What happens to a congregation when the building it built begins to consume the ministry it was built to house? I have asked that question of pastors in fellowship halls, in parking lots after funerals, and over coffee that went cold while we talked about roof estimates. The conversation follows a familiar arc. It begins with gratitude for the saints who laid the cornerstone. It moves to the boiler, the steeple, the leaking fellowship hall. And it ends, almost always, with a quiet confession: we are spending more on the house than on the household. That confession is becoming a national one.
THE QUIET CLOSING OF AMERICAN CHURCHES
Church closures used to be a rural lament. Now they are a structural trend. Lifeway Research estimates that 3,800 new Protestant churches were started in the United States in 2024, while roughly 4,000 closed.1 That gap has narrowed from five years earlier, when 4,500 churches closed against 3,000 openings, but the direction has not reversed. Measured against the roughly 293,000 Protestant congregations counted in the 2020 U.S. Religion Census, the 2024 closures amount to nearly 1.4 percent of all Protestant churches in a single year.
Broaden the lens beyond Protestant congregations and the picture darkens. Partners for Sacred Places and the National Trust for Historic Preservation have estimated that somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 sacred places close each year in the United States, taking community programming with them.2
Behind every one of those numbers is a real place. A sanctuary where a grandmother was baptized. A basement where the food pantry ran on Tuesdays. A pulpit that once thundered for civil rights. When a church dissolves, a neighborhood loses more than a worship service. It loses an anchor.
WHEN THE HOUSEHOLD BUDGET TIGHTENS, THE OFFERING PLATE FEELS IT
Tithes and offerings are the most honest economic indicator in America. They measure not what people earn but what they believe they can spare after the groceries, the rent, and the car note are paid. When household budgets tighten, discretionary giving is often the first thing to bend.
The data bear this out. Half of U.S. Protestant pastors say the current economy is hurting their churches, and while the average church saw offerings rise 2.1 percent over 2024, inflation grew 2.9 percent.3 In other words, many churches are raising more dollars and still falling behind.
This is not a crisis of faithfulness. It is a crisis of margin. Families who love the Lord and love their church are simply stretched thinner than they were five years ago. Utilities, insurance, and repairs, meanwhile, do not adjust downward because the congregation is struggling.
THE BURDEN FALLS HEAVIEST ON THE BLACK CHURCH
If American congregations have a cold, the Black church has pneumonia. The economic year that just passed was brutal for Black households. According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Black unemployment rose from 6.2 percent in January 2025 to 7.5 percent by December, a level that would signal a recession if the nation as a whole experienced it.4 Much of that pain traces to the reshaping of the federal workforce. Black workers were hit harder by federal cuts because they made up 18.5 percent of government employees in 2024, compared with about 13 percent of the overall workforce.5 Economists noted that layoffs concentrated in agencies where Black women were overrepresented, such as Education and Health and Human Services, and that the dismantling of DEI offices fell disproportionately on Black women as well.
Many in the Black community experience this as something more than coincidence. The National Urban League has argued that more than 327,000 federal jobs were eliminated through deliberate cuts rather than attrition or modernization, and that Black America is already in a recession.6 Whether one reads the pattern as strategic targeting or as a policy whose consequences fell predictably on one community, the effect on the offering plate is identical. When the federal civil service, long one of the surest ladders into the Black middle class, is sawed off at the lower rungs, the tithes of the people who climbed it go with it.
There are signs of easing this year. Black unemployment fell from 7.3 percent in January 2026 to 6.0 percent in August, yet the Black labor force shrank by roughly 288,000 people over those same months.7 People who have stopped looking for work do not show up in the unemployment rate, but they show up in the treasurer’s report.
Black churches enter these storms with fewer financial shock absorbers. Legal scholar Pamela Foohey found that Black churches account for two-thirds of all congregations that file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy each year, and some were sold the equivalent of subprime loans to purchase, renovate, or expand their buildings, often after mainstream banks had turned them away.8
The Black church built hospitals, schools, and movements with nickels and dimes. It will not be defeated by a recession. But it may need to rethink its relationship to real estate. When members lose jobs, churches lose budgets.
A TEMPORARY SOLUTION: SHARING THE HOUSE OF GOD
Here is a modest proposal, and I offer it as a bridge rather than a destination. Churches facing financial strain should seriously consider sharing a building with another congregation.
This is not a new idea, and it is not a fringe one. A Barna study of multisite and planting churches found that 18 percent of pastors reported sharing a facility and resources with another church.10
The benefits are practical, pastoral, and missional. It stops the bleeding. Utilities, insurance, maintenance, and debt service are fixed costs. Split between two congregations, they fall by nearly half for each. That difference can be the line between closure and survival. Acquiring a building of their own could take a very long time and alot of money for most churches. Sharing space however, frees up money for community partnerships, salaries, and outreach. It matches under-used space with unmet need.
Maturing congregations frequently consider closing while young, under-resourced church plants struggle to find affordable space, but by partnering, the two can meet each other’s need. An aging congregation gains rental income and fresh life in its hallways. A young congregation gains a home.
Sharing space embodies the unity we preach. We sing of one body. Sharing a roof forces us to practice it: to coordinate calendars, to extend grace over a misplaced hymnal, to discover that the congregation meeting at noon is not a competitor but kin.
None of this is easy. Shared space requires a written covenant covering schedules, costs, maintenance, insurance, and conflict resolution. It requires doctrinal compatibility and humility from both pastors. But the alternative, watching a century of ministry end at a closing table, is harder still.
WHAT THE BIBLE TEACHES
Scripture never confuses the church with its building. When Solomon dedicated the most magnificent structure in Israel’s history, he confessed its limits in the same breath:
SCRIPTURE
“But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You, how much less this house which I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27)
The house mattered, but the God of the house could not be contained by it. The New Testament church was born without a building of its own. Believers gathered in homes and borrowed spaces. Paul greeted Prisca and Aquila along with “the church that is in their house” (Romans 16:5), and when the synagogue in Ephesus closed its doors to him, he reasoned daily “in the school of Tyrannus” (Acts 19:9). The apostle did not wait for a capital campaign. He used the room available.
The earliest believers also held their resources with an open hand:
“And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need.” (Acts 2:44–45)
That generosity continued into the second century. Tertullian of Carthage, the North African father, described Christians of his day as bound together in mind and soul and therefore unhesitating about sharing what they possessed, supporting the poor, orphans, and the elderly from a common fund.11
The wisdom literature offers the logic plainly:
“Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up.”
Ecclesiastes 4:9–10
And Paul gives the posture: “do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others” Philippians 2:4
A shared building is not a compromise of identity. It is a sermon in brick and mortar.
SCRIPTURE
“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity!” Psalm 133:1
THE CHURCH WAS NEVER THE BUILDING
I do not propose building-sharing as a permanent answer to every church’s financial crisis. Some congregations will recover, grow, and reclaim their full use of their facilities. Others will merge. Some will discover that sharing was not a detour but the path God intended all along.
But for the congregation staring at a roof estimate it cannot pay, with members who have lost jobs and a treasury that shrinks every quarter, sharing may be the bridge that carries them from this season to the next. The saints who laid our cornerstones did not build those sanctuaries so their grandchildren could sell them to developers. They built them so the gospel could be preached. If two congregations can keep that pulpit alive together, the builders’ purpose is honored.
The church has always been a people before it was a place. In a hard economy, it may be time for the people of God to remember that, and to open their doors to one another.
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NOTES
1. Aaron Earls, “Church Closures Eclipse Openings in the U.S.,” Lifeway Research, January 13, 2026, https://research.lifeway.com/2026/01/13/church-closures-eclipse-openings-in-the-u-s/.
2. “Two Episcopal Churches among 10 Sacred Spaces to Receive $1.9 Million in Preservation Grants,” Episcopal News Service, October 18, 2019, citing Partners for Sacred Places and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
3. “Pastors Split on the Economy’s Impact on Their Churches,” Lifeway Research, October 14, 2025.
4. “Black Unemployment Reaches 7.5% Nationwide as New Report Warns D.C. Faces Sharpening Risks,” Washington Informer, January 21, 2026, reporting on Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, State of the Dream 2026.
5. “Why Are Unemployment Rates Climbing for Black Workers?” Marketplace Online, February 5, 2026.
6. “Black America Is Already in a Recession,” National Urban League, 2026.
7. Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, “Black Unemployment Is Falling, But the Racial Economic Divide Continues,” Washington Informer, September 2026.
8. Pamela Foohey, Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2026); Pamela Foohey, “Why So Many Churches Are Turning to Bankruptcy to Reorganize,” Canopy Forum, August 10, 2026.
9. “As Black Churches Close across South Florida, Some Find New Ways to Thrive,” The Miami Times, December 2025 (originally WLRN, October 27, 2025).
10. “Two Churches, One Roof,” Christianity Today, Fall 2018 (State of Church Ministry issue), citing Barna Group.
11. Tertullian, Apology 39.