Church Design

Guest Post by Brad Leeper, Generis What would your church or organization do with an extra 25% of your budget by December 31, 2020? What advantage would you have with special funds for the much-needed project to energize your mission impact in 2021? You have a rare, unusual window to engage a small group of givers that might give you these added financial resources to solve your biggest mission hurdle.

Even if you’ve been in ministry for decades, 2020 may have felt like your first year on the job. Although your church’s message was unchanging, many other elements felt like moving targets as you worked to adapt your physical ministry space, digital presence, and perhaps, even your ministry priorities.

Your church building is one tool of many to help you express your mission, accomplish ministry goals, and connect with people. When churches create ministry space, they do it to facilitate the programming they are currently providing—or hope to provide in the near future. The world, however, is changing more quickly all the time. Physical space that serves ministry purposes today may not provide the kinds of spaces we need next year, let alone for the next decade or more.

Church building projects are exciting—and daunting. Visioning, funding, planning, implementation, and project management are all critical aspects of a design-build project. With all these variables, how do you ensure that the right people are involved from the start to provide input to each other, to collaborate throughout the project, and to communicate with the church?

What would it mean to embrace a phygital ministry strategy at your church? If you're ready to make the shift, where do you begin? Recently, we met with Aspen Group’s Ministry Space Strategist Greg Snider and Jamie Shafer, a Communications Strategist with Fishhook, to explore how churches can build a frictionless physical and digital experience for their guests.

Leadership development may often be perceived as vague, time-consuming, or intimidating. In reality, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Using “Tony” as my fictional example, here is a proven, five-step mentorship/apprenticeship model that can be used to develop new leaders in church ministry.  

What do you need to recognize about shifts in culture now that will affect your church in the coming year? How can you find unity within your church? How can you keep running the race? These are questions we explored in a recent conversation with Karl Vaters, one of the leading voices for equipping leaders of small churches. Karl is the Teaching Pastor at Cornerstone Christian Fellowship and author of several books including, The Church Recovery Guide: How Your Congregation Can Adapt and Thrive after a Crisis, which was released this summer.

We will remember this year for many reasons. Among them, it will be known as the year the church closed its doors while simultaneously claiming new space in the digital world—and living rooms across the country. Churchgoers worshipped from home and church leaders wondered if Easter 2020 might break the internet. Now we’re wondering the same thing about Christmas.

At Aspen Group, we believe lobbies should be vibrant, mission-critical space for churches. However, right now, your lobby needs to support your church in new ways as you relaunch in-person worship services and begin to phase in key ministry functions. It won’t look exactly like it did earlier this year, but you can still use it effectively.

Throughout COVID-19, we’ve implored churches to look with fresh eyes at their facilities and ask, “In what ways is your church building creating space for ministry impact, and how is it creating a barrier to effective ministry?” With many churches still closed for in-person gatherings—or only open on a limited basis—there may still be a window of time for you to refresh specific areas of your building so that you’re ready to relaunch church for a new season of ministry. But which projects should you tackle on your own, and which ones are better left to the experts?