Church Design

Editor's Note: Greg Snider and Josh Gregoire of Aspen Group presented a talk to a full room of leaders from across the country at Exponential in Orlando on March 3, 2020 on "3 Myths About Facilities that Keep Church Planters from Multiplying." Their presentation drew heavily from the same content featured in the post below. Based on positive feedback on the content of their talk, we're featuring this post again on our blog in case you missed it in previous weeks.    Pastors who are focused on church planting and multiplying often focus on leadership and ministry as the key aspects of launching new churches. But one critical piece is almost always missing from the multiplication plan—a facility strategy.

Churches once held a place of influence at the center of our communities. In the past, many hospitals, colleges, and social services were launched out of a vision to obey Jesus’ admonition to give to the poor, clothe the naked, care for orphans, and visit the imprisoned. Churches were viewed as an anchor in our communities, and they literally were given a central place in the town square.

In 2004, religious facility construction was an $8 billion a year industry in the U.S. That's a lot of church buildings. At the same time, other research was emerging that indicated that church attendance and growth had plateaued or was declining. We saw a massive stewardship issue—how could so many churches be renovating and building new facilities and yet not experiencing growth, either in attendance or in spiritual maturity?

Every church is driven primarily by the same mission: To “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . . .” (Matthew 28:19). How a church goes about making disciples can be vastly different though. To be effective, each church needs to identify its growth engines and growth barriers—aspects of ministry that either foster or inhibit growth, whether in the number of people who attend, or in their levels of spiritual maturity.

The primary purpose of a church building is to provide a place for two things to happen: an opportunity for people to encounter God, and the chance to build meaningful relationships with others. These two needs for reverent space and relational space can be met through the physical layout and design of the building. In this post, we'll look at how to maximize your lobby to create relational space.  

When we work with churches to design ministry space, high on their wish list is storage—space to stow seasonal decorations, banners, candles, music equipment, Sunday school supplies, tables, chairs, and so on. These are legitimate storage needs. But many times adding more storage isn’t the right solution. There are high, hidden costs attached to it. Before increasing the amount of square footage devoted to storage, here are five key questions churches need to consider:

It's time to break some ground at Community Christian Church's main campus in Naperville, Illinois and expand their main campus building—affectionately called the "Yellow Box."

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As we’ve seen, the multisite movement is not going away anytime soon. In fact, according to Jim Tomberlin in Outreach Magazine, “there are 3,000 expressions of multisite church across North America ... 50 percent of megachurches have multiple campuses [while]another 20 percent are thinking about it.”

In a church facility, each component of the building is either going to support the ministry and growth of that church (be a growth engine), or be something that inhibits the ministry or growth of the church (a growth barrier).