Special Reports - Foreclosures Don't Spare the House of God

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Posted December 28, 2008

Business

Foreclosures Don't Spare the House of God

J. EMILIO FLORES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Seabreeze Church bought this building in Huntington Beach, Calif., in 2004 and is struggling to pay the mortgage.

By LOUISE STORY

After years of renting makeshift quarters, Seabreeze Church finally bought a permanent home in 2004 — a five-acre former tennis club in a beachside Southern California town.

The price was high and the building plans ambitious, but Seabreeze secured a $5 million loan from a credit union that caters to evangelical churches and raised several million more. The congregation moved in last year, just as credit markets froze, and now the church finds itself struggling to pay its bills as weekly expenses outpace weekly giving.

J. EMILIO FLORES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Bevan Unrau, senior pastor at Seabreeze Church, compared the church to a couple that "stretched their first home."

“We were kind of like that young married couple that really stretched for their first home,” said Bevan Unrau, the church’s senior pastor. “But I don’t think we’re completely unique.”

The era of easy credit has begun taking its toll on even the most sacred of borrowers, religious institutions. Many churches expanded during the real estate boom, as banks large and small lent money based on assumptions about growth in their donations.

The lenders were, in a sense, betting on the likelihood that a particular pastor could attract a large audience or, in some cases, on the popularity of one denomination over another. But, where those bets were wrong, or too optimistic, congregations found themselves knee-deep in debt and at risk of losing their houses of worship.

Hundreds of churches across the country have received foreclosure notices in recent months, and even more are behind on mortgage payments. An economic downturn tends to increase church attendance, but the amount each churchgoer donates tends to decrease. And newer members usually donate less than older ones. Churches can trim spending by cutting staff and social activities, but for many parishes, the biggest monthly expense is the mortgage.

Historically, churches were wary of debt, and many old-line congregations have owned their buildings free and clear for decades. But borrowing by churches became more common in the 1990s, reaching $28 billion nationwide in 2006, including mortgages, construction loans and church bonds, according to Lambert, Edwards & Associates, a consulting business in Grand Rapids, Mich. New companies and nonprofit organizations focused on church lending sprang up, as did real estate investment trusts and other bundles of church loans, which were sold to investors.

The rise of nondenominational churches and a resurgence in the evangelical movement also led to more religious institutions seeking to borrow. Churches were often founded in storefronts or school auditoriums, but as they grew, they built sprawling edifices, including so-called mega-churches. At the same time, some older churches lost members as young people went elsewhere, and had to borrow to survive. Some in the church lending industry say aggressive lenders pushed church mortgages, too.

“Some of the mentality that you saw taking hold of the residential marketplace probably shifted into the church,” said Dan Mikes, executive vice president of the church banking division of Bank of the West, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas. “Lenders loaned far too much, they loaned into lofty projections of future growth, and they just saddled the churches with far too much debt.”

At least a quarter of religious properties have mortgages, according to an analysis of property and mortgage filings in 115 United States counties completed for The New York Times by First American CoreLogic, a data provider in California. But that number is far higher than it would have been without the mortgage boom. The number of mortgages issued to churches in those counties in 2005 was 50 percent higher than in 2002, the analysis showed.

Foreclosure filings have fallen on the doorstep of 254 properties, or 0.31 percent of the 82,441 churches studied. The percentage is higher when churches without mortgages are excluded. St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Easton, Md., exemplifies the optimistic assumptions that fed church lending. St. Andrew’s had only 35 members in 2005 when it moved from a rented storefront to a Gothic revival-style chapel built in 1866. The building cost $795,000, but the church borrowed $50,000 from one lender and $850,000 from the Talbot Bank of Easton, according to W. David Morse, a vice president of the bank.

The church hoped its congregation would expand at a time when some Episcopalians were leaving their churches to join Anglican parishes. But by early this year, St. Andrew’s had not grown much and had fallen behind on its mortgage. By August, as interest racked up, it owed Talbot Bank $884,657.

At auction this month, Talbot took possession of the church for $700,000, giving the congregation weeks to move out unless the auction is contested.

“In hindsight, any loan that goes bad will invariably look ‘ambitious,’ ” Mr. Morse said. “At the time the loan was made, the board of directors obviously believed” in the vision and projected growth of the church.

Fewer than 30 people attended the church service on the Sunday before Christmas, and most kept their coats on, shivering in the cold because the heat had been turned down to save money.

“I bid your prayers for this parish and that God will continue to sustain it,” Bishop Joel Johnson told the congregation.

To be sustained, a church does not necessarily need a home. For instance, the Living Truth Church in Des Moines was foreclosed on last summer and now the congregation meets in a local Boys & Girls Club. In Houston, the St. Agnes Baptist Church was foreclosed on in September, but the bank that took over simply rented the building back to the church.

Church mortgages, long a niche product, became more mainstream in the past decade. Bank of America and other national banks expanded their practices, and in the last few years specialty financing companies began bundling church mortgages to be sold to investors. Moody’s Investors Service, for instance, rated a handful of church mortgage securitizations just before the financial crisis.

MARK KEGAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Living Truth Church lost this Des Moines building to foreclosures and uses a Boys & Girls Club.

Churches are also included in a small fraction of commercial mortgage-backed securities, according to Trepp, a New York research business that tracks the commercial mortgage market. But there are few public filings by churches, which are not required to disclose details of their bond offerings to the public. One exception is church real estate investment trusts, or REITS, which are required to file disclosures with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In one such filing, by the Church Loan and Investments Trust in Amarillo, Tex., nonperforming church loans increased 14 percent for the quarter that ended on Sept. 30, compared with the quarter a year earlier.

STEVE RUARK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

St. Andrew's Anglican Church in Easton, Md., defaulted on its mortgage and must move.

That real estate investment trust also disclosed in its filing that in 2004 it increased the levels of debt that it would allow its churches to take on to 85 percent of the value of their properties, from 67 percent. No national regulations govern church debt levels.

Veterans of church lending predicted most church loans would not fall into the same kind of trouble as the housing and office markets.

“You’re beginning with a borrower that considers it a moral obligation to repay his loan,” said Timothy Horner, a partner with Warner Norcross & Judd, a law firm in Grand Rapids, Mich., who has worked on church financing issues.

That seems to be the case at the Seabreeze Church in Huntington Beach, Calif. The church reduced its monthly payments by switching to an interest-only mortgage with its lender, the Evangelical Christian Credit Union.

Pastor Unrau and his staff now work out of home offices or the Sunday school classrooms instead of separate office space. Each week, he posts the church’s expenses and the amount of donations. Last week, giving totaled $14,066 and expenses were $29,693. Pastor Unrau said people at churches are sometimes not realistic enough in their thinking. “ ‘Well, maybe God’s just going to make this go away,’ ” he said. “But, actually, we have a responsibility for the situation.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times, Business, of Saturday, December 27, 2008.

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