When a Church Is a Business

The overlap between churches and businesses can be very entertaining during these hard economic times.
First, let’s establish once and for all, I am wholly and completely unsympathetic to folks who somehow believe tangible property is important to Christian faith. Western Christianity has long confused the Two Realms, having absorbed the heresy of Thomism and Aristotle’s fallacies, and does not realize there is a world of difference between ceremonial purity and spiritual purity. Aristotle assumed all things were a continuum, and that this universe is all there can be, whether we see all things or not. Ancient Near Eastern conceptions show a distinct break between the physical and spiritual; the two are entirely different categories. While the Spirit Realm overshadows and invades this realm, nothing here can touch what is there.
So this silly notion that a ceremony devoting some piece of real estate, with its facilities and structures, to God can make it genuinely sacred to God is asking for serious trouble. It’s okay if I say something belongs to God, because I intend to honor Him by how I use it. It’s not okay to then imagine He is somehow bound to honor that, when it’s entirely too easy for me to be misguided. And besides, if it’s His, he can dispose of it as He likes. Nothing in this discussion so far binds bankers or thieves (there’s a difference?) from messing with the property. It might be nice if they take it seriously, but I’d be a fool to expect it. Because when they don’t take it seriously, this silly notion about material things being sacred somehow makes God look weak if He chooses not to protect it.
Right now there is a huge spike on church facility foreclosures. While banks have traditionally been slow to enforce the contracts on churches, these mortgages are handled as commercial loans. God isn’t going to strike the bankers in His wrath simply because the congregation can’t pay the note. If you make a deal with the secular institutions, you get a secular response to your actions under the contract. God didn’t sign the contract; your members and representatives did.
Since every staff member of every religious institution in the world is fully capable of doing some of the awfullest things, things anyone regards as sinful, it should indicate how silly is the notion someone can put on their superman cape clerical garments and be treated differently. If anything, you should expect to be held to an ever higher standard, and at the very least, one which is internally consistent. The posturing gets old.
Jesus was once confronted by a fellow making lots of noise about following Him. Jesus warned the man He had no property, not so much as His own bed. Not that such lack hindered anything Jesus wanted to do, but that “wanted to do” included allowing Himself to be arrested and executed in grisly fashion. I’m waiting for all the religious officials to line up for that. Yes, I have room to talk, because I’m already in that line. It starts by freely proclaiming you don’t have to take me seriously.
Look for a lot of church poo-bahs to cast dark moral coloring on the banks and other financial institutions for doing what all of them agreed could and should be done when things get tough.