To sell or not to sell
Across Canada, more and more churches are faced with a difficult choice

Frank Stirk
BC Correspondent
bc@christianweek.org

BURNABY, BC-As church attendance among Canada’s mainline denominations continues to decline, congregations are being forced to decide what to do with buildings that are now too large for their needs.

More and more members are deciding to sell their property as a first step toward either disbanding, finding a more affordable location or merging with another church.

For those whose lives are intertwined with a beloved old building, that can be a wrenching decision, as Burnaby-based realtors Leonardo Difrancesco and Rav Rampuri have discovered. The pair promote themselves as "specialists" in marketing church properties.

Matter of prayer

Difrancesco recalls one instance where church leaders wrestled in prayer for two hours over whether to sell their building.

"They went inside the church hall, closed the door, and I’m sitting there with a purchase-and-sale agreement, waiting for what’s going to happen," he says.

"All of a sudden the praying stops and for five minutes the doors are locked. Then the head pastor, the secretary, the board members come in. The pastor sits down. [He says,] ‘Rav, Leonardo, where’s the document? We’re signing.’"

It is not a large market, but Difrancesco and Rampuri say they do a steady business in church buildings, usually with three to five for sale at any given time across British Columbia.

"A majority of the Christian churches are coming up for sale because the congregations are shrinking and a lot of these properties hold a lot of value," says Rampuri. "Buddhists are also moving on. It’s not one particular group."

At other times, a faith group will buy a church building because it has outgrown its current rented facility.

"We’ve sold churches to Sikhs, Buddhists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, Christians-all across the spectrum," says Rampuri. One church they sold is now a seniors’ care facility.

Others will buy a church building with an eye to turning it into a home. "We had a church that we sold to a couple from Italy," says Difrancesco. "They’re very artsy, so where the pews were, they have a lot of art items that they make and sell."

Purchase prices have ranged from $250,000 for a small building up to $5 million for a large church with a lot of adjoining land.

In recent months, churches across Canada have gone on the market as denominations are forced to downsize.

In Montreal, an Anglican congregation that shrunk to 15 members sold its building to a Pentecostal church, while a Presbyterian planning group is recommending the sale of two churches and the merger of four others into two congregations.

In Winnipeg, three Lutheran churches are for sale, one of which hopes to use the proceeds to re-open in a smaller building. Several United Church buildings are also on the market.

And in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, four Anglican churches are on the market. The plan is to build one new church with the proceeds.

But in central Vancouver, Cityview Baptist Church is going against the grain. It recently returned to holding services in a building-bought from a United Church congregation in 1997-that it left two years ago for the larger space offered at a movie theatre.

"It was difficult for us to make that transition, to grasp that opportunity, because people had that memory of being in the building and having a place that was theirs," says senior pastor Craig O’Brien. Fortunately, the building had been kept as a ministry centre.

He believes the greatest challenge facing congregations is to find creative ways to "do church without necessarily having buildings. I think the architecture of Christianity must be in the home, the coffee shop, the rec centre."

And yet for now, says O’Brien, the church building cannot be abandoned entirely.

"Vancouver still has a large number of people with religious memory and some sort of expectation of what church looks like. And it’s a pretty big marker in the life of some congregations and the ministry they do."