How Parkview Christian Church Created a Financial Win During Crisis

Parkview Christian Church in Orland Park, Illinois is a robust multisite church in the Chicago area. They are a strong and active church where, pre-COVID, they averaged more than 7,500 adults in weekly attendance across their three campuses. A few months ago, Parkview had the opportunity to refinance their debt and sought Ministry Solution’s help and guidance for this endeavor. 

Our recent article, Status of the Market: The Church Can Thrive in Crisis, identifies the opportunity for churches to restructure long-term debt based on very open credit markets and low, long-term interest rates. Ministry solutions was originally hired by Parkview to see them through development of their multisite model. After further analysis of what can be accomplished, Parkview took us up on our offer to refinance their debt and find a new banking partner.

Parkview is blessed to have stable leadership that has outstretched many years. Dr. Tim Harlow has served as Senior Pastor since 1990, Bill Brown has been the Executive Pastor since 2003, and Wayne Krahn served as the Executive Director of Finance from 2003 to July 2020, at which point he retired.  Ken Andresen joined the team in early 2020 to replace Wayne. Ken began his career as an auditor for KPMG. He later served as CFO then President of a regional transportation company with more than 500 employees.

The church found a potential new lender through an internal recommendation. This lender proposed refinancing the existing debt and offered additional banking services.  Ministry Solutions brought the church three additional offers to compare to their original offer, all with a lower interest rate and more flexible terms than the initial offer. All three of these offers were at or below 3% on a long term fixed rate, a significant improvement from the first offer. Ultimately the church chose one of the Ministry Solutions’ offers to move forward with. The final offer from the winning bank refinanced the debt, provided a line of credit, and enabled capacity for future expansion.

The interest rate from the winning bank provided Parkview six-figure savings over the seven-year term from the initial bank’s offer.

We are thankful for the opportunity to partner with Parkview Christian Church and are thrilled that this refinance allows them to redeploy capital into their ministry and further along their mission, to find the lost one.

Ministry Solutions has been able to refinance and restructure debt for churches all over the country. Our projects have resulted in more than $700,000,000 in funding and millions of dollars in savings now being redirected into ministry. We would love the opportunity to uncover savings for your church. Our heart is to protect your purpose and take the financial burden off your shoulders in order to create ministry capacity for you and your team. 

Are you interested in learning more? Let's Get Started to learn what the Ministry Solutions team could do for you!