Church Design

In a past blog post entitled “Missing Men at Church: Why You Might Be Pushing Them Away,” I shared the unsettling fact that women’s church attendance across America on a typical Sunday outnumbers men 61% to 39%, and women’s ministries outpace men’s ministries roughly 8 to 1. This equates to approximately 13 million more women in church than men!

Last week, I examined why men hate coming to church and how your church design might actually be the reason they’re staying away. But can the design of your facility help you attract men? Yes, definitely!

“Make my facility comfortable for men.” Occasionally over the past few years, my design team and I would hear this request from pastors as we began to create new ministry space for their church. I didn’t think much of the requests at first because we naturally designed spaces with both genders in mind. But during one particular meeting with a church, the pastor began quoting statistics from David Murrow’s book, Why Men Hate Going to Church.

Did you know that you “own” the rain that falls on your church property, and you are legally responsible for how it flows off your property? Most every jurisdiction has rules and regulations that the civil engineering community must abide by in the design of your site and water runoff system.  These regulations are not a result of local whimsy, but usually of a county and state-wide comprehensive stormwater management plan. This plan is designed to protect our downstream neighbors from flooding, regardless of the rain event, so compliance is not optional.

Remember the city of Jericho in the book of Joshua? Remember how the Israelites captured it? They walked around the city for seven days and the walls just crumbled to the ground. We’re seeing a similar experience in how churches approach the design of their administrative space. (Ok, more walls coming down than a week’s worth of marching.)

Acronyms. As you may have already experienced, there’s no shortage of them in the design and construction field. Nowadays, there’s a new one floating around in the industry—BIM—which stands for Building Information Modeling (or Management).

After reading the CKN article by Rex Miller, titled “Collaboration Without Context”, I couldn’t agree more with his thoughts on the issue of teams needing to form trust which then leads to collaboration. Collaboration isn’t co-laboring unless trust is present and is the foundation of our actions. In the design/construction market, trust with team partners (Owners, consultants, sub-contractors) is developed over time through a series of successes. 

If you are planning a building project, you know that there are several different project delivery methods to choose from.  But what you should care the most about is that your project comes in on time, on budget, and is designed to meet your needs. 

Buzz words…..every sector of business has them.  In the design/construction world, what has been stirring up the latest “buzz” for the past several years are two new three letter acronyms. IPD-Integrated Project Delivery and BIM—Building Information Modeling. Both of these processes are new ways of thinking about design and construction that are substantially different from the methods used for the past several decades, and are a direct result of the digital revolution we are currently navigating. These two processes have been in the incubation stage just waiting for the right environment of technology to emerge. It’s here and in full swing.