Your visitors will encounter many things before they choose a seat and listen to your sermon this Easter Sunday. How is your church facility preparing the way for your guests and helping to draw them in? Seeing your facility through the eyes of your guests will help you create a more welcoming environment and give them a reason to return. The following five tips will help you shape a positive guest experience this Easter.

Chapelstreet Church was looking for a unique solution for the addition and renovation of their North Aurora, Illinois campus. This compact facility required an efficient design so the spaces could be adapted to have more than one function. Aspen was called in to help, after having partnered with Chapelstreet on their South Street and Keslinger campuses, as well as their Shepherd’s Heart Care Center. The outcome was a facility with a high level of flexibility for Sundays and mid-week activities, setting them up for success in a fast-changing culture.

As church designers and builders, we continue to develop more intentional design around outdoor ministry spaces—bursting open the facility doors, and utilizing all of the space in creative and inspiring ways to create spaces that impact ministry and reach into the communities. It can be overwhelming to know where to start when it comes to extending your church's hospitality to the great outdoors, so it's important to assess your site so you can start to formulate a plan.

Spring is just around the corner, so it’s time to start thinking about your church’s site and outdoor space. In the world of church design and construction, we often stress the importance of interior connection spaces like church lobbies, cafés, and worship venues, but outdoor space is also a critical zone for building relationships and supporting ongoing ministry.

As we look to design spaces that help churches address needs for things like respite and personal connection, the interplay between the indoors and the outdoors and art and architecture can offer creative and unique solutions, and result in emotionally and mentally supportive environments. One goal of good design is to incorporate a sense of ease and emotional well-being into a space. We move beyond the purpose of simple function to create a more personal interaction and meaningful experience for the user.

Can you imagine if the design of your lobby, sanctuary, and gathering spaces in your church could actually help address the emotional and mental health needs of our culture today? Recent data from Barna underscores a need for churches to bring real solutions to bear on our culture's growing mental health crisis—and the spaces we provide to our congregations and communities can be a powerful tool to help people navigate their anxiety, grief, and depression in order to more deeply connect with others.

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.

We’ve been enjoying the last six weeks of Barna’s ChurchPulse Weekly podcast series, “Making Space,” leading up to some great new research we’re partnering with Barna on called, Making Space for Formation. Aspen’s VP of Design & Integrated Services, Derek DeGroot, spent some time reflecting on each episode in his blog series, “From the Church Architect’s Desk.” In case you missed any of the posts, here's a quick recap from Derek.