Chapter 1: What historical significance does the Central Church of Christ hold in Nashville?
There'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 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. He 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.
Here's Mathis giving a lecture in 2019.
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Chapter 2: How did Sean Mathis become involved with the church?
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. Then they had started to rent out those parking lots.
So those parking lots were 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 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. When 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. He 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.
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Chapter 3: What accusations were made against Sean Mathis regarding the church's management?
But before they made their move, the Nashville Church of Christ, under Mathis, sued Amy and the Burtons.
Amy Grant and her family get 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? But 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 religions.
There'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, expresses 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. So 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 died in their wills, they would leave money to their churches. So there's a lot of cash there.
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