.99% confident we'll get as the local residents want the old hall GONE lol). Then about £450k for the new hall (if it's all built in one go). If we do it in stages it'll be about £650k.

Does it have a website? Ours is \link
{http://www.kvfc.org.uk/html/building.php\here}

Our tithe fund welcome applications, but we are supposed to know something about them (explain MN LOL) to put to the committee.

try again!

Dominic: Were you a Catholic? You have SUCH a catholic name!

The Church of England's built heritage is presevered for the good of the nation, rather than for the church itself, so it is reasonable to expect help from outside the congregation.

At the same time, the congregation does have a duty to provide for itself. Why the dwindling congregations? Maybe you church needs a wake up call to do something different to build up the congregation with fresh blood.

My C of E church is growing at a rate of 10 - 20% per year because of our meaningful churchmanship. Consequently, we pay far more than our fair share to the diocese to prop up those churches that do little to evangelise or even self-examine, yet complain that their congregations are literally dying.

Dominic: Were you a Catholic? You have SUCH a catholic name!
Yes.
The Church of England's built heritage is presevered for the good of the nation, rather than for the church itself,

So why doesn't it sell them then ?

Lots of organisations have pretty buildings, own one myself, we don't demand cuts in health or education spending to fund this.

so it is reasonable to expect help from outside the congregation.

You are assuming that someone would want to buy a church building for a price that is reasonable to the Church (ie with sufficient revenue to rehouse their congregation in a modern building without the costly heritage obligations).

Even if a historic church building were sold to a secular organisation, that organisation would still be under obligation to preserve it, inside and out. Who would want to without help?

My own church is valued at about £400k. That's because it's really only of use as a church - you could not buy it and convert it into 20 executive flats because of the listing. For us to find an alternative building, it would probably cost us over £5 million. BTW, we can meet our quinquennial obligations because we are a vibrant congregation. But we usually apply for whatever grants are available from the local authority for repairs to the churchyard.

Church of Scotland has been selling off around here and reaping the benefits! My FIL works in church w/a manse next to it that's worth about £1.5m. and that's just the manse! It's HUGE and I think they'll be selling it as soon as the vicar retires - which is soon - as the big ol' house next store just sold for £1.3m and got permission to be converted into 2 flats.

Oh, sorry, they're called 'villas' when they want to charge people more than for a normal flat .

A manse, vicarage, rectory - they are all dwellings at the end of the day, so have a decent market value.

The diocese sold off our vicarage and glebelands a few years ago for about £2 million. What once housed a family of 5, is now about 60 executive 2-bed flats going for about £350k a piece.

Our vicarage is now an ordinary detached house in a street, costing about £500k. The diocese used the £1.5million profit to do work on struggling churches.

It's a gorgeous manse, sci, but it's truly massive and the vicar has no more children at home. they had two daughters who are long grown and had kids of their own.

This house is also bigger than the one next door, that went for £1.3m, and has a spacious front green as well.

B/c it's listed, whoever buys it won't be able to raze it, but the two other houses on the block have been converted successfully into villas which fetch a good £500K+ each. The vicar knows once he retires the manse will be sold.

It's in one of the best neighbourhoods in town, too.

You are assuming that someone would want to buy a church building for a price that is reasonable to the Church

Close but not quite.
I am assuming that the revenue generated from the building is less than the cost of it's upkeep.

If so, then it's not an asset, it's a liability, and as such, any money at all that you get for selling that gets you out from under it, is from a financial perspective good.
If you need the million quid that morningpaper cites, then it's actually rational to pay someone to take it off your hands.

(OK, I've studied finance more than may be good for me

If the building's activities generate enough wealth then I don't see why other people should pay. The CoE has huge assets in jewellery, art and nice houses for it's senior executives. Don't see why poor people should pay taxes so that they can keep those.

Even if a historic church building were sold to a secular organisation, that organisation would still be under obligation to preserve it, inside and out. Who would want to without help?

Regular stream of churches concerted to upscale dwellings. Most have land as well, things can often be done there as well.

Rather suspect that a few of the prietter abandoned churches will end up serivng the gay marriage market.

My own church is valued at about £400k. For us to find an alternative building, it would probably cost us over £5 million.
Lots of organisations find themselves in that position. Not just buildings. Many people drive older polluting vehicles with bad fuel consumption because a newer car is beyond their ability to raise capital. Even the most simple minded accountant could spot that one coming. When the money it stole from charities was spent, the CoE was basically doomed, though the sheer scale of the the thefts meant that it this would not show for decades. It's a huge momentum to deal with priest pensions, law suits for raped children, and clinging to an architectural legacy that would look out of place on a successful organisation.

As you say, some parts of it aren't fading away, and I expect that in the next 20 years or so the financial stresses will lead to schism in the church.

But we usually apply for whatever grants are available from the local authority for repairs to the churchyard.

That's fair enough ,where an organisation make a facility open to the general public, then some provision for it's upkeep. Churches themselves are not available to the majority of the community, so it's a different story.

I don't agree with most of your assessment - but I'm not going to nitpick them (not because I'm not willing to, but there are too many individual points in one post).

On the last point, however - the Church of England has a unique place within our society and that is that it is available to everyone who lives here.

You might choose not to exercise your rights, but you can say the same about a lot of parts of society. For example, you get an awful lot of childless individuals objecting to paying taxes for children and families, including basic education. Fortunately, as a society, we are not so shortsighted as to bow to much pressure. The same goes for the Church.

As for a schism in the Church of England due to financial pressures, I don't think we are waiting 20 years for the debate to come to fruition. We are acting on this now - at least in my diocese - where the Parish Share system is about to undergo a great overhaul.

The point of view of my PCC is that we should continue to support the weaker parishes in our deanery, but with accountability from them. They have to get their act together to make their services and ministries more relevent to their residents so that they can actually get new people (and their wallets) in. If they don't want to do this, we'd be more than happy to plant a new congregation in their buildings.

The CofE has made loads of mistakes with property and finance but it is, after all, run by people! Individual parishes are not at liberty to sell off their buildings on the whole and they do cost a lot to maintain. It is about weighing up whether the church building is of benefit to the community or not, in many small villages, the church is the only large venue for any event.

There is not 'best answer'. Our church has a 'friends' organisation which has members both from within the church and those who have no Christian believe but want to support the upkeep of the building. They help with fundraising to maintain the church and its fixtures/fittings.

DominiConnor - some church land is used for burials and there are very strict rules about building, digging up, developing etc. Perhaps not as straightforward as it is for some other organisations!

On the last point, however - the Church of England has a unique place within our society and that is that it is available to everyone who lives here.

If you're a Christian, and straight. CoE vicars have even refused to bury christian gays. I do not accept that taxes should be used to fund any facility that is denied to people on the basis of faith or sexuality.

scienceteacher I appreciate that you are in a growing church. However, these are very rare. That is not because the church has changed, but because society has changed. The Church of England lacks relevance to most people. Our parish church used to contain all 600 people that lived in the parish. There are now 12,000 people in the parish and about 50 of them attend church. The way that we worship has not changed that much over 200 years. But we are deemed no longer relevant. The same is true of the Church of England as a whole, and all denominations apart from the Baptist church.

There might be small congregations that will continue to grow, but their growth tends to be in cycles and a lot of people are lost out of 'the back door' over a period of time.

Statistically there is no one approach that is going to 'save' the church of England. We are doomed to be crushed by the weight of our architectural heritage unless we take action.

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We are doomed to be crushed by the weight of our >architectural heritage unless we take action.

The geographical distribution of churches approximates to that of the population's wealth 2-300 years ago. Their fabric is rapidly decaying, and many aren?t actually very good for the basic act of shouting things at people.

Although pubs are far from ideal meeting places, there are many hotels with meeting rooms that are clean and doing very little on a Sunday morning. They have decent audio-visual gear, and unlike many Churches have 100% access for the disabled, including toilets for them.
I would bet you could do a deal where they don't charge the church at all, but the hotel get their money from selling tea, coffee and Sunday lunch.
I've done deals like this. One was hugely popular.

Actually I can't find a hole in that argument, anyone care to have a go ?

The last birthday party we went to hired the sports hall of a school for about 65. Easily could hold 300, and schools are very much nearer where people live.

There must be a dozen or more variations on this theme. Thus the CoE is quite capable of holding services in purpose built premises, albeit built in the last 30 years, not 300. It chooses not to, and that is of course up to them. Tt will hurt, but the right to be wilfully stupid and wrongheaded is perhaps the most fundamental human right.

All churches will need either highly expensive repairs, and of course new ones. Although scienceteacher says a new building is 5 million, typically commercial outfits find it cheaper to build then endlessly fix. Standard depreciation for repairs etc is 10%, and a loan at 8%, and utility bills at (say) 2% make a nice round million quid per year.
Assume attendance of 500 people, you?d need a million per year before you paid the priests, etc. For 500 people that about 40 quid per week per person, even at a 1,000 souls, the 20 quid seems unrealistic.

You are assuming that church only happens on a Sunday morning. That's not what happens in my church. It is in use most daytimes and evenings as well.

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