The reality is that, apart from declining church attendances in some denominations, a lot of churches were built in earlier times when people walked to church. They didn’t have cars.
These days just about everybody drives, so there is no need for a multiplicity of small churches in most cases.
The big churches today are usually in the outer suburbs. As my old pastor said, “If you know anything about church planting, inner city church ministry is deadly. If you want to grow big churches, you go to the outer suburbs where the young families are.”
For example, the article quotes “Buyers advocate Paul Osborne, from Secret Agent, said he had seen **five inner-city churches **from a range of denominations sold in as many months.”
He himself turned around an inner city church from a membership of 10 to about 150, which is about as much as a pastor can handle. But the devil got back at him after he died, and put his man in there to wreck it.
Within six months, that hard won gain of serveral years had been lost. He expected it, as he had an uncanny knack of seeing some future events. His comments was “I think (bugalug) will get hold of this church after I’m gone, and wreck it! But he can’t touch the people!” He was right, as usual. Most of the people left, and went elsewhere.
There were three churches in his parish incidentally, and one of them has since been sold as far as I know. He wanted to sell it way back then, but he had to respect the views of the old time parishioners who’d gotten married there, had baptisms there, seen their kids go to Sunday School there etc. That church wasn’t economic even back then. There are probably a lot of other “unprofitable” church buildings being kept on the roll even now for the same reason.
And when it’s all said and done, a church building is just that - a building.
If anything, I get a bit annoyed with my wife’s Baptist denomination sometimes. Within a short distance from our place there are three Baptist church buildings, with another congregation meeting in a school. As far as I’m concerned, proliferating church buildings are a waste of resources. They cost a lot of money to build and maintain.
In this respect I think the Catholic Church has a pretty good policy. They usually partner their churches with schools, so there are fewer of them and less overhead goes to waste.
