How do you sell a “house of God?”
You do it jut like almost any other home. Get a real estate agent, put it on the market and pray for a buyer.
There are churches for sale across Indiana. In Evansville, there are more than half a dozen churches available.
They range from the tiny Keller Street Mission with pews to seat 40, to a complex of buildings owned by the former Cullen Avenue Christian Church, whose booming membership has outgrown its East Side building.
And just like the residential housing market, the prices range widely, from a modest $16,000, which will get you 250 square feet of sanctuary and two small bathrooms, to $1.9 million, for which you can get not only a large church, but a fellowship hall, parking lot and several other buildings as well.
But the decision to leave behind a church can be highly emotional, and fraught with peril.
“It’s very hard to move,” said Dennis Conwell, an Evansville Realtor whose experience selling houses of worship has earned him the nickname “The Church Man.”
“Churches know that when they leave a certain location, they are going to lose some membership. They may pick up new members along the way, but losing their old members is like losing a member of the family. The feelings run that deep.”
Since leaving his teaching job a decade ago to go into commercial real estate, Conwell has been on the buying or selling side of 27 churches. He’s sold a Mormon church to Korean Presbyterians, a Nazarene church to Baptists, and an independent, evangelical church to a group of Catholic nuns.
It’s not always a church building that Conwell sells to a congregation, nor always a congregation that buys a church. When Conwell put the former Twelfth Avenue Baptist Church building up for sale last year, it was the not-for-profit Life Choice Inc., that bought the sanctuary and turned it into a shelter for pregnant, unmarried teens.
One of his latest sales was to a new church congregation, which bought a former grocery store. Members of the Faith Bible Church now walk through the automatic “In” and “Out” doors, left behind by the grocery store owners.
Churches have become a booming market, Conwell said.
“I’m selling more churches than ever before,” he said. “The Pentecostal movement is going nuts. It is growing by leaps and bounds.”
While Conwell has done business with mainstream churches, much of his work these days is with new church congregations which have split off from their original church bodies and are looking for their own places of worship.
Many are independent, nondenominational churches with enormous optimism, ready to take a financial leap of faith.
They often succeed. Conwell said the financial institutions he works with have never foreclosed on a loan to a church, though they have come close in a couple of cases.
“A church’s giving increases when they decide to buy a building or add an addition,” Conwell said. “It becomes a way for a church to grow. It brings excitement. It’s the old adage: Either you’re going forward or going backwards.”
Yet Conwell is very cautious when it comes to working with church groups.
He challenges them from the start to scrutinize their decision.
“I want to make sure I can work with someone (on a sale) and still go back and break bread with them later,” Conwell said.
“I’ve gone to some church groups who weren’t sure they were ready to move and told them they should stay. I’d sure hate to think a church moved away from where God wanted them to be and that I was part of moving them out.”
Conwell is a former Methodist who now attends Bible Center Cathedral, a large independent church in the midst of expanding its children’s center in Evansville.
In his office is a framed picture of a contemplative man sitting at a desk. Jesus is sitting near the man, as if he’s advising him. Below the picture are the words from Psalm 1:1, which speaks of keeping counsel with God.
“I believe I was called to work with churches,” said Conwell. “Some Realtors don’t like to work with churches. It’s hard. It’s often emotional and you end up dealing with groups of people trying to make decisions. But I’m not sure they really try to get into a church’s heart. That’s something I try to do.”
Conwell has attended the worship services of churches contemplating buying or selling a building and has frequently met with church members.
“I try to take the teachings of the Bible with me into those meetings,” Conwell said.
When there is disagreement, he asks church members to ask themselves: “What is the purpose of this church? And what can we do to fulfill that?”
Says Conwell: “I try to let God be the peacemaker.”
Conwell’s secular commercial real estate deals are often easier, more profitable and often go quicker than his church sales, he said. But what he gets from church sales, he says, can’t be found elsewhere.
After almost every church sale, he’s been invited back to his client’s first worship service.
“It’s wonderful,” Conwell said. “They invite my wife and I to church and the minister will tell us how appreciative they all are. People will come up to us afterward and they are so warm and kind.
“It’s a job where you get so involved with people personally. It’s been a wonderful call.”
