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This article was published 17/7/2010 (3728 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- About halfway through Sunday service at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, as worshippers passed around the collection plate, a chorus of screams pierced the air.

Chunks of the ceiling in the 52-year-old church near Hickory , N.C., came crashing down on the crowd of 200 or so, striking about 14, who were later treated and released from nearby hospitals. A jagged piece of the ceiling, roughly three metres by three metres, dangled from exposed wires over the back pews as deacons struggled to guide panicking worshippers from the building.

AP PHOTO/TELEGRAPH HERALD, JEREMY PORTJE The sun sets between the steeples of Sacred Heart Church in Dubuque, Iowa.

"My jaw just dropped," the Rev. Antonio Logan said. "I thought, 'This can't be real.' "

Caring for old church facilities is an increasingly acute problem, particularly for mainline Protestant denominations. As membership declines and budgets shrink, the beautiful edifices of American Christianity can feel like weights dragging down churches that are forced to spend money on maintenance and repairs instead of ministry, charity and other Gospel-derived imperatives.

"It's hard times in paradise," said the Rev. William Quick, pastor emeritus at Metropolitan United Methodist Church in Detroit, Mich.

Metropolitan's Gothic church was completed in 1926 at a cost of $1.6 million, at the time the most expensive Methodist house of worship ever built. By 1949, it had 10,300 members, more than any Methodist congregation in the world.

Today, membership is at 375, in a city where Methodist churches have fallen from 77 to 16. Its decline in fortune is mirrored among such other Protestant denominations as Lutherans, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, which have seen membership drop in recent decades while the average age of remaining worshippers increases.

A church can be an anchor for a whole neighbourhood, and its loss can hurt beyond the borders of a single congregation, as a coalition of residents and preservationists in Charlotte, N.C., discovered when they tried to save the old Garr Memorial Church from the wrecking ball.

The building had stood for nearly 70 years, with its iconic rooftop "Jesus Saves" sign a beacon that locals used as a landmark when giving directions.

On a Wednesday in July, the old building came down after its new owners, the New Bethel Church of God in Christ, could not justify refurbishing the building.

"It's regretful, but the economics, just the roof repair cost was just excessive," said Bobby Drakeford, a real estate developer and consultant for New Bethel.

Making things harder is that many pastors are loath to set aside money for maintenance that could be used on missionary work or charitable services like soup kitchens, said the Rev. Ken Carder, a retired Methodist bishop and professor at the Duke University Divinity School.

"I was the same way about endowments when I started out. You know, 'Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon the earth, where moth and rust corrupt,' " he said, quoting the Gospel of Matthew.

A reluctance to spend money on upkeep has caught the attention of churches' insurers, who are making more maintenance recommendations since the start of the recession, according to Rick Schaber, risk control manager for Church Mutual Insurance, a Wisconsin-based company that insures more than 100,000 religious institutions in the United States.

"We're finding some things are starting to get a little bit worse," he said. "If our customers are forced to make cuts, we're finding that maintenance budgets are commonly the first place they look."

-- The Associated Press