Caring for old church facilities is an increasingly acute problem, particularly for mainline Protestant denominations.

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

Chunks of the ceiling in the 52-year-old church near Hickory 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 10 feet by 10 feet, dangled from exposed wires over the back pews as deacons struggled to guide panicking worshipers from the building.

“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.

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.