In the approach to the U.S. political elections, often in quiet conversations, we began to sense rising anxiety and fear in the voices of many spiritual leaders. People expressed concern — or even dread — thinking about the divisive, racist and hateful speech that had emerged in previous elections.
For those who lead congregations, there was the challenging and complex reality of offering both pastoral and prophetic ministry while at the same time assessing their own vulnerability and risk in this season.
A study published in 2024 by the Religion and Social Change Lab of Duke Divinity School reported that the almost 1,100 United Methodist congregations in North Carolina are theologically and politically diverse. This creates a “purple church,” in which people are often sitting and serving across the aisles from siblings in Christ who think differently from them.
Certain religious communities are gifted in navigating their mission in public and political spaces. The historically Black church is a noted exemplar. More recently, conservative evangelical congregations have influenced electoral politics. The mainline church, in which United Methodism is situated, has had neither a consistent voice nor a meaningful presence in political life, even though UMC churches are often anchor institutions at the heart of their communities.
Yet as the study notes, the mixed political affiliations of our UMC membership aren’t just a source of tension. They also offer an opportunity for the two sides to engage with each other. Indeed, local churches remain one of the few settings where such conversations can occur.
What would it mean for a purple church to enter faithfully into a contentious political election? And how could we hear the voice of Jesus in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God”(Matthew 5:9), as both command and assurance?
To equip us in our faithful witness as peacemakers, the Peace Building Ministries of the Western North Carolina Conference launched the Purple Church Initiative in August 2024. This initiative offered a practical, intentional means of fostering peace in our differences. The resources included training for 20 clergy and laity using the 3 Practice Circles method, access to a Politics & Faith town hall in Charlotte, and digitally available guidelines for being a peaceful presence at the polls.
The core of the Purple Church Initiative was a free downloadable resource kit with weekly worship planning, Bible study, prayer guides and social media called Conversation Across the Aisles. At the end, members were invited to sign a Peace on Purpose pledge card to encourage them to be ambassadors of peace within their families, congregations and communities.
We estimate that a third of the churches in the Western North Carolina Conference engaged the Conversation Across the Aisles through sermon series, in Sunday school classes and small groups, and through weekly social media posts.
As part of this effort, Bishop Kenneth H. Carter Jr. preached a sermon across the region in the summer and fall called “Loving God, Loving My Neighbor and Loving My Country,” in which he connected Jesus’ teaching from two passages in Matthew 22: on paying taxes to Caesar (verses 15-22) and on the greatest commandments (verses 34-40).
The sermon was a reflection on democracy and equality rooted in the image of God in each person, and in it Carter distinguished between patriotism and Christian nationalism. He delivered this message in various ways, including in a video released a week before the election and as part of worship resources for a prayer service for peaceful elections.
We both heard anecdotally that the initiative was a success. In a rural county in western North Carolina, the chairperson of a political party said the Purple Church Initiative had opened conversations within his congregation. His community had been hit by Hurricane Helene, and political polarization was contributing to suspicion and a heightened ethos of violence in this difficult time. Through the initiative, people in the church and community engaged in healing conversations, he said.
In another instance, the pastor of a thriving urban church led the congregation through the weekly sermon series and offered small group discussions. Participants said they were grateful and relieved to have the sacred space and time to step away from their usual echo chambers and were able to have holy conversations across differences.
We know it’s not a perfect solution; we’ve heard criticism that the Purple Church Initiative allows people to avoid the hard conversations that love requires. Our experience has been different, however. We saw that for many congregations, the initiative offered an intentional process and context for neighbors to move toward one another. They could express deeply held convictions while finding unity in their core identity in Christ and in our Wesleyan tradition.
The idea for the initiative was to offer conversation starters, not conversation stoppers. We hope people will continue to engage in even deeper and more challenging dialogue moving forward. We know the election isn’t the end; it’s a beginning. And of course, we are still a purple church.
In his sermon “Catholic Spirit,” John Wesley said, “Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion?” To love alike requires us to be in genuine relationships that move beyond ignoring — or worse, silencing — different opinions. It requires us to engage in a conversation across the aisles that moves beyond keeping the peace to being ambassadors of peace.
Moving forward, we must boldly reclaim that our identity is not rooted in any political affiliation but instead in the beloved community. As disciples commissioned to transform the world, we must pledge our allegiance to Jesus Christ and to the kinship of God that welcomes the stranger, embraces the disenfranchised and cares for the least of these. This is our unifying mission.
Now more than ever, our communities need to experience our faithful witness as United Methodists who make peace, not just keep it, by working together to be of one heart, notwithstanding our differences.
We know the election isn’t the end; it’s a beginning. And of course, we are still a purple church.
Chicken Little — that prophet of doom — creates mass hysteria with the ominous proclamation, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
The panicked frenzy that ensues in the well-known folktale is both unfortunate and instructive for incredulous readers who are privy to reality: this apocalyptic declaration and dread of Armageddon is, in fact, sparked by a falling acorn.
Often, the story of Chicken Little resonates with our experiences as pastors or leaders in congregations where problems are pervasive. Financial stress, aging facilities, discord among members, technological challenges, scarcity of resources, lack of volunteers, crises in the community — these all have the potential to keep leaders pacing the floor at night.
Congregational leaders and their teams can find themselves in a perpetual posture of chasing and triaging problems, becoming deflated and exhausted because they never reach a point where everything seems to be fixed. The pessimism that wafts through the air of the organization is more insidious than the problems themselves, creating a culture of despair where everyone seems to be glum and on edge, waiting for the sky to fall.
Pastors don’t surrender to God’s call because of an insatiable desire to simply “put out fires,” so remaining inspired as visionary leaders under such circumstances is extremely challenging. The yes we give to God, generally after intense, internal wrestling, is because we believe, as professed in the simple grace prayed over our meals as children, “God is great, and God is good.”
Pure, unrelenting hope is found in this great and good God who will perform wonders to drive out evil and bring about God’s good purposes in this world. This conviction ignites a fire and passion for participating in God’s redemptive work. After all, we are proclaimers of the euangelion — the good news — who seek to galvanize others around a common dream for good.
In my own context, it was our compelling vision to disciple the next generation that opened the eyes of two staff members to the possibility of outside funding toward this effort. Lilly Endowment Inc. was seeking applicants for its Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative; they saw the alignment with our vision and encouraged us to apply.
We had never pursued a grant of this magnitude before, but our faith in the power of God led us to magnify possibilities over potential impediments. We prayed, applied, prayed some more. In God’s abundance, we were notified that the church was awarded a $1.25 million grant!
I share this to encourage any pastor or leader who is doing the good work of galvanizing God’s people to pursue good. Continue pointing and looking upward, because God’s blessings still rain down.
Orienting our congregations and ministries around promising possibilities and expectation of good is more personally rewarding and congregationally enriching than staying in a constant orbit of the ominous. This orientation, which really is a reorientation for many congregations, does not happen on its own but rather through great intentionality on the part of the leaders in shaping a culture of expectancy and hope.
Working strategically in this vein is critically important, because the culture of our organizations will determine whether we are prepared to receive God’s generosity or whether God’s goodness will be missed or dismissed by doubts and fears. As evidenced in Numbers 13:25-33 when the negative report of the spies infects the Israelites’ hearts with doubt, it is possible to be on the edge of experiencing the miraculous and talk yourself out of seeing the good. How many times has this happened in church business meetings?
Leaders, therefore, must first cast and continue to reiterate a God-size vision that is rooted in a deep conviction of the truth of God’s powerful ability, as communicated in Ephesians 3:20 (ESV): “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us …”
As nervous as this might make leaders, who are equally susceptible to being overly pragmatic or pessimistic, such a vision supplants problems as the new goal to run after and inspires congregants to offer their gifts and talents to see it come to fruition. A compelling vision can also be the seed for collective creativity in addressing challenges.
Yes, problems will arise, but problems can be viewed as barriers to overcome in pursuit of a greater purpose rather than as the purpose themselves. And problems can become further impetus for expectancy that God will “show up and show out.”
After casting a vision, our proclamation must set the people’s gaze upon God and encourage them to look with anticipation for God to give provision for the vision. We should keenly focus people’s hearts and minds on God’s omnipotence.
Acknowledging God’s power challenges our own doubts and insecurities. If God’s potency surpasses our impotence, then we cannot tailor dreams to fit what we deem conceivable or possible in our strength. This power causes the seams of our intellect to come undone, and the only appropriate response is awe and wonder; what we cannot explain or fully comprehend, we must simply believe.
Finally, our belief should be heard in our corporate prayers and seen in our response when God answers them. We must not be like the church that, praying for the imprisoned Peter in Mary’s house, decried Rhoda as being “out of [her] mind” when she reported that the liberated Peter was knocking at the door, their prayers answered (Acts 12:15).
Hope-filled congregations don’t pray puny prayers. As we pray big prayers, we must also encourage our people to open the door when God’s answer shows up. Through casting vision, proclaiming God’s power, and praying with expectancy, leaders are encouraging their congregations to look up — not at a falling sky — but at a good and great God.
Working strategically in this vein is critically important, because the culture of our organizations will determine whether we are prepared to receive God’s generosity or whether God’s goodness will be missed or dismissed by doubts and fears.
Do you remember the American Express advertising slogan from the late 1980s “Membership has its privileges”? For me, the slogan defined a generation that highly valued membership. It was aspirational. It was exclusive. It was Miami Beach, a Cadillac with a car phone and Southfork Ranch from the TV show “Dallas” all wrapped up in one.
Being “members” in that era meant being set apart from those who weren’t, and even though the ad campaign ended in the mid-1990s, I still feel that we carry that sentiment into our attitude toward church membership. In my life as a pastor, I’ve known many who held a distinct belief that church membership had its privileges — and some might not be fit for it.
The great heresy (not merely irony) of this mis-orientation of membership is that the local church claims to worship a God who welcomes all. When Jesus invited children to gather around him, it was not to build an attractive children’s ministry. Rather, Jesus’ invitation to children and outsiders was a direct affront on the religious leaders who believed that being a religious leader had its privileges.
Jesus pushed against exclusivity in membership with a generous invitation that — in the words of the 19th-century hymn — “whosoever will may come.” His invitation was not, “Whosoever qualifies for an Amex Gold Rewards Card can show up, claim a pew until death and enjoy the privileges,” though this is how membership functioned in the temple. It’s also true in enough congregations that countless local church ministers now bear the burden of the stereotype that churches are full of members holding on to privilege. Of course, this should change.
Flipping the membership model
A healthier membership mindset might look like Bike Shed Moto Co.in Los Angeles. Bike Shed is a club of sorts that includes a restaurant, retail shop and event space, but at its core, it is a gathering place for folks who love motorcycles and motorcycle culture.
I discovered Bike Shed Moto while listening to “Spike’s Car Radio,” a sometimes irreverent podcast by comedian Spike Feresten. Feresten interviewed Bike Shed founder Dutch van Someren, who spoke about membership at the club in a way that has stuck with me.
“When people say, ‘What’s the privileges of membership?’ … I’m kinda like, ‘Actually, it’s the obligations of membership,’” van Someren said. “You’ve gotta be nice to our staff; don’t be a [jerk]; … if you do wheelies up the road when you leave and [upset] our neighbors, we are going to ban you from the club and you won’t get your money back. So actually, our members are our nicest customers. And they are the ones who … tip the best and look after our staff, and everyone knows everybody’s name and they hang out together.”
That was the moment I realized that far too many churches stick signs in the yard and think they are welcoming to all, but when the rubber meets the road, they are functioning as though they are American Express, not a church as it should be.
Church members think they are “here for everyone — all people need to do is come.” However, when guests cannot find simple things like coffee, the bathroom or name tags, let alone new friends, they are lost in a space where “membership has its privileges,” and they are definitely not members. Meanwhile, most church members have no idea that they are inhospitable hosts, oblivious to the noise and chaos they surround their guests with.
As Christian people invested in congregational life, we must interrogate the ways we lean into the privileges of membership and away from membership’s responsibilities. We must dust off the church covenants and recover how we are called to embody our faith and treat one another.
It is both biblical and essential for us to look through lenses of faith and love when gathering a community. While hospitality isn’t a magic pill to save the church as we know it, I am certain we cannot build a community of faith without the generous embodiment of membership as expressed in hospitality and love.
Membership may have its privileges, but in congregational spaces, it has its responsibilities as well. The church that emerging generations need is not one of entertainment, pandering or exclusivity. The rest of the world has plenty of that. Instead, the church of today and tomorrow will be the one that figures out how to be a generative community of love, driven by the call of God. And in that, we recover the responsibility of God’s love that drew us into our family of faith from the very beginning.
It’s not easy to be optimistic about the church these days. But Mark Elsdon is working on it.
In his book “We Aren’t Broke: Uncovering Hidden Resources for Mission and Ministry,” he argued that, well, the church isn’t broke.
In his new book, “Gone for Good? Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition,” he makes the case that this moment poses a unique opportunity for the church to make a difference. As congregations disperse the enormous real estate holdings of the church, Elsdon sees a chance for renewal.
If congregations think of their buildings and land as assets they are stewarding rather than possessions they own, that mindset can help them transform church spaces for the community’s well-being, he said.
“Gone for Good?” is a collection of 16 essays by practitioners in many fields that addresses the question of what happens to church property when a church closes. At its core is the argument that property should be viewed as neither an albatross nor a cash cow but rather an asset that should be thoughtfully handled and used for good.
And there are likely to be a lot of property transfers in the coming years: as many as 100,000 buildings and billions of dollars in church-owned property are expected to be sold or repurposed by 2030, according to the book.
“There’s so much opportunity to think about those assets being opportunities for God’s mission to flow forth into our neighborhoods,” said Elsdon, who is ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and holds an MBA from the University of Wisconsin.
If the many churches across the country that are likely to close in the coming years simply sell off their buildings and land one by one, driven only by the market, he said, “we’re going to look back and say, ‘Wow, what a huge loss of spaces that were for the social good.’”
Elsdon is the executive director of Pres House, a combination church, campus ministry and seven-story apartment building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. He also is a co-founder (with Shannon Hopkins) and a director of RootedGood, a nonprofit that empowers institutions, social enterprises and entrepreneurs to create systemic change.
The book came out of a Gone for Good symposium hosted by Laity Lodge and the H.E. Butt Foundation in October 2022. Elsdon spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Sally Hicks about his vision for church property transition. The following is an edited transcript.
Faith & Leadership: One of the things I found interesting in the book was your sense of this as a moment of opportunity. In the foreword, Willie James Jennings writes about “a new possibility of forming life in place.” This book takes a practical approach, but there’s also a big vision for it. What is that vision?
Mark Elsdon: I’m interested in this idea that you highlight: thinking about buildings and land that churches have stewardship over as missional opportunities. Not simply vessels for a congregation, but missional, in terms of the impact they can have on the community.
In this moment of transition around church buildings and land and their use, it’s a particularly important moment to recognize the role they play in the community.
Church buildings and land are right in the middle of it all, and they’re everywhere. I think this is really critical. They’re in every city, village, town, of every size, everywhere in the nation. There’s nowhere they’re not — and there’s nowhere that they’re not changing, either.
I’m trying to be a bit reflective about that. What is the witness, the opportunity for the space that I think churches have been given the chance to steward? What’s the opportunity in the middle of neighborhoods all over the country to be those sorts of places?
It’s not that dissimilar from my previous book, where I was arguing the same thing with regard to our money. But it’s these assets that have been viewed as simply transactional, or have been actually held too tightly. Not for the good, not in a generous way, but just like, “This is ours.”
F&L: Talk a little bit about the scale of both the concern and the opportunity here. Because it might be a once-in-forever kind of thing. It’s a real wave, right?
ME: Yes. The clunky phrase I used was a “once-in-many-generations” change. Because when this stuff changes over, it’s not going back.
I like to bring it down to the scale of whatever people’s familiarity is. For example, in Madison, where I live, I use 40 out of 100 [closing]. Imagine 40 properties all over the city, everywhere — on busy streets and tiny neighborhoods, everywhere — 40 out of 100, 40% of them, closing or going empty or being repurposed.
We vote in Madison in churches. I don’t know where we’d find 40 [new] polling places. Not to mention the spiritual impact that has in the community.
It’s not just about the church. My real hope, too, is that city municipal folks will take notice, because there’s a chance to incentivize or disincentivize how this trajectory goes.
If we just let it unfold purely according to the market, just one by one, I don’t think it’s going to end real well. I think we’re going to be disappointed.
And now they’re what? Either there’s a fence around them because they’re a landmark building and you can’t do anything with them or they’re just high-end condos.
Robert Jaeger’s chapter on the Halo study found that 3.7 million people visited the 90 churches [in the study] over a year and only 9% of those visits were for worship. The other visits were for something else, often community or educational programs — food pantry, voting, Girl Scout meeting.
F&L: What do you think will move people from the mindset of crisis and worry to this sense that this is a time of unique opportunity?
ME: There is a great deal of loss. We have to recognize that this is indeed happening and is quite hard and sad, especially if you are in a church that is selling, which many people are. I never want to put this sort of glossy sheen over it, “Oh, it’s all going to be fine.”
But the Christian faith is one of death and resurrection, of death and new life, and there’s a sense that there is something beyond the next step. I don’t believe for a second God’s declining or God’s going anywhere. It’s just that the structure we’ve created that is the American church and all of our associated property, frankly, is going to change.
I do see, often, people in churches are intrigued by the question of legacy. I will often ask church members who are considering what to do with their property to envision themselves coming back to that piece of land 50 years from now. Fifty years is past the life of pretty much everyone in the room.
We are the stewards that will shape what happens 50 years from now. We can say, “Well, we’ll just let whatever happens happen. I don’t really care. As long as I have my funeral here or as long as I have my children’s wedding here, I’m fine with it.”
But if we start to envision what really is going on in this corner of our city or of our neighborhood or of our county or whatever it might be in 50 years and ask what can we be involved in right now that will lead to beautiful things happening on that land in the future, that sometimes helps.
F&L: You stress that congregations need time to envision something different. Why is that important, and why is that so hard?
ME: I just got a message today from a congregation seeking help that has 18 months of money left, and they want to do a complete redo of their whole property. And the truth is, you can’t do it in 18 months. This is not quick work.
F&L: We recently did a story about a church that wasn’t closing, but they were doing affordable housing, and it was a vision 20 years in the making.
ME: Pres House was an idea from the 1920s. It was 80 years. That’s extreme, of course. But to do the work well, it takes time. Time to listen to your community, to do the kind of discernment work that really leads to good outcomes. I think we underestimate that.
Sometimes there’s a resistance to accepting where we are, and there’s a sense of, “We can just do one more year like this, and we can just do one more year like this.” Eventually, the “one more year”— that’s the last of them. It’s hard.
Part of the reason I did the book, frankly, is to try to normalize that conversation a little bit, to try to help. Maybe it’s overwhelming, but maybe it’s a little bit of a comfort to know that there are 99,000 other churches facing the same thing. We’re not alone when we’re facing it, and it isn’t about us.
I always encourage people to think about it far earlier than they want to. To think of it more as, “What is this resource that we have to steward out to the world?” And to have those conversations going on all the time, so that when the moments do come that the change is needed, it’s not quite so revolutionary or hard to face.
F&L: Besides time, what are other key aspects of this process?
ME: Funding is definitely an issue. Funding on multiple levels — shorter term, pre-pre-development, pre-development funding, funding to do the discerning, to do the accelerator courses, to do the kinds of stuff that get people thinking differently.
There are a lot of financial resources, at least in the mainline church world, that could be used for investment money or for loans, for other funds to be pulled out of traditional investments and put to work in financing some of the development. That’s needed as well, especially if you’re going to do something interesting.
There’s a reason that affordable housing is so hard to do. It’s not easy, because you have to subsidize it. It doesn’t work on a purely market-driven method. But we also have money in the church that we could use to support some of those projects.
This pre-pre-development work is what RootedGood is working on a lot right now. We have our Good Futures Accelerator, which is a nine-month course for congregations to think about who they are, who their neighborhood is, to come up with ideas, to get creative, to test some demand and to do a space audit in their building.
We need more of that happening from more directions. There are nowhere near enough consultants, for example, to do one-on-one consulting for the number of churches that need to address this stuff. So we need to think about much more scalable, different ways of meeting that need.
Obviously, also, I talk about hope. I mean, hope is key. So again, while recognizing those sad realities, what will really move us is hopefulness that there is opportunity to do new good stuff, which I truly believe there is.
F&L: Philanthropy and government funding are two other sources you address.
ME: In my area, Madison, Wisconsin, there’s not a great deal of trust between cities and faith communities. That may be different in other parts of the country. Similarly with philanthropy, they just don’t do it. They don’t often give to churches directly.
But what this property transition moment allows for is different ways of structuring those relationships. And I would say, very broadly speaking, it’s different opportunities to, again, live out the Christian faith much more broadly and bring the gospel into people’s lives much more broadly.
As a practical example, I’m seeing a lot of churches starting nonprofit organizations that are not the church; they’re affiliated with the church. Then they have an opportunity to seek funding from foundations and funders through grants that wouldn’t go to a church.
Similarly, cities and planning departments are much more amenable, often, to working with development that’s multiuse, that isn’t just simply a traditional church worship space. So in both cases, it’s this opportunity to really broaden the network and the connection, and people all working together.
F&L: The chapter by Jim Bear Jacobs, citizen of the Mohican Nation, suggests an idea I’d never heard of before: returning the land to Indigenous tribes or organizations.
ME: I would not have published the book had I not been able to put a chapter like that in there. It was really important for me. This is a trickier, more sensitive subject for people.
I think you could argue theologically that we’re stewards of the land and that God has given us the opportunity to make use of it. But you could also argue very much historically and ethically that it was taken and so it really wasn’t ours to begin with anyway.
If we’re the church and we care about people and we care about our communities and we care about big questions, then I think we have to recognize that we’re monetizing land that was taken.
I think we have to think about that, recognize that, be aware of that, before we go ahead with it as if it’s ours. What’s our position with regard to church buildings and land? If we have a chance to right some wrongs from the past by returning it, it’s a form of reparation, a form of atoning for past sin. Why not consider that as an option?
There are lots of ways in which we can be more generous with what we have. Why do we need to hold on to it, especially if it’s not being used?