Something that should be noted about the whole chapel thing and the finances of Southwestern that non-Fort Worth people would miss is that Fort Worth is built over the Barnett Shale geological formation. The Barnett Shale is a natural gas bearing rock layer that can have the gas released and recovered through laterally-drilled wells and fracking. When the price of natural gas spiked about a decade ago, drillers came to Fort Worth to make deals with landowners and mineral rights holders to extract the gas. Because there was such a race to get the wells drilled, exploration companies were signing agreements with homeowners, churches, schools, etc. so they could drill wells. In the earliest days, they focused on large property holders such as Southwestern Seminary, TCU, Tarrant County College, and persons who owned ranches just outside the city limits. Southwestern entered into a lease during the period where they were offering up to $5,000/acre for a signing bonus and 20-25% royalties on everything extracted. Later, the bonus money went up to $25,000/acre and 25-27% royalties for extracted gas.
There were lots of people and institutions who had a windfall of bonus money and then assumed that they would have a steady royalty income pouring in for the next 20 years or so. For instance, I had a friend who pocketed more than $250,000 in bonus money and was earning about $15,000/month in royalties during that time. He quit his job and devoted himself to doing humanitarian work in Haiti for a couple of years until the money ran out. He doesn't regret the work he did in Haiti, but he regrets not saving most of the money he received He assumed it would continue for years.
The reason the money ran out is that the drillers were so successful that the price of natural gas fell very quickly and many of the wells became unprofitable to operate -- so they were capped. That shut off the royalties for many.
Looking at the Texas Railroad Commission's GIS viewer, seven planned and permitted wells were not drilled, one is "shut in" (aka capped), and two might be operating at an extremely low level. I believe they also signed with Chesapeake who unscrupulously created a shell company to purchase gas from themselves at a greatly discounted rate and then resold it on the open market so that they would not have to pay as much in royalties to mineral rights holders.
So it is quite likely that Southwestern made plans regarding projected income that did not happen. At the time of signing their lease, they were extremely optimistic about the gas wells securing the financial future of the seminary, and gave each person on the payroll a signing bonus (I think it was $100) to their pay checks to celebrate their good fortune. There's a very good chance that the bonus money was nearly all of the money they received.
Financial planners tell us that winning the lottery, gaining an inheritance, or receiving some other type of financial windfall is often financially devastating to a person because it distorts common sense financial planning. People make commitments they can't afford and spend money they should be storing away for the future. I strongly suspect that was the type of thinking that went on when Paige Patterson and others began a number of large projects on a campus of an intitution that was losing student enrollment.