Experts project an estimated 100,000 churches in the US will close or be repurposed over the next decade.
Many churches will be unable to escape this “tsunami” of closings — a grim trajectory one pastor described as, “Every year the pews are getting emptier and the collection plates getting lighter.”
uplifting news!
Hell yeah
Jesus never went to church.
…ok
is this still true of the mega churches?
Repurpose them as community centers
I have been thinking for a while that so so many of these churches sit on prime real estate that they would have to give up if they actually had to pay property taxes. Same with cemetaries. Like, you got acres of land sitting in my city where sfh go for millions of dollars.
Younger folk see the grift.
A lot of older folks, too. A lot of people used to go to church for the social aspects, but today, everything is about grifting more and more money, and people get tired of constantly being tapped for money.
Also, a lot of people don’t like their church ordering them to vote for evil pedophile traitors, or they’ll go to Hell. The first time my pastor told me that I had to vote for Trump, would have been the last time he ever saw me.
But that didn’t happen to me, because I know better than to welcome Zombie Cannibal Death Cults into my life.
IIRC, it’s mostly that mega-churches are taking over.
It’s the smaller (ostensibly) community focused ones that are dying.
The bigger the grift the closer to god - or something like that
My wife’s is one that is. They’ve got no new blood coming in and a pastor that was intentionally sabotaging them, driving their most dedicated and supportive members out. No attempts at community outreach or retention. Also our state conference literally cares about money more than the god they supposedly serve.
They just got told that they can either sell the church and parsonage, keep some of the money from its sale to bring to the church they’ll merge with, or the conference will shut them down, sieze the property, sell it, and force them to merge with the other church anyway, but without the money.
It’s no wonder people have been bailing for decades. Totally sounds like something worth being a part of and associated with, right?
Reading between the lines in the article, it’s the more agreeable ones that are closing. Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, to some extent Catholics. The ones that are thriving are your batshit insane Baptist, Evangelical, Pentecostal types. So don’t get too excited from the headline, the worst of Christianity will always survive.
They’ll become less and less mainstream hopefully. Get the assholes out of schools.
Churches should pay taxes like the rest of us.
Let’s start with billionaires. Then work our way down.
Por qué no los dos?
Because as it is we can’t even do one.
I figure let’s tackle billionaires to gain some momentum.
Churches are literally billionaires hiding behind Jesus
No kidding. Where I live in the Midwest that isn’t particularly religious, most churches have like an insane amount of labs they’re not using. Tax them to the ground.
God is dead and we have killed him
Well, we created her in the first place, so it seems appropriate.
In the words of the Prophet Reznor, “Your god is dead, and no one cares.”
I want to buy up a megachurch and turn it into a to something that serves everything the Victorian bullshitters despised.
Over here, an abortion clinic. And here we have the needle exchange. On the east end there’s a gay bar and sex dungeon in the basement. (We didn’t really have to make a lot of changes to the basement.) second floor is a children’s library (it was important we placed that one as far away from the basement as possible since….well, trauma from the previous tenants). Psychotherapy is offered on the weekends. In the annex we have a furry menagerie and then the grey room.
In the field out back we have a solar array and charging stations in the parking lot. We also added a bus stop here so those without cars can still come in for low-income food assistance on sundays.
What’s the grey room? Oh it the most sinister room of all. All the complaints we receive from Christians are fed into a paper shredder. Their phone calls also just go to a speakerphone in that room. Nobody mans the grey room. It’s where Christians BS gets ignored entirely.
I love your idea. Please make room for a Planned Parenthood clinic.
EVERY LIFE MATTERS!! I mean, I don’t want any of them, and I don’t care where they go as long as they’re born and it’s someone else’s responsibility. /S
Around my area megachurches are just in industrial buildings. Its not tough to imagine a small manufacturing shop replacing any one of them.
The church putting its weight behind Trump has turbocharged its own demise. Good fucking riddance.
The churches that put their weight behind trump are doing perfectly fine. The churches that are dying are the moderate churches that focus on traditional church stuff, helping neighbors, that type of thing. Megachurches that preach killing gays are doing great.
Trump is only about as unpopular as Bush was in the last couple of years of his presidency. The church also put their weight behind Bush and they seem to have survived.
“dire” forecast? I couldn’t think of anything more optimistic than church closings.
In my rural hometown a Christian church, whose small building was the model of old-timey church architecture, closed and sold the property to some kind of glass artist who lives there and uses it for a studio. Huge improvement and a boon for the arts.
Near me in the PNW a small off-brand Christian church shut down about 5 years ago and the building, which is modern and ugly, was converted to a homeless shelter for people with chronic diseases. It’s hard to think of a more socially-positive conversion and it always warms my heart to walk by there and say hi to any residents who happen to be about. You can tell how grateful they are to have a roof overhead. This whole region is peppered with tiny Xian churches and the sooner they’re bankrupt and converted into something pro-social, the better.
