A Camp the Church Couldn’t Afford: A Presbytery’s $70,000-a-Month Lesson in Debt

• National Capital Presbytery sold Camp Glenkirk’s 233 acres to a homebuilder
• It bought and developed 358 acres at Meadowkirk in Middleburg, Virginia
• Debt payments reached roughly $70,000 a month
• Meadowkirk was sold in 2013 to an independent board

A Presbyterian pastor has set out what his presbytery learned from buying, developing and then selling a camp it could not afford, in a February 2015 article for The Presbyterian Outlook.

The Rev Henry G. Brinton explained that National Capital Presbytery, which covers the Washington area, sold its 233-acre Camp Glenkirk to a national homebuilder in the late 1990s. It then acquired 358 acres at Meadowkirk in Middleburg, Virginia, and borrowed millions of dollars to develop the site.

The debt proved crushing. Meadowkirk could not survive without the presbytery making debt payments of roughly $70,000 a month. In 2013 the property was sold to buyers who continued to run it as a Christian retreat centre, Meadowkirk at Delta Farm, under an independent board. Presbyterian Scott Henderson became its executive director, and Brinton served on the transition board.

Brinton wrote that debt obligations create long-term burdens that are hard to transfer or escape, and that losing an asset brings real grief alongside the financial loss, because money invested in the property would never be recouped. The outcome, he argued, still achieved the presbytery’s aim of placing the camp under an independent board, and he concluded that “God can be trusted to be involved in any process that is grounded in honesty and integrity”.

The story is a warning about church development projects financed mainly by borrowing. Land values can make a sale look like a windfall, but the cost of servicing loans on a replacement property can quickly outweigh it.

Jamaican churches and denominations planning camps, retreat centres or new sanctuaries should test the monthly debt payment against realistic income before they sign. A phased build, paid for as funds come in, may be slower but is far safer than a project that depends on the whole denomination carrying a loan for years.

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