What is the property gospel?

The property gospel is the belief that if a church doesn't own its own building, it cannot fully share the gospel with its neighborhood. The philosophy was started by the owner of Lakewood Streams Property Services, Inc., a commercial real estate agency. His team, which operates under the guise of a parachurch ministry, holds conferences intending to draw pastors into an endless cycle of fund-raising so they can move out of their high school cafeterias and strip malls and into twenty-acre properties. Although, mostly it's to make the owner of Lakewood Streams a lot of money.

Lakestream Woods sells their services by emphasizing how owning a building makes it easier to evangelize. They pull out carefully crafted statistics from the 1950s about how churches that had buildings had church services. They then show pie charts about how pastors with bigger buildings tended to get paid on time more than those who met on the beach. My favorite is the correlation between the number of churches that meet in grade school cafeterias and the number of vape shops. Woodstream Lakes then talks about how you can't share the gospel in a grade school, but you can in a vape shop, and you definitely can in a church building.

[Well, depends on the "church."]

What Stream Woodslakeswoods conveniently neglects to mention is the money saved by renting space on Sundays. Without the expenses of owning property, smaller churches can pay their pastors better, and members can go on missions trips or work for non-profit ministries.

Can a church spread the gospel better if they have property? Sure, if the seekers come to that property. In truth, God doesn't want every church to own a building any more than He wants every Christian to have prosperity. The owner of Woodstreams WoodLakes Woods knows that.

But if he can't convince you to buy, he doesn't get that fourth house in Bali.

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