Church Design

Each year, Aspen celebrates Safety Week on our job sites. This gives our construction teams the opportunity to learn, support each other, and get connected through a series of learning topics, demonstrations, and fun events! Safety is a critical component for the wellbeing of our teams and clients, as well as the success of our church projects, not only during these special events, but year-round.

Shepherd’s Heart Care Center, located in Chapelstreet Church’s South Street campus in Geneva, Illinois, serves 1400 people in the Tri-City area. When this ministry began in 1999, it was a simple food pantry closet with pre-packed bags, where families in need could get a helping hand, but the small, tucked away space wasn’t sufficient to allow the team to actually build relationship with the people they served. Years later, a new, larger location offered more visibility, and the ministry grew to serve more families. But it wasn’t long before they were again busting at the seams, so they decided to expand again, but they didn’t want to limit their help to food only.

One of the things that makes Aspen Group unique is our integrated Design-Build-Furnish approach. This means our designers, construction teams, project managers, estimating team, and interior designers all collaborate together under one roof to bring the most innovative solutions to our church building projects.

2021 was a busy year of partnering with churches and ministries on new facilities, renovations, and space refreshes! The following five videos feature churches and schools we’ve teamed up with to solve their unique ministry problems, and give their spaces maximum impact so they can ultimately reach more people for Jesus.

When your church engages in internal discussions about facility expansion or renovation, your first conversations should not be about design, construction methods, how much square footage to add, or how many seats are needed in the sanctuary to accommodate growth. This might feel like a natural starting point for a conversation on church architecture, but there’s a better approach—and it starts with asking three specific questions.

Waypoint Church in St. Charles, Missouri, has a mission of "Worship. Love. Go." This thriving community of faith wanted to adapt their church building to create a cohesive, effective, and engaging ministry space that would allow their congregation to experience a deep and intimate connection with God and others. We partnered with Waypoint on an addition and renovation aligning with these core values of relationships and missional living. Here are five ways we intentionally designed the space to foster discipleship:

As a designer, I think a lot about how the spaces we occupy inherently provoke responses. Our physical body and our mind are often driven to an action based on the physical environment we’re in. If you’ve ever been to an IKEA, you know this to be true. The massive furniture store that originated in Sweden and has now taken over the United States has turned ordinary people into furniture super-shoppers.

This third and final post of a three-part series explores how our Aspen teams apply collaboration and learning to support our unique Design-Build-Furnish approach. Recently, we've talked a lot about our integrated Design-Build-Furnish process, and how this delivery method differs from a Design-Build-Bid approach. One of the factors that makes our DBF process successful is the collaboration between all of the different disciplines that makes up a DBF project. Throughout the process, our design and construction teams at Aspen Group collaborate and share lessons learned in order to continually improve the quality and effectiveness of the work we produce. Learning permeates the culture when collaboration between construction, design, estimating, interiors, and other teams is the default way of operating, and in turn, helps us avoid repeating mistakes.

This post is part two in a three-part series where we explore the advantages of our unique, integrated Design-Build-Furnish approach. Every building project comes together by navigating the tension between priorities and constraints—costs and budget, schedule and programming, and vision and scope. A crucial part of choosing a building partner for a project is selecting a delivery method—the process for navigating those tensions as you take a project from concept to a completed building. But how can you know which delivery method your church should choose? In the following post, we’ll review the differences between a “Design-Bid” and a Design-Build-Furnish” approach.

This post is part one in a three-part series where we will explore the advantages of our unique, integrated Design-Build-Furnish approach. In the world of church construction, Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) has a lot of advantages, including schedule and cost benefits. But Aspen’s Design-Build-Furnish (DBF) process goes beyond even the typical integrated project delivery, design-build approach of the industry.