Church Design

During Aspen Group’s 2018 Alignment Conference, Josh Gregoire, Church Relations Coordinator for Aspen, facilitated a panel discussion about structuring churches to help them regain impact in their communities. The panel included three influential church leaders: Dave Davis, Parkview Community Church; Matt DeMateo, New Life Centers of Chicagoland; Mike Martin, All Nations Worship Assembly. Here are four tips these leaders shared for increasing your church's impact in your community:

I have three children in their 20s. Once in a while, they still ask me, "Dad, what do you do for a living?" The best way I know to describe it is that I help people navigate change. Change is constant. Having worked with organizations in the social, private and public space for years, we've discovered certain patterns of change. And based on those patterns, we created the following Change Formula to help with that process:

Aspen’s 2018 Alignment Conference is in the books! On Tuesday, October 16, 2018, we greeted pastors and church leaders from the Southeast, Midwest, and even Canada for our one-day annual learning event. This year's theme focused on "Building Your Church for Community Impact."

Community Christian Church, a dynamic, growing faith community whose mission is “helping people find their way back to God,” launched a new multisite location—Community Christian Church Plainfield—in 2016. Recognizing the need for an innovative space where people could connect and the community could embrace its love for athletics, Community Christian Church Plainfield, the location for the 2018 Alignment Conference, embarked on a complete renovation of a former manufacturing plant with the help of Aspen Group, an integrated design-build-furnish company for churches.

In 2001, the first multisite campus launched at Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago, using video to share the teaching across campuses.

Aspen Group works with a number of trusted tradespeople and professional partners on its church building projects. In this post, we’re highlighting Metropolitan Fire Protection (Metro FP), a leading commercial and residential sprinkler contractor, serving the Chicago metropolitan area and Northwest Indiana for more than 25 years.

In this Thanksgiving season, we'd like to extend our sincere gratitude to the 2017 Alignment Conference Partners, who helped make this year's event possible. Please take some time to review this year's roster of partners who play vital roles in supporting our clients throughout the year.

I was present at the beginning of this era of multisite ministry. It was an accident; I was just fortunate enough to work at Leadership Network at a time when we were making a list of and tracking the early practitioners of multisite. After a meeting with a church in 1997 that had already gone multisite, my team and I looked at each other and said, “ This is going to be big.” We then saw a cadre of churches doing similar things across various geographic areas and denominational backgrounds. What began as a list of 78 in the ‘90s has grown to more than 8,000, according to a Duke University survey. I believe we are still in the early chapters of this story. There has been a rapid replication of sites and systems to fit the current context, but we are a long way from seeing the totality of this movement. Drawing from the research within this report and my experience, here are some trends I have observed during the rise of expansion strategies, as well as a few shifts I think we have yet to see unfold:

What do we do when we run out of space? How do we answer God’s call to plant another church or campus site? Where will we find the resources we need to launch a new church? How do we train leaders and raise funds? How do we engage Millennials? Is it even the right time to start thinking about planting a new church? As a church leader, you may find yourself asking these same questions. Weren’t able to make it to Aspen’s 2017 Alignment Conference? Here’s a quick recap of the main stage keynote talks.