Old churches are for sale all over Europe, and most of them cost less than a parking space in San Francisco. A chapel near Sancerre is listed at 30,000 euros. A Protestant temple in Picardy, pulpit and painted glass included, is 90,000. They are cheap because they are a liability. The roof leaks, the congregation is eleven people, and whoever holds the deed, whether a village of 200, a diocese or a family, would like someone else to pay for the gutters.
I think more people should.
People tell me you will never make money on a church. Correct. You will have nobody to sell it to. Also correct. You buy the building, you fix the roof, you keep the door open, and when you die it is still standing. I call this heritage custodianship. Vandals burn churches down and everybody is upset for a week. Custodianship is the same story run backwards, and it takes thirty years.
Why bother? Look at how we already behave. We fly across the world to stand in front of old stones. We queue for the Pantheon, which has a roof today because in 609 somebody turned Jupiter’s temple into a church and kept using it. The Parthenon had no such luck. It became a gunpowder store and blew up in 1687. Buildings survive when somebody takes them on. Most of the Greek and Roman temples are gone, and we wish they weren’t.
A village church is eight hundred years of work by people who could not read. Stonecutters, glaziers, bell founders, carpenters. I want my great-grandchildren to know that stained glass was a thing people made, and to see some that is still in its window.
Then there are the dead. Families gave these buildings to their villages and asked to be buried in them. Their names are on the floor. Keeping the roof on is the least we owe them.
You do not have to be religious to do this, and you are not handing money to the Church. In France the Catholic Church has not owned its old parish churches since 1905. Many of the chapels and priories on the market were sold off by the Revolution and have been private property for two centuries. Who owns the churches explains who owns what, country by country, and every church on the shortlist names the seller.
This site is a shortlist. I have read the listings, checked the heritage status, and written down what is wrong with each building and what it will cost to put right. Pick one. If you cannot buy a church, give to the people who rescue them.