While it is true that ABs can just about do what they want, if a local church can’t pay its bills and keep the doors open, it falls on the AB as the one who has to deal with it as ‘a real estate asset.’ I would bet money, if I were a gambler, that an AB would not just sell a local church property if it could have stayed open and paying its bills. It is not their goal to close churches. The ABs I’ve known have done all they could to keep struggling churches open, and always took it personally if they failed. I have seen ABs actually take an associate pastor from one church (that needed him) and place him as lead pastor in a dying church situation that only ended up prolonging the last gasp of the lifeless church for a year and a half and