The Battle Over a Church Worth Millions

0:05There's a church in Nashville, Tennessee that's been around for generations. It's a five-story red brick building that was once a pillar of the community. And for many, many decades, the church was really thriving down there in the heart of Nashville. That's my colleague Cam McWhorter. Cam says that like many churches around the country, eventually the congregation shrank and got older. The church over time dwindled. Ultimately, by the late 2010s, it had, you know, maybe 30 people going to it. It had a lot of assets, but it didn't have a lot of people. Then, one Sunday in 2017, a man named Sean Mathis showed up.

0:52He came for a service there with his wife. Mathis was in his 40s, much younger than the average member. And the congregation, which was desperate for newcomers, welcomed them with open arms. They knew it was declining. They knew there were issues. So when Sean showed up, at first they were very excited. Mathis said he wanted to get involved and started sharing his thoughts about how the church could grow. What were some of his ideas? He was very interested in talking about reviving the church and bringing in more members and expanding its mission to the whole world via the internet. He had big plans.

1:32Here's Mathis giving a lecture in 2019. The church will thrive as much or more than we've ever seen it. Because we have advantages that others did not have in the past. We have the internet. We have the internet. Mathis was quickly elevated to leadership. And before long, he effectively took control of the church. But for some congregants, things did not go the way they had imagined.

2:06The accusation that has been leveled against the people who took over this church is that their goals were primarily financial and that they were trying to basically use the assets of an older church with an older congregation, take it over, and use it for their own benefit. An attorney who represents the church said his client committed no wrongdoing. Mathis declined our request for an interview. Mathis' arrival kicked off a multi-year legal battle over the church's fate, and the situation has shed a light on a problem facing churches across the country.

2:45Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Thursday, December 18th.

2:58Coming up on the show, who should own the Central Church of Christ?

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4:14The church at the center of this fight was co-founded in 1925 by a man called A.M. Burton. He was a well-to-do insurance executive in Nashville who had a strong sense of faith. So he sets up a church in downtown Nashville, which at the time had a lot of poor people from the country moving into the city, to help people, to help young families, to give out food, and to bring them to Christ. That was his idea. Burton named it the Central Church of Christ. And it did more than just preach the gospel. The church was a community center. It fed the homeless and provided medical services. It even had a daycare.

4:54At its height, the church had hundreds of members. But in the decades following World War II, more and more people started moving into the newly developed suburbs outside the city. And as they did, its membership declined. But the church still had some valuable assets. First, there was the building, which Nashville, as many people know, has been absolutely booming in recent years. There's all kinds of restaurants and new stores and museums. So that property became hot. Secondly, the church had obtained two parking lots that it had used back in the day for people to come and park and go to the church.

5:36Then they had started to rent out those parking lots. So those parking lots are worth a lot of money. The church is tax-exempt as a house of worship, and the building itself is valued at$11 million, according to a 2025 assessment. And those two parking lots bring in about$40 ,000 a month. And then there were people who had left, particularly one person had left a large amount of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, into an endowment fund for a missionary work, for the church to sponsor missionaries to go in the United States and abroad. to spread the word. Altogether, the church had some$3 million in the bank.

6:20When Sean Mathis showed up in 2017, all of those assets, the building, the parking lots, and the savings, were being managed by a very small group of aging congregants. He gets on the board that controls the church, and he quickly takes over as a leader of the committee that runs the church. and he immediately begins to make decisions. After he took control, the church was renamed the Nashville Church of Christ. And according to court filings, it started paying both Mathis and his father six-figure salaries and gave them housing stipends. He was talking about setting up a nonprofit. He set up a website.

7:00He was creating a theological institute that was going to be doing global missionary work. He sent one of his supporters to go study at college. He sent himself to Oxford to study. And under his leadership, the church stopped its weekly services. All this was very disconcerting to people who had been longtime members. In a statement provided by its lawyer, the Nashville Church of Christ disputed that the church had been shut down. The letter also said, quote, quote, changes to the church's leadership happened according to the same regular processes that had always occurred at the church. Some of the church's longtime members told Cam that when they started to question Mathis's leadership, they began to feel unwelcome.

7:48They felt they were being pushed out and there were questions that weren't being answered. They started to have arguments over the finances and the financing of the church, and they eventually made the painful decision to leave. In the letter, the church's attorney said, quote, the members who were replaced as church leaders weren't pushed out. They were simply replaced by the next generation, just as has happened in church bodies for thousands of years. All of these changes started to come to the attention of the great-grandchildren of the church's original co-founder, A.M. Burton. My family has many generations in Nashville, but the only time I ever entered the building was when I was five and a half years old and I went to his funeral.

8:32One of those great-grandchildren is Amy Grant, as in six-time Grammy winner Amy Grant. Around Nashville, Amy Grant is considered music royalty. She's been called the queen of Christian pop, with a string of hits like her 90s single Baby Baby, which my sister and I used to dance to when we were kids.

8:54There's kind of a bit of a running joke on our podcast about how, like, when I have people on, and I sometimes make a joke about trying to get them to sing, but I think you might be the first person with the actual chops to sing. Okay. Are we singing today? Sadly, no, we are not singing today. Amy politely declined. Okay, back to the story. Amy heard from her cousin Andy Burton, a local dentist, who had caught wind of what Mathis was doing at their great-grandfather's old church. And so Andy was the first one to just start calling. And, you know, there was a recorded message about welcoming people to services.

9:34And finally he went down there and said, hey, it's like boarded up. And then he finally was able to get somebody on the phone. Whoever it was said, is this an adversarial call? And Andy said, no, I just, I'm curious about what's going on at this location. And this was a family property. Even though Amy hadn't gone to the church since her great-grandfather's funeral, she often saw it when she played concerts downtown. I can see the boarded-up church. So my job continues to put me in a sightline of a boarded-up church. Now it's just stripped of everything. It's stripped of everything, including water services and electricity.

10:16I go, yeah, he was my great-grandfather. I might want to step into this. Why did you feel like it was something worth fighting for? Well, I think the intention of A.M. Burton was to create a space that helped the Nashville community, that saw human life as valuable, the housed, the unhoused, in his words, the pauper and the successful businessman. And my cousin and I just saw a situation where what was left of that investment was not being used for anything. And the building's boarded up. But Amy and the Burton family had found a way to fight for control of the church. That's next.

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12:00Here's my colleague Cam again. In the deed, he includes a provision that says, this building is in perpetuity for the Central Church of Christ as long as there's church services. And if there aren't, then the property reverts back to the family. Remember, the church had stopped offering services in the building after Mathis took over. So Amy and her family thought they could use that provision in the original deed to try and regain control of the church. It's amazing that your great-grandfather had put that line in the deed in the first place. I know. Yeah, it's crazy. In 2019, the Burton family hired a lawyer and prepared to fight for ownership of the building.

12:48But before they made their move, the Nashville Church of Christ, under Mathis, sued Amy and the Burtons. Amy Grant and her family gets sued by the church saying that that provision in the deed is inapplicable here. And that starts basically a years-long legal war. In a statement, Mathis' lawyer said that attempts to take control of the building and oust Mathis are motivated by the church's rising property value. For seven years, the church was stuck in legal limbo. Courts don't like to get involved in this. It's the First Amendment. It's the freedom of religion. Do whatever you want. You know, you run your place, how do you want to run it?

13:28But there are instances, and they're increasingly popping up, where people are seeing these assets coming in and using them in ways that divert from the original intent or the intent of the religion.

13:46There's actually a term for the kind of hostile takeover that Mathis has been accused of Steeplejacking Steeplejacking is like carjacking A group or an individual comes along Usually a younger person to the elderly congregation They express his interest in joining the church And the next thing you know, they're in charge Steeplejacking is happening all around the country Especially in the Midwest and South We are in a situation in America where churches are in decline, many of them. And some of them have a lot of assets because they were, at one point in America, churches were incredibly wealthy and prominent in society.

14:29So they'll have buildings that are worth a lot of money. They'll own property that's worth a lot of money. A lot of them, a lot of people, when they die, in their wills, they would leave money to their churches. So there's a lot of cash in a lot of these places, but they have a very small membership often and a very limited group controlling who's in charge of all that. Aren't churches supposed to have some kind of oversight? These are usually congregations that aren't hierarchical like the Catholic Church. You know, the Catholic Church knows all the buildings that it owns. It has its own financial problems, but it knows everything that it owns, and it knows down to the penny, you know, what other assets it has.

15:09small churches don't have that. You know, a small church in a town in the Midwest that was a single congregation, you know, it's really unclear how much money they have. And because steeplejacking most often seems to happen to these independent churches, it's a problem that's hard to track. And because the government is so reluctant to intervene in a lot of these, especially the courts, we don't really have an idea. This case in Nashville is so interesting because it kind of laid it all out there.

15:44After years of fighting, in October, the Burtons and the Nashville Church of Christ settled. They agreed that the building would revert to the estate of A.M. Burton, but the parking lots would stay in the hands of the Nashville Church of Christ and Sean Mathis. The agreement also requires that the property be sold, with the Burton family receiving 80 % of the proceeds and Mathis' group receiving 20%. The church's attorney said his client, quote, made the strategic decision to settle the very narrow litigation related to certain deed restrictions. The attorney also said the church looks forward to investing its portion of the building sale proceeds into its global mission efforts.

16:25Have you thought about writing a song about what happened with the church? Ah, well, a song, it really is a three-and-a-half-minute story. And I don't know how this one's going to end. So I've gotten so many congratulatory, you know, way to go, way to go. The settlement sounds amazing. But to me, really, it's not the end of the game. It feels like a first down. Amy has an idea for how she wants it to end, though. She says she's spoken with groups and philanthropists philanthropists about turning the building into a center to help the homeless. Several groups have already made offers to buy the building and turn it into a base for one or multiple non-profits, according to Burton Family Court filings.

17:09Can you paint a picture for me for what you hope this church becomes? Well, I'd love it to do exactly what Central Church of Christ did. People would gather and sing and pray every week. If somebody was homeless, they were fed without question. I mean, it's not an impossible dream.

17:38This episode has been updated. A previous version incorrectly stated the salary amounts Mathis and his father were paid. We should have said they were paid six-figure salaries. That's all for today. Thursday, December 18th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Thank you for your time. Yeah. Well, forgive me for putting you on the spot one more time, but you want to just like sing the chorus to Baby Baby? I don't.

18:19Okay. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. See you next time.

18:52Hallelujah.