- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52667802
Experts project an estimated 100,000 churches in the US will close or be repurposed over the next decade.
Many churches will be unable to escape this “tsunami” of closings — a grim trajectory one pastor described as, “Every year the pews are getting emptier and the collection plates getting lighter.”
We might be a bit ahead here in Germany. A lot of churches around me have been closed or repurposed some years ago. Including the one where I grew up.
I think some of the contributing factors are how church never modernizes or listens to the people. Despite Christianity claiming to be about people or some kind of community of people. And where I’m at, they just massively cut funding to youth projects. So no wonder they’re struggling with succession. They’re still catering to old people, who will go to heaven sometime soon-ish and they might leave donations in their last will. But there’s no replacement for their followers becoming extinct, since they don’t have anything of value to offer to younger people. And they’re now actively throwing them overboard because young people’s spaces and concerns are just (financial) ballast.
So… I think this is largely self-inflicted. I mean they could make an effort to offer something of value. Something that contributes to people’s lives in the 21st century. Or relates to their real-world wants and needs. But they don’t do any of that.
Here there is a common theme of daycare/church combos. It’s money, using Sunday school space for daycare during the week. It’s likely those will survive.
Yes. Their current scheme is to run daycares and elderly care institutions. The former are very profitable. I think elderly care has become less profitable over time. At least I’ve seen some of them close because of money and a shortage in trained professionals. And hospitals (which they have as well) aren’t profitable either.
I wonder where they’re going with this, though. There’s nothing unique about a business which runs daycares. I think transitioning into that will cost them their identity. And they’ll become hooked on state money because that’s who funds the lion’s share of all daycares, schools etc.
Hospitals tend to be profitable, religious affiliated or otherwise. Religion, aside from some seventh day adventist institutions, tends to be more veneer. Business CEOs and doctors gone over to business run them, not actual nuns or religious leaders.
It would be highly unusual for an urban hospital, in an area where doctors want to live and work, to go out of business. Medicine is contingent on location, locations where doctors want to live and work. For hospitals, that means specialists and surgeons, because that’s where the money is.
The loss leader of medicine is mother baby, and NICU. The latter are commonly referred to a million dollar babies, and that was well before 2020 inflation happened. Birth centers exist in the red, which is why not every hospital has one. Surgeons in other areas earn the money to support a birth center. That gastric bypass? That open heart surgery? Paying for mother baby to stay open.
When hospitals close birth centers or rural locations it’s not about religion, it’s straight up income stream based on earning doctors at that location, or how capable the city location is at covering the rural location while still maintaining profit.
Non-profit is a tax status that isn’t what it sounds like. There is always profit for a hospital or it would be closed.
we saw a wave of closures two years ago, and are about to see another one when the medicaid cuts hit after the november elections.
Very likely going to be a focused rural and birth center hit. Rural hospitals have a 60% reliance on Medicare/Medicaid as their baseline income stream. Even then, Medicaid benefits never cover the actual cost of giving birth, only a portion.
Major urban areas lean on the 30% side for Medicare/Medicaid dependence. Again, it’s all about the capacity to provide things like cardiac cath lab, gastric bypass, knee replacement, etc. All the specialty areas that require specialty doctors to want to live in the area. They won’t close.
There was already a wave of downsizing and penny pinching in response to the Big Betrayal Bill passing. Layoffs. Closures of less lucrative units. Less new grad hires. Weekend programs dissolving. Ancillary staff like supply runners, housekeeping, phlebotomy, transport, the people who answer the phones, all cut back by both position # and hours. A lot of night shift in transport and supply were laid off. And dietary. Forget selecting, you get what you get and don’t eat if you don’t like it. Even nurses were cut.
All of that in quiet anticipation.
But yes, your rural hospitals, especially birth centers, will likely close.
meanwhile conservatives want more white babies. lol
Yea. You can’t keep birth centers open without Medicaid and yet here we are.
Safe birth/pregnancy, historically, hasn’t been a top priority though. It’s just women, after all.
gross but true; same with ‘it’s just dead babies after all’… gross, but true.