Love It or List It: We Sold Our Church Building

On October 8, 2023, we held our last worship service in our home of 59 years. We're moving on to a temporary location while we wait for God to reveal where our more permanent home will be. It's been a journey for which there is no solid road map, but we feel blessed by what's happening.

We formed a giant circle for the final song at our longtime, northeast Fresno home.

In late January, our elders announced a shock decision. We would be selling our church building and moving on. Among the elders, it was an uncontentious and unambiguous decision. They 100% believed it was in the church's best interest to put our property on the market and find a new home. Many congregations have hard choices to make about aging properties that are oversized for today's churches. Selling seemed the most desirable option to our board in our circumstances. I wrote about that decision back in January. You can read about it here.

I had an inside seat to their decision-making process. As a result, I had extra days to think about this decision before the news was shared with the whole church. But I was no less surprised than many. Perhaps not for the same reasons.

People commonly misunderstand the decision-making process in a Church of Christ like ours. I could veer into a long discourse about the assumptions people make. In some future article, perhaps I will describe how I understand my leadership role in our system.

In Churches of Christ, elders traditionally make key decisions. In many evangelical churches, the senior pastor has that responsibility—often in consultation with the board or with staff. The decisions, generally speaking, are owned by the senior pastor because he makes them. Many people in Churches of Christ today confuse these two different systems and make incorrect assumptions.

In this instance of selling our church building, however, I couldn't be more grateful for the courageous decision made by our elders. Our church has needed to move on. Again, you can read my previous post to see some of the reasoning behind this.

We listed our property with a well-respected, commercial brokerage firm. We received multiple offers for our 43,000-square-foot building and nine-acre property. It sparked a wee bidding war before we accepted an offer above our asking price. Through the inspection process, they identified a number of major issues with the property. We then accepted a renegotiated price of $7 million, close to our original asking price. Despite a few hiccups, the elders and ministers agree that the purchase agreement from these particular buyers gave us the best possible terms. The sale closed September 15.

I am pictured here with our realtor team with three leaders from the My Deen group who purchased our property. Their intent is to convert the facility into an Islamic cultural center focused on youth.

At the close of our sale, we had the option to continue using the building for up to one year for our worship gatherings. We chose to end our sojourn last Sunday after only four weeks as renters. So almost six decades after our first worship service at 1284 E Bullard Ave, we pulled up roots and left for good.

Several months ago, we found a property we hoped to purchase. In our due diligence, however, we identified major problems for which we found no resolution, so we backed away from that deal. For the next several months, we will be meeting at Fresno Mission's new City Center campus. Their generous offer to host us allows some time to work out our longer-term plans while giving us a front-row seat to look into the Mission's ground-breaking work with Fresno's unhoused community.

The Fresno Mission's new City Center campus will be our home for the next several months.

What have I learned through this process so far?

First, our church has a broad core of resilient, vibrant people. I expected resistance. And there was some, but mostly from outside our church. Our folks felt sadness and some shock, which seems wholly natural. As we talked and reasoned together, we heard strong words of affirmation for this chosen course. As a church, we want to be in the business of reaching out to people. Our huge, aging property was forcing us to spend too much time, energy and money on "bricks and mortar," as one elder put it. Most church members didn't need much convincing to understand that.

As a result, we have had a productive summer of packing up, cleaning out, and throwing away accumulated "treasures," some of which hadn't been used in years. Volunteers took on the task of sorting through decades of stuff, and we experienced the joy of working together. This bodes well for our future as we seek to launch new ways of ministering and reaching out to our community. 

Two of our moving/cleaning heroes from our summer of cleaning, packing & discarding: Louise Stuckert & Stephanie Norby

Second, our church is starting to think and talk differently. Now that we have pulled up anchor, there's a new spirit at work in our church. We are fortunate that we know our core identity and we have some sense of what God is calling us toward. Without this sense of mission and vision, I would fear for our church at this juncture. But the shared sense of purpose is binding us together.

Being in this fortunate position, two seemingly opposing characteristics are at work in our church. There's a lightness about us that seems new. The weight of trying to care for our huge property is gone. We're starting to think about things beyond bricks and mortar. It's a phase filled with possibility yet to be realized, but the possibility of new things is real.

In addition to the lightness, there's also a seriousness coming to the forefront. People are watching whether we are going to hold true to our mission and vision. They are holding our leaders and each other accountable, and they seem to want to live into whatever future God has in store for us.

Finally, my work has suddenly become much more life-giving than it's been in years. Christian author & pastor Dan Kimball used to write about the Christian bubble that many pastors and church members live in. Being the lead pastor in a declining church can often be more like a prison than a bubble. There are often too many things to take care of and not enough people to take care of them. As a result, pastors often wind up with duties and jobs they never signed up for. I can relate.

Now at this new stage, I am busier than ever. But's it's a life-giving kind of busyness. I have to collaborate and plan both in the church and in the community. My to-do list is long, but it's no longer filled with thankless tasks such as making sure the garbage company emptied the dumpsters this week or that someone takes care of yet another broken sprinkler. As we prepared for the sale of our property, my friend Tony and I (pictured below) couldn't wait to move on from our property. This summer alone, we faced vandalism of our commercial chiller, multiple broken windows, and homeless folks camping out on our property.

Tony DellaMaggiore and I sat and watched an HVAC crew dismantle our vandalized chiller and install a temporary commercial unit. We are happy to pass the building along to new owners.

Our vandalized chiller. Someone destroyed our $100,000 AC for about $100 worth of copper. We're so happy to move away from too much focus on bricks and mortar.

I was so ready to be free of those things and move on to to more life-giving, kingdom-building work. God has answered our prayers. The work ahead of us is enormous, but we have one another to lean on.

Please join me in praying that God would guide us into the right steps at the right time. I'll share updates on the journey as best I can.