Churches that plan to offer in-person Christmas worship services this year may need to adapt their facility to mitigate the potential spread of COVID.  Your church lobby serves as the first point of entry. It’s the initial space that greets newcomers and long-timers, and it’s the place where people will want to mingle most. But, how will it work in the midst of COVID?

Your church building is one tool of many to help you express your mission, accomplish ministry goals, and connect with people. When churches create ministry space, they do it to facilitate the programming they are currently providing—or hope to provide in the near future. The world, however, is changing more quickly all the time. Physical space that serves ministry purposes today may not provide the kinds of spaces we need next year, let alone for the next decade or more.

The digital age has been driving us to change our physical spaces. Because of COVID, churches are taking a closer look at how to adapt their physical ministry space to help serve both their physical and digital ministry needs. “During the last 20 years, there has been a tremendous shift in buildings, largely due to the fact that the digital age has been driving us to change our physical spaces," says Greg Snider, Aspen Group's Ministry Space Strategist. "We've been adapting spaces based on cultural changes in a digital world, but the shifts have not been with the mindset of digital-first.”

The built environment is complex, changing, and needs fresh thinking to solve today’s challenges. The pandemic has created new problems to solve and accelerated the problems already occurring. Recent data from Barna highlights shifts in our culture and how they are—or soon will be—affecting the church.

Just like your home decor gives people clues about who you are—your style and taste—so do church interiors. People can quickly identify who you are as a church, what you value, and who you're trying to reach based on the furnishings, finishes, and equipment you have throughout your building. While it's not practical to stay on-trend with every interior design fad, incorporating some current design details will help keep your building fresh and relevant. Here's a quick snapshot of five interior design trends we've been integrating into churches, which will stay fresh for some time to come:

Guest Post by Brad Leeper, Generis What would your church or organization do with an extra 25% of your budget by December 31, 2020? What advantage would you have with special funds for the much-needed project to energize your mission impact in 2021? You have a rare, unusual window to engage a small group of givers that might give you these added financial resources to solve your biggest mission hurdle.

Even if you’ve been in ministry for decades, 2020 may have felt like your first year on the job. Although your church’s message was unchanging, many other elements felt like moving targets as you worked to adapt your physical ministry space, digital presence, and perhaps, even your ministry priorities.

Church building projects are exciting—and daunting. Visioning, funding, planning, implementation, and project management are all critical aspects of a design-build project. With all these variables, how do you ensure that the right people are involved from the start to provide input to each other, to collaborate throughout the project, and to communicate with the church?

What would it mean to embrace a phygital ministry strategy at your church? If you're ready to make the shift, where do you begin? Recently, we met with Aspen Group’s Ministry Space Strategist Greg Snider and Jamie Shafer, a Communications Strategist with Fishhook, to explore how churches can build a frictionless physical and digital experience for their guests.

What do you need to recognize about shifts in culture now that will affect your church in the coming year? How can you find unity within your church? How can you keep running the race? These are questions we explored in a recent conversation with Karl Vaters, one of the leading voices for equipping leaders of small churches. Karl is the Teaching Pastor at Cornerstone Christian Fellowship and author of several books including, The Church Recovery Guide: How Your Congregation Can Adapt and Thrive after a Crisis, which was released this summer.