“Christ said, ‘I build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail,’ ” he said. “That’s the bank. The bank is a gate of hell. We are not fighting against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers of darkness and spirits of wickedness in high places.”
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Foreclosing on God’s house: Sunrise church facing eviction
SUNRISE — The clock is ticking for 300 parishioners at the United Pentecostal Church in Sunrise.
With the church in foreclosure limbo, Pastor G. Oliver Barnes says a banker arrived Tuesday morning without warning to change the locks.
TD Bank has given Barnes and his flock two weeks to clear out, the pastor said.
“We need more time – at least a few months,” Barnes said. “We are at our wit’s end.”
It turns out the bankers failed to change one of the locks, so Barnes plans to hold Sunday services at the church, perhaps for the last time.
The bank won the church at a foreclosure sale on July 18, but had not yet taken title to the property when it changed the locks, Barnes says. The bank failed to give Barnes the required 10 days to object to the sale.
“That’s a no-no,” said real estate attorney Gary Singer, who is not representing the church. “You need to follow the [legal] steps” in the foreclosure process.
Rest here…
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It’s typically very hard to finance a church because they make absolutely terrible colatteral … If they paid $5.7M in 2006 it’s worth at most $2.5M today … I’d let them have it (if they can show ownership) and rent space elsewhere for 10% of their current monthly $35k payment.
Boy have you got that right. I remember back in the early nineties, when the church across the street from where I worked closed down to move to a bigger building outside of town. That white elephant sat vacant for YEARS!, and this was during normal, non-bubble times. This was a well built, up to code huge brick edifice built in the early seventies that had just simply been outgrown. The state police used the parking lot as a tractor trailer inspection pull off spot since vehicles found to be unsafe could just sit there at no cost to the rig owners until they were fixed because nobody cared. Finally the church was torn down to make way for a car dealership. Bottom line, any bankster who finances a church deserves the sure to come butt reaming. If anything goes wrong, finance-wise, for the congregation, that loan is toast with a big useless collateral!