What do you do with churches that have long since lost their congregations?In Germany, some are put up for sale, and get converted into luxury apartments, offices, theatres, bistros and restaurants.
From massive metropolitan cathedrals to village chapels, some 35,000 Protestant and Catholic church spires rise above German towns.
These buildings cover some seven billion square metres.
But while the continent remains rooted in Christianity, devotion is ebbing and church attendance is in decline.
Houses of worship have fallen victim to a deepening financial crisis within Germany's two most powerful religious denominations, with studies suggesting that as many as 30 to 40 percent of the nation's churches will have to close in the coming years.
With vast numbers of people turning their backs on the church in the past 30-40 years, funding has become a serious issue.
What is new is not that less and less people attend church services -- that has been evident for decades now -- but that more and more parishioners are contracting out of church membership to avoid paying church tax. Since the early 19th century, Germany's Catholic and Protestant churches have enjoyed a constitutional right to levy taxes -- a privilege that helped many churches become wealthy organisations.
But now, with tax revenues dipping dramatically, churches are hard pressed to finance their many schools, kindergartens, missions and social programmes home and abroad. Dramatic demographic changes in the past 30 years, in cities like Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne, have also impacted on church life.
This is very much the case in Berlin, where tens of thousands of Turkish guest workers, most of them Muslims, arrived to settle with their families in the once predominantly Protestant districts of the city in the sixties and seventies. In Berlin-Schoeneberg, the historic Luther Church soon found itself without a congregation, as its mainly elderly members passed on and the number of Turks in the area multiplied.
Refusing to tear down the 1894-built church, Protestant administrators agreed a deal in 2002 whereby the American Church in Berlin (ACB) would lease it under a five-year payment arrangement. Now, after spending three million euros renovating its interior, the ACB is the new owner of the church.
In similar arrangements, two Protestant churches in Berlin's Wedding and Tempelhof districts now belong to the Serbian Orthodox Church. More than 8,000 people from Serbia live in the German capital.
In 2000, the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany received a total of 8.8 billion euros (11.1 billion dollars) in church tax revenues, but since then amounts have dipped. In 2003 it was 8.5 billion euros, and in 2004, 7 billion, with officials nervous that the downward trend will continue.
In 1990 the nation's two most powerful church organisations boasted 28 million members; today it is around 21 million, with the Catholic Church losing over two million of its flock and the Protestant Church more than double that figure since reunification (October 1990).
German church administrators face a tricky choice: either they divest themselves of some of their real estate assets -- estimated between 350-500 billion euros -- or they lay off personnel and cut back on social programmes.
Aachen, one of Germany's bigger dioceses, struggles to make ends meet. A third of its staff has been axed in downsizing plans aimed at plugging the hole in the church's coffers, and saving 60 million euros in costs in 2008.
Three years ago in Bielefeld in western Germany, the 1897-built Martini Church (St. Martin's Church) was converted into a restaurant called GlueckundSeligkeit (Luck and Happiness) by local businessman Achim Fiolka.
It was an unprecedented event -- the first time a big church had been reinvented as a place for wining and dining in Germany. "Where the devout once offered praise to God, today connoisseurs of fine food and drink indulge their passion on 620 metres of floor space," wrote Matthias Pankau, the Leipzig-based bureau chief of IDEA, a Protestant wire service and news magazine.
For a parish to relinquish a much-loved church is no easy matter, especially when the result is it will be used for commercial purposes. But such is the cold wind of reality today that German churches are now only too happy if there's a suitable buyer -- it's preferable to having churches torn down.
"It's an emergency situation, one that doesn't bring us enormous profits, but enables the church to get rid of a financial burden," says Johann Hinrich Claussen, one of Hamburg's Protestant provosts.
Katrin Goering-Eckardt, a Green Party deputy in the German parliament, told 300 delegates at a recent church congress in Wittemberg that "ultimately the Church knows it needs to reappraise its role and find a new place for faith within contemporary society. We need a worldly church, not another-worldly church."
At the Elias Church, in Berlin's eastern Prenzlauer Berg district, hymns have in recent years been replaced by the shouts and squeals of children cavorting in a cavernous sanctuary rigged with tunnels and platforms in place of pews. The Elias Church, with its red brick arches and towering spires, is today a children's museum.
In Cologne and Potdam two former churches now serve as luxurious private residences for an architect and city businessman. In Milow, a village in the eastern state of Brandenburg, a branch of Sparkasse (Germany's savings bank) functions in a former Protestant chapel.
The Martin Luther Memorial Church, a Nazi era church in Marienfelde, a southern suburb of Berlin, has now been put up for sale. Consecrated in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, it once featured Swastikas and the idealised carvings of Aryan figures.
Three years ago it was closed when its 150-foot-high tower, damaged during war-time bombing raids, was found to be unstable. Parishioners failed to raise the 3.5 million euros needed to restore it. Parish priest Hans-Martin Brehm told IPS he would like to see it preserved -- possibly as a museum or documentation centre warning of the evil of fascism and dictatorship, or even as a concert hall.
But so far no offers have been forthcoming. Talk of demolishing the building and having the site redeveloped have been rejected by the church authorities. Engelbert Luetke Baldrup, a senior official at the Ministry for Transport, Construction and Urban Affairs, insists that the first goal in dealing with disused churches is to prevent them from being torn down.
"No matter whether in cities or in the countryside, churches are often the most interesting edifices in the region, and people identify with them far more than with other buildings," he said.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce