Land values in the city mean a single church building can be worth tens of millions of dollars while families sleep in shelters blocks away. Is stewardship of a sacred gathering space a biblical priority, or does loving your neighbor demand liquidating that asset for affordable housing?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentThis whole debate assumes churches are passive actors just sitting there. My congregation on Staten Island partners with Habitat for Humanity, runs a transitional housing program out of our fellowship hall, and we just approved a plan to build 22 affordable units on our rear lot while keeping the sanctuary intact. We didn't need to be shamed into selling anything. We prayed, we planned, we acted. That's what faithful stewardship actually looks like, and I wish that story got told as often as the scandal stories.
Born and raised in the South Bronx. Our church on 149th Street has been the ONLY stable institution on that block for 60 years. Through crack, through COVID, through everything. You sell that building, you don't just lose a sanctuary — you lose the food pantry, the after-school program, the AA meetings on Tuesday nights, the senior lunches. The building IS the ministry. Anyone suggesting churches just cash out clearly has never needed a church to survive a neighborhood.
I attend a small Pentecostal congregation in Jackson Heights and I want to ask the people confidently arguing for selling: sold to WHO exactly? Developers? The same ones who turned our neighborhood into luxury condos that none of us can afford? You think a church selling to a private developer produces affordable housing? That is genuinely not how this city works. The affordable units disappear the second the tax incentives expire. I've watched it happen three times on my block.
The false choice here is driving me crazy. Nobody is saying SELL THE BUILDING AND WALK AWAY. The actual conversation progressive urban theologians are having is about ground leases, air rights development, modular construction on parking lots, covenanted affordable units in new mixed-use buildings where the church retains the ground floor. St. Paul's in Brooklyn Heights did exactly this. Community Preservation Corporation has a whole program for it. Do some homework before you post.
I moved here from Nashville two years ago and I'll say what the locals seem afraid to: the housing crisis in this city is a genuine moral emergency. Thousands of children in the shelter system. If a congregation of 200 is sitting on property worth $30M and doing nothing creative with it, that is a stewardship failure. Full stop. 'Losing the sanctuary' is not a biblical argument — the early church met in homes.
ok but can we be honest for one second. some of these 'churches' in manhattan are like 11 people meeting in a 40 million dollar building. thats not a congregation thats a real estate holding with a cross on it. jesus literally flipped tables. pretty sure he'd have thoughts.
I used to attend Riverside Church up on 122nd and I can tell you that congregation has been wrestling with exactly this question internally for years. The tension is real and good people disagree. But I get frustrated when outsiders parachute into this debate and treat churches like they're corporations that simply haven't optimized their portfolio. These are communities with history, trauma, resurrection stories. Discernment takes time and it belongs to the congregation, not to Twitter.
My grandmother was baptized at our church in Flatbush in 1951. My mother was married there. I was confirmed there. My father's funeral was there last March. There is no dollar amount. There is no policy argument. Some things are not for sale and Christians used to understand that without needing it explained.
Matthew 25:35 — 'I was a stranger and you took me in.' Not 'I was a stranger and you held a really meaningful worship service in a historically significant building.' Just saying.
Leviticus 25 literally established Jubilee — land returned, debts cancelled, people restored. The whole biblical framework treats land as something held in trust, not owned forever by any institution. If that doesn't apply to a church sitting on Manhattan real estate while families are in shelters, I don't know what Scripture is even for.
genuine question for the 'church should keep its building' crowd — do you think the disciples were worried about preserving the Temple real estate? because that worked out great
Fun fact: the Catholic Church is actually the single largest private landowner in New York City. Not a political statement, just context for this conversation. You're welcome.
Here's what nobody wants to admit: a lot of the churches opposing any kind of development are led by pastors whose personal housing situation is the parsonage tied to that building. Follow the incentives. I'm a deacon. I've been in those meetings. It ain't always pure theology driving the resistance.
Should Christians pray to saints — or is asking Mary and the dead for help straight-up idolatry?
56 comments
Did Christianity give birth to modern science — or did the church spend centuries trying to strangle it in the cradle?
56 comments
Does God choose who gets saved, or do you choose God — and is Calvinism secretly making God into a monster?
55 comments
Do humans have an immortal soul — or did the church steal that idea from Plato and dress it up as Scripture?
55 comments