Thanks for clarifying that as well. I must've greatly misunderstood how that has traditionally worked. :)
If you read the Pillars of the Earth, (Ken Follett), you would certainly have been left with the impression that the "Mother Church" footed the bill for the local congregations.
In actual fact, Cathedrals, which often are the seats of Bishopdoms, are paid for with pooled funds, but that is rarely the case for local facilities. There are some mission churches around.
Can't speak for the other denominations, but what TaxRelief says about the "money-grab" clauses is exactly right in the case of the Episcopal Church USA. In 1979, ECUSA decided to adopt a complete rewrite of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer & begin ordaining women as priests. The schism that resulted cost ECUSA something in the neighborhood of 100,000 parishoners. Worse (for ECUSA, that is) they lost property & endowments when some whole congregations left. The loss had to run into millions. As you can imagine, the national church was more than a little upset that 100,000 had left, taking their wallets, their property & their endowments with them. The "Dennis" Canon was passed at national convention & implemented 8 years later. This is ECUSA's "money-grab" clause that says: while legal title is held by the local church vestry, the church property is held in trust to be used as a place of divine worship of the Episcopal Church USA. Since most of the clauses seem to be "carbon copies" of one another, I wouldn't be surprised to find that ECUSA "money-grab" clause was the benchmark for the others.
But, it's not the history of this that's important. The bottom line is this...the Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etal. are all following ECUSA down the same destructive path...namely, total acceptance of ordaining non-celibate homosexuals to the ministry & same-sex "marriage." They can see the disaster this has wrought in ECUSA & they understand very well that many more Episcopalians would have left that denomination over the past year & a half, if ECUSA had not been able to hold their church property hostage. More importantly, without that "land grab" clause, the Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etal. will be left with no way to bludgeon their orthodox believers into "accepting" the pansexual agenda that is sweeping through their denomination - just as it has already done in ECUSA.
These clauses nothing less than ecclesiastical EXTORTION. What do you suppose Jesus would have to say about that?