David didn’t really know what to think of his church’s building. It was in an abandoned old factory, which was kind of neat, thinking of a church in place of where men once worked. The church was itself only a couple of decades old. Its founders had acquired the old factory building for next to nothing and then took years to slowly restore it. David appreciated that story, too. But David knew his church was ugly. And worse, the staff members who maintained it exhibited no sensitivity for design. David wished that he could take over beautifying the space, turning it into something truly special and worthy of his Lord. Maybe some day, he hoped.
Commitments
A church facility is more than a necessity. A church building also represents the membership’s commitments and aspirations. A membership that reclaims an old factory building as a worship space, for instance, admits that we are ourselves restored works in progress. A membership that builds a crystal palace honors a glorious Lord. A membership that rents a beaten-up old community center downtown to offer a church home to the transients and vagrants sees the Lord as reaching for the downtrodden and lost. And a church that develops an indistinguishable suburban facility, efficient to enter and exit for a commoditized worship experience, may conceive of faith as a convenience, luxury good, and transaction. Help your church be thoughtful of where and how it acquires, designs, and improves its facility, so that your church building reflects the best conception of the faith, not its cheapening, embarrassment, or disgrace.
Needs
Church bodies do have space needs. Even a rudimentary gathering for worship needs a room large enough to hold the membership. A sanctuary for worship is the first need that house churches seek to fulfill when their fellowship grows beyond what the home of the leader or host can hold in a single gathering. But a worship space may quickly become only a first need, followed by an entry or assembly space outside the sanctuary, traditionally called a vestibule or narthex. Church offices are a next space need, for the pastor to prepare sermons and counsel members, administrators to manage finances and communications, and directors to pursue ministries. Classrooms for teaching and conference rooms for meeting are a next space need, followed by a multi-use presentation, gathering, and hospitality space with an adjacent kitchen. Restrooms, custodial closets, and storage rooms for sanctuary decorations, ministry resources, and building and grounds equipment are other functional needs. Indoor and outdoor play, prayer, and reflection spaces add to the church’s ministries. A church facility can grow as complex as ministries take it. Help your church plan, design, and raise funds for all ministry needs. The following paragraphs describe in greater detail a church’s primary space needs.
Worship
The capacity and functionality of your church’s worship space or sanctuary are your church’s most important facility needs. Your church’s sanctuary should accommodate the substantial part of your regularly attending church membership. Your membership won’t substantially exceed the capacity of your worship space until you add services to accommodate that growth. People tend not to join overcrowded churches. They won’t even fill every seat. If your sanctuary is filled to 85% at regular services, your sanctuary is full, as far as your membership and guests are concerned. Plan for the right sanctuary capacity. Consider adding services once you reach 85%, unless you prefer to cap your church’s growth at a smaller size than it would otherwise accommodate. Beyond capacity, the keys to the suitability of your church’s worship space include good acoustics and sight lines, and reasonable comfort. Improve acoustics with deadening soundboards and better sound systems with professional help. Sight lines depend either on theater-style sloped floors or a raised platform for the pastor and other worship leaders, and favorable seating arrangements. Improve comfort with padded seating, preferable to plastic chairs or wood pews or benches. Decent sound systems and sight lines, and reasonably comfortable seating, may be conveniences but they’re also increasingly the expectations. They’re also a sign of your church’s respect for its members and guests.
Gathering
While the capacity and functionality of your church’s sanctuary are your church’s priority space needs, the entrance, vestibule, or narthex where members and guests gather immediately outside your church’s worship space or sanctuary may be the most important space in your church. Your church’s sanctuary will hold members and guests for the duration of the service, as long or short as it lasts. By contrast, your church’s entrance will hold members and guests only for as short or long as they wish, when you should generally want them to linger for fellowship. Plan your church’s entranceway to welcome and hold members and guests. Make your church’s entranceway a large, hospitable, and attractive or even beautiful space. The most important activities of a church, referring to worship, prayer, and communion with God, happen in the sanctuary. That’s why people come to church. But the fellowship that heartens and beckons guests to join and members to become active happen in the entranceway. That’s where the meeting, greeting, and earnest conversations take place. A large, well-appointed, clean, and sensitively furnished entranceway with abundant natural lighting can make your church a hospitable and friendly place.
Administration
Every church requires some administration. The more ministries, programs, functions, and operations the church has, and the more staff members the church employs to conduct those activities, the more administrative space the church needs. Your church can’t maintain an up-to-date website without a communications director working steadily away, day after day, in an office with a computer on a desk. Your church can’t collect, secure, count, and account for tithes and offerings without a bookkeeper working steadily away in another office with a computer on a desk. Your church’s pastor can’t prepare sermons and counsel members without an office. Your church’s ministry leaders will also need workstations. Your church’s governing board and ministry teams will need a conference room in which to meet. For churches of any significant size, the church office can be a hive of activity not just Sunday mornings but throughout the week. Plan for administrative space.
Instruction
Churches commonly have classrooms for instruction. To hold a Sunday School, especially a children’s school during the adult worship service, a church needs a classroom and preferably multiple classrooms adjacent to the sanctuary. Youth and adult instruction also benefit from classrooms. A church with an active instructional program may offer classes throughout the week. While your church may be able to stagger classes to maximize the use of a single classroom or couple of classrooms, on Sunday mornings and weekday evenings your church may need not just one or two but multiple classrooms. Plan for enough classrooms to carry out a vibrant program of instruction. If your church lacks teaching spaces, it won’t teach.
Hospitality
Your church can benefit from a large multi-purpose room or area with the capacity to serve as a meal, hospitality, and presentation space. An open area adjacent to your church’s entranceway that your church can cordon off as a presentation and hospitality space could serve as well as a room having four walls and doors. Your church may be able to use the sanctuary for presentations, but the sanctuary seating, pointed toward the platform in front, is not conducive for meals and other meetings and hospitality gatherings where the attendees need tables around which to sit, eat, write, and meet. Moveable tables and seating in the hospitality space make it flexible for gatherings of different sizes and purposes. A kitchen immediately off the hospitality space facilitates meal preparation and serving. Help your church plan a functional and attractive hospitality space.
Acquisition
How your church acquires its facility can go a long way toward determining your church’s success. Your church’s choice of facilities and locations, acquisition price, and means of funding the acquisition all have major significance to your church’s start, mission, survival, growth, budget, and ministries. Do it right, and you’ll set your church up for success. Do it wrong, and you’ll burden your church with a poor location, inadequate facility, and unsustainable debt. Put together a strong facility-acquisition team with wise individuals and professionals with real estate, finance, construction, and legal skills. Churches have unusual hours and uses, not like residential, commercial, office, or industrial uses. When evaluating available properties, examine zoning restrictions, other use restrictions, parking availability, easements, and building codes. Have a professional inspect the property, and have a skilled builder help you evaluate the inspection results. Do not commit to a property’s purchase until your acquisition team is sure that the facility will meet the church’s needs for the foreseeable future. If you do not find a facility suitable for the long term, then consider renting temporary quarters until you do. Don’t buy with a plan to move in a few years. Purchase a temporary facility only if you know that you can redevelop the facility to meet long-term needs and your church can afford redevelopment costs.
Financing
Have a clear, conservative, and achievable plan for financing your church’s facility acquisition. Have your finance team examine acquisition and renovation costs closely, and put in place a sound plan to pay for those costs. Minimize debt in acquisition because debt carries risk. Count the cost. Do not embark on facility acquisition or a building program without ensuring that you know the cost and can pay the cost, even in the face of economic headwinds. A church’s revenue can fluctuate by ten percent or more simply due to economic cycles. Avoid debt if at all possible, in favor of building-fund-campaign financing. If your church must incur debt, do not incur more debt than your church can sustain in a sharp and extended downturn. And do not incur long-term debt but instead only debt that you are confident that your church can pay off in the relatively short term. Understand the full financing costs before committing to a mortgage loan. Avoid variable-rate financing that may make the debt unsustainable after an increase in rates. Start a building-fund campaign as soon as your church determines to acquire a facility. Avoid committing to a purchase until the building-fund campaign has met its target. Better to live within your means while planning for God to provide the means for a suitable facility.
Design
Designing and building a new church facility can be an exciting and rewarding process. New construction enables your church’s building task force to configure a facility suited to the church’s needs. Designing a new facility can take a year or more of close work with a skilled architectural-design and planning team with experience in church design, even before construction commences. Construction itself can take well more than a year. Begin your design process early to ensure that the whole membership has an opportunity to communicate facility needs and preferences, and your church’s building task force can present design options to the membership for evaluation and response. Treat the design process openly and collaboratively, while relying on a task force of respected and trusted church members who have design and construction experience. Have the task force report to your church’s governing board and present the board-reviewed designs to the full membership for final approval. Board and membership participation in the design process can be critical to membership participation in the building-fund campaign and membership support of the construction process.
Construction
Successful construction of a new church facility depends on a number of things all working together. Your church needs to choose a reputable general contractor and construction manager for the work. Your church also needs to continue to work with the architectural firm that led the design process to ensure that the facility’s construction meets the design. Expect the architectural firm and construction manager to conduct regular meetings throughout the year or more of construction. Have a member of the church’s building task force present at the design-construction meetings. That representative should report regularly to the building task force on the construction’s progress, so that the task force can keep the church’s governing board and membership informed. Cost changes, design changes, and other construction issues may arise that the church, not the construction manager, architects, or contractors, should control and approve. The church’s building task force can manage that process. The church should also designate an owner’s representative, whether the church’s operations director, chair of the governing elders, or chair of the building task force, to communicate the church’s approval. Don’t treat construction as a done deal. Manage the process closely to avoid surprises.
Renovation
Renovation of a facility may be your church’s better option over substantial new construction. Successful facility renovation, though, likewise needs a strong architectural design team, construction team, and church-member building task force. Even for modest renovation work, local building officials may require submission and approval of design plans, building permits, and periodic inspections, all generally requiring employment of licensed architects, engineers, and contractors. Within your church, treat renovation with a planning, financing, and approval process involving the church’s membership, like the process described above for facility acquisition and new construction. Renovation can be as sensitive, extensive, and expensive as new construction. Poor process can lead to poor results. Follow a sound process involving wise and skilled representatives of all constituencies, from the church board, leadership, and membership, to the architectural team, builder, bank or lender, community, and government officials.
Participation
Your church may have members who are able and willing to participate in aspects of your church’s construction or renovation of its facility. Treat members of your church who are in the building trades with respect, including them in the design, planning, and construction process. But don’t contract with a member for building services simply because they are a member. Instead, encourage them to submit bids competitive with other non-member contractors. If a member wishes to offer the church a discount-price service, representing substantial donated goods and services, then the bid sheet can reflect that donation, and the construction manager can select the member based on favorable cost and other usual indicators. If church members wish to contribute labor toward the project to reduce the church’s total construction or renovation cost, then consider having the construction manager reserve finish work, painting, clean up, or similar simpler, safer, and lower-risk tasks for members to perform under the close supervision of a skilled church member. Don’t let member participation substantially delay the project, expose members to danger, or reduce the quality of the work. But do let members participate where doing so saves costs and increases member commitment.
Development
A church facility may benefit from further development to remain adequate to support existing church ministries, programs, and events. Facility development also doesn’t have to follow church needs. Facility development can lead a church into new or expanded ministries. Adding an indoor daycare space, children’s place space, youth activities room, prayer room, coffee bar or cafe, woodworking shop, or craft space, or outdoor courtyards, picnic areas, prayer gardens, skate parks, basketball courts, and ball fields, can all support new ministries, extend existing ministries, and promote healthy recreation and fellowship. Don’t miss the opportunity to make your church a fun, warm, exciting, and inspiring place, not just through ministries but also through the physical features of the place.
Reflection
On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your church’s present facility in its fitness for sustaining your church and its ministries? What are your church facility’s strongest and weakest points? How could your church make better use of its facility’s strongest points? How could your church remediate or improve your facility’s weakest points? Is your church’s sanctuary the right size, large enough to hold regular attenders but not so large as to feel empty? Does your church need to add a service to create more room for attendance growth? Is your church’s entrance a large, well-lit, clean, and inviting space? Does your church have adequate administrative offices? Does your church have enough classrooms to support a strong teaching program? Does your church have a large multi-purpose room for hospitality and presentation events? If your church is planning a new or renovated facility, do you have a strong building task force in place? Are you working closely with an experienced architect and qualified construction manager? Can you safely involve members in a portion of the work?
Key Points
A church’s facility design and location reflects its commitments.
Assess your church’s facilities needs to develop the right facilities.
A primary need is a sanctuary with the capacity for regular attenders.
The entrance outside the sanctuary should be large and inviting.
Church ministries and operations need administrative offices.
A strong teaching program requires multiple classrooms.
A multi-purpose hospitality and presentation space expands uses.
Rent until able to purchase a suitable facility in an appropriate location.
Use a building-fund campaign for financing, minimizing borrowing.
Allow for a thorough design process with an experienced architect.
Meet regularly with the construction manager and architect.
Treat renovation like new construction with design and build teams.
Encourage only qualified member participation on safe and fair terms.
Continue to develop your church facility to support and lead ministries.