The old bungalow, once home to the pastors of Trinity Lutheran Church, is gone now, flattened to make way for parking spaces.
Not that demolition was the Warrenville church’s first choice. The congregation had tried for months to find a buyer who would move it and give it new life. But in November, time had run out and the 40-year-old structure went the way of many other parsonages that had outlived their purpose.
The pastor, Rev. Mary C. Frances, said the church had rented the house to tenants for about 15 years. “The previous pastor had lived in it,” she explained. “But when he and his family ran out of room, they bought their own home and he started getting a housing allowance from the church.”
Eventually, the congregation tired of being a landlord, so when the church starting experiencing a parking crunch on Sundays, the old house had to go, she said.
Whether they’re demolished or sold to private owners or converted to inns or to shops or to mission-outreach buildings, “the parsonage” may be a term that’s fading into antiquity. The house where the clergyman lives — and who owns it — is no longer a given.
“I think the mentality has changed. People understand that we don’t have to live right next door,” explained Frances, who lives several miles away, in Naperville. “I can’t think of anybody we know who lives in a parsonage.”
It’s difficult to get statistical data on church-owned clergy housing, which may also be called manses, rectories or rabbinages, depending on the denomination and faith. Christianity Today magazine researched the issue in 1997, and concluded that about 32 percent of pastors live in parsonages, with 61 percent owning their own homes. It reported in October that anecdotal evidence suggests that the trend has accelerated, with churches increasingly favoring giving housing allowances to their ministers.
The practice of furnishing homes to clergy developed as a supplement for historically meager pastoral incomes. Steve Merriman, who heads Clergy Financial Services, in Loveland, Colo., which specializes in advising churches and clergy on taxes and compensation, estimates that until World War II, 99 percent of all clergy lived in church-owned housing.
But that started to change when postwar federal programs were developed to encourage homeownership. The government’s low-down-payment programs and guaranteed loans made it “almost your patriotic duty to buy a house, and it was too good to pass up,” Merriman said. “That was when ministers started leaving parsonages.”
There have been other motivations in recent years. For one, family structures have changed, and newly hired clergy today might arrive with an employed spouse whose income affords them the option of being more choosy about where they live. An outdated parsonage might turn out to be a negative for an institution that has to court its clergy.
For another, some churches just decide to forgo the time and expense of home maintenance in favor of more churchly activities, Merriman says.
Perhaps the biggest motivation in recent years has been the issue of planning for retirement, and as a result it has become fairly common for churches to pay an annual housing allowance so that their clergy can buy homes.
“Generally, new ministers don’t want to live in a parsonage because they don’t build up any equity,” Merriman says. “Career ministers, when they retire, are going to get their denominational pension but they won’t have anywhere to live. I try to encourage the church to help the minister to own their own home.”
Sometimes, the reasons are just personal ones. Rev. Stephen Martz said he felt rooted to Glen Ellyn, where he and his wife had lived for two years, when he became pastor of St. Nicholas Episcopal Church in Elk Grove Village in 1995. They wanted to stay near his wife’s mother, and thus weren’t interested in the parsonage next to the church, even though they considered the 20-year-old house to be roomy and attractive. The church has been renting it to tenants since then.
“Initially, there was some resistance in the church” to agreeing to have Martz and family stay in their own house, he said. “The leaders of the congregation had never experienced having a priest who did not live in church-owned property. It took some educating [on my part] to get them to understand that these days it is a viable option. Within our diocese, it has become very common for priests not to live in parish housing.”
He says he prefers living apart. “There are a lot of advantages to having some distance from the church,” Martz says. “Many clergy find it pretty difficult to have any real privacy. I would think we would have felt like we were in a fishbowl.”
It’s a common refrain. “I had a friend in Wisconsin who lived in a parsonage [next to the church] and it was the worst experience,” recalls Frances. “As much as people try to be respectful, when you share parking space, how can you even sit in your back yard on your day off, and people pull up to do business in the church? There are some people who have real boundary problems.”
Not everyone agrees. Rev. David Perkins says he has had no problems living next door to Highland Park Presbyterian Church. In some ways, it has been a bonus, he says. “My children know I am right next door, and that makes it easier for them.”
Perkins says his congregation views the 100-year-old house, which Presbyterians call a manse, as an economic necessity. “A pastor moving into Highland Park wouldn’t be able to afford housing anywhere nearby,” he says. “This is really an asset.”
However, Perkins estimates that more than half of Presbyterian churches don’t have parsonages these days, and says that some ministers would have looked at his church’s manse as a negative. “I’m sure they lost some applicants [because the manse came along with the job]. A lot of pastors want to build equity. But for me, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.”
Revs. Dan and Diana Facemyer found themselves with the option of not one but two parsonages some years back when the married couple took new pastorates — he at Plainfield United Methodist Church, and she at St. Thomas United Methodist in Glen Ellyn. They chose the Plainfield parsonage, and so St. Thomas sold its nearby parsonage but keeps the proceeds in a reserve fund for when it might need to own one again — which seems likely, as it’s unusual for United Methodist pastors not to live in parsonages.
“The bishop frowns on it,” she says. “Just last year, Bishop [C. Joseph] Sprague [leader of the church’s Northern Illinois Conference] restated his firm conviction that churches need to own parsonages,” she said, explaining the denomination’s practice of regularly moving its clergy around to new churches.
As such, mobility is highly valued, she says. “It clogs up the system when pastors have to find a house, buy a new house, sell the old one.”
Although the proper term is “rabbinage,” just about everybody at Temple Beth Hillel in Wilmette calls the house that it owns “the parsonage,” according to congregation President Sabra Minkus, who says the synagogue just spent about $25,000 to renovate the home a few blocks away. Rabbi Allan Kensky moved in early in December.
Among synagogues, ownership arrangements run the gamut, Minkus says. “Younger rabbis coming out of the seminary over the last five years tend to want to own their homes so they can start to build equity. Probably that would have been OK in our congregation, too, except that the cost of housing nearby would have been prohibitive for our clergy.”
“I think that it’s still more common for the congregation to own a parsonage,” Rabbi Kensky said. “Part of the reason is that in traditional forms of Judaism, riding in a car on the Sabbath is prohibited. The rabbi needs to live within walking distance.”
Minkus says the renovation was a time-consuming job. “We considered alternative arrangements, but when it came to the bottom line, it was important for our congregation that our clergy be part of our community,” she says.
“I don’t think other congregations should shy away from doing something like this,” she says. “It does so much as a unifying type of thing. It shows respect for your clergy that you want them to live in a nice home. The home is a reflection on all of us.”
