Welcome to the Making Space Podcast!
This podcast comes out of a decade’s long partnership between Aspen Group and Barna. In this series, hosts Benjamin Windle and Jay Kim will be focusing on the impact that physical spaces have on the way people are formed and shaped as they experience Jesus, engage with the church, and interact with others in community.
In this first season of the Making Space Podcast, hosts Jay Kim and Benjamin Windle will unpack the Barna and Aspen Group research, Making Space for Inspiration. They’ll sit down with various leaders and thinkers to discuss how nature affects our spiritual lives, the value of historic buildings in our digital era, what the church can learn from the design of retail spaces, and they'll offer some key takeaways for your ministry.
Ashley Ekmay, from Barna, and Elena Forsythe, from Aspen Group, share insights on how their teams collaborated on the first volume of the Making Space research project, Making Space for Inspiration, which dives into the way church and other spaces form and shape us as we experience Jesus and engage with others in community. They'll discuss the concepts of transcendence, comfort, how we bring our emotions into a space, and what it means for a space to be personal. They’ll share insights on how space affects us physically, emotionally, and how it influences our spiritual lives.
In this episode of the Making Space Podcast, hosts Benjamin Windle and Jay Kim will talk with priest and award-winning author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, Tish Harrison Warren. They’ll discuss the threads of connection between spiritual formation and the built environment.
Daniel Grothe, Associate Senior Pastor at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, and author of The Power of Place: Choosing Stability in a Rootless Age, talks with hosts Jay Kim and Benjamin Windle about how the sense of connectedness to a place forms and shapes us, and can impact our spiritual formation.
Darryl Answer, founding and lead pastor of New Community Church in Kansas City, MO, talks with hosts Jay Kim and Benjamin Windle about innovative ways his congregation has approached physical church and caring for the community.
In this episode of the Making Space Podcast, hosts Jay Kim and Benjamin Windle talk with author and Assistant Professor of Bible Theology and World Christianity at Bushnell University, Dr. A.J. Swoboda, and Sara Joy Proppe, a Placemaking Consultant and founder of Proximity Project. They discuss how the transcendence of nature and creation translates to the design of our church spaces and how we can incorporate the outdoor world as part of the physical church experience.
In this episode, Jay Kim and Benjamin Windle talk with Jonathan Shaffer, a virtual reality designer who brings brands to life both physically and digitally. Jonathan shares how the design of retail space can inspire innovative church environments and he gives examples for how churches can step outside of the mundane to create unique physical church experiences.
In this episode of the Making Space Podcast, Daniel Yang, Director of Church Multiplication Institute at Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, discusses how the pandemic affected church plants and the trends coming out of it. He also shares how we can reimagine the power of meaningful church gatherings in unique spaces.
In this final episode of the Making Space Podcast, Jay Kim and Benjamin Windle talk with Liz Laird, co-founder of the Sacred Spaces Conservancy, a Washington, D.C. based nonprofit organization that finds collaborative solutions to preserve vital sacred spaces in neighborhood life. Liz shares how historic church architecture can inspire the modern church to lean into creative ways to communicate beauty, transcendence, and holiness.
