The Battle Over a Church Worth Millions
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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.
The church will thrive as much or more than we've ever seen it because we have advantages that others did not have in the past. We have the internet. We have the internet.
Mathis was quickly elevated to leadership. And before long, he effectively took control of the church. But for some congregants, things did not go the way they had imagined.
The accusation that has been leveled against the people who took over this church is that their goals were primarily financial and that they were trying to basically use the assets of an older church with an older congregation, take it over and use it for their own benefit.
An attorney who represents the church said his client committed no wrongdoing. Mathis declined our request for an interview. Mathis' arrival kicked off a multi-year legal battle over the church's fate. And the situation has shed a light on a problem facing churches across the country. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Thursday, December 18th. Coming up on the show, who should own the Central Church of Christ?
The church at the center of this fight was co-founded in 1925 by a man called A.M. Burton. He was a well-to-do insurance executive in Nashville who had a strong sense of faith.
So he sets up a church in downtown Nashville, which at the time had a lot of poor people from the country moving into the city, to help people, to help young families, to give out food, and to bring them to Christ. That was his idea.
Burton named it the Central Church of Christ. And it did more than just preach the gospel. The church was a community center. It fed the homeless and provided medical services. It even had a daycare. At its height, the church had hundreds of members.
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.
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