Our Small Church Building Sustains Itself on 200 Community Reservations a Month – Here’s How We Did It
Photo by Susan Holt Simpson on Unsplash
Wonder Anew is a new recurring section of the Church Anew blog, intended for spiritually curious readers who want to explore the Christian faith with honesty, depth, and imagination.
In 2022, my church plant became the owner of a building. This is a big milestone, and typically new congregations like ours would take some standard actions: rebrand every space toward discipleship, paint Bible verses in the kids’ room, mount elaborate stage decor, and so forth.
But our foremost commitment was creating a building that was usable for the broader neighborhood.
Space is a gift given to you to give away.
This was a vision continued from the United Methodist congregation that transferred the building to us (we are also United Methodist, proudly!). They designed the rooms to be intentionally usable to neighbors who aren’t comfortable with a gilded cross mounted to the wall or Bible verses on the paper towel holders.
Four years later, our building has 200 reservations a month, with thousands of people passing through our doors. Documentary showings, protest rallies, 12-step groups, mutual aid circles, and free meals fill our building from sun up to sundown–all of them values-aligned, community-benefitting events that create real Gospel impact, whether or not they are explicitly faith-based.
Further, we have a sustainable maintenance model driven mostly by community members, and the space use fees from the building cover utilities, cleaning, and insurance.
Here are two orientations that helped us get to where we are. Of course, every context is different, and it would certainly be worth double checking with your denominational leader, nonprofit lawyer, and neighbors before implementing any of these ideas.
Orientation 1: Stewardship, Not Landlordship
Space is a gift given to you to give away.
Just like Lydia invited Jesus-followers to her home as an act of hospitality in Acts 16, so too does God gift us space to host others.
New City Church decided that, even though we own the building, we were going to pay for the space we use at the same rate that any other community group would. This policy literally incentivizes us to make sure that we minimized our footprint and made as much space available to the community as possible.
We try to recruit trustees, maintenance volunteers, and janitors who understand this principle. With this level of use, the building is rarely pristine (but still tidy enough to be welcoming!), and it is critical that we found trustees who celebrated stewardship rather than scowled at marks on the wall.
Further, we launched a separate 501(c)3 that reaches out to community groups, catalyzes leadership development, and coordinates the (many!) logistics of running the building.
Orientation 2: Dispel Fairy Tales About Finances
Neither my congregation nor my neighborhood is wealthy. But, again and again we discovered a perception that the church has secret pockets of money that could cover expenses.
“Couldn’t the church just pay for this? This is really important,” I heard about once a week for four years. And in none of those cases was the speaker lying–there are really important events that God is stirring up in people’s hearts. All the time.
Since New City was paying for the space that we use, we already lowered the price of every other group using the space. Beyond that, though, the church decided we would not subsidize community groups further, because that would be an unfaithful representation of how God provides.
Sometimes God provides like manna in Exodus 16, when exactly what we need rains down, and all we have to have are the hands to receive it.
But sometimes God provides on a longer time frame, like Joseph storing crops (Genesis 41), when God’s provision looks like seeds and soil and water, and our discipleship is a matter of long-term tending.
Either posture, taken to the extreme, will ruin the ministry. On one hand, I’ve worked with numerous churches who gloss over money conversations because “God will provide,” which bypasses the need to have some difficult conversations over hard math.
On the other hand, a scarcity mindset that drives hoarding leads to spiritual decay. It was prudent for Joseph to save up in preparation for a drought; it would be sin for Joseph to save up in perpetuity without care for the poor.
What are we really building?
Churches across the country are wrestling with stewardship of their building. Like Elsdon points out in Gone for Good?, this often results in churches selling their property to a for-profit developer who doesn’t care about the neighborhood.
But with a commitment to stewardship and truth-telling, we are living in a renaissance of property innovation, including what we witness at the New City Center.
Ready for next steps? Here’s a prayer for your congregation:
Holy God,
Your abundance drives out the panic of scarcity. As we consider our building, help us to dream dreams and see visions. Help us to imagine not only what could happen in the building, but whom you’re calling us to connect with. Help us to see the unlikely suspects who are your called leaders. Give us the courage to take risks for the sake of the Gospel, our greatest treasure.
Amen.
