Your Church Property Has a Mission Too - Rev. Dr. Shelly Stackhouse. Episode 92

Does your church have more property than it needs? Is much of your building unused most of the time? If so, you have lots of company! Many churches have significant real estate that’s fallow – unused – and yet they continue to pay for its upkeep. Of course, no one likes this situation or planned for this reality, yet churches often have difficulty moving forward. Put differently, churches often struggle to incorporate their property into a realistic understanding of their current mission and purpose as a faith community. Rev. Dr. Shelly Stackhouse, a long-experienced interim minister and now the Senior Director of Programs for the non-profit, “Partners for Sacred Places,” offers some key questions and a process to help such churches move forward in this episode titled, “Your Church Property Has a Mission Too.”

• Does Your Church Have a Mission Statement for Its Property?
• Interim ministers have the opportunity (obligation?) to help a congregation begin to assess their situation with their property:
  • How is our property being used?
  • How often?
  • Who’s using it?
  • What spaces could be used more fully?
  • What property should we offload? How and to whom?
• Developing a mission statement for your property;
• Understanding property as part of your mission – start by going room to room…
• There are people in the wider community who are stakeholders in your property;
• Honoring the grief in letting go of unused property;
• It’s in the telling of stories that people come to feel the past has been honored, and then are open to a different future;