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Sure. Growth is a great problem to have. But the reality is that rapid growth not only puts stress on the resource of space, but also on people, time and money.
When you are designing facilities for people who aren’t even coming to the church yet, with leadership who are feeling the pressure of an expanding ministry within the hard boundaries of construction timelines and tight budgets, it can be easy to miss something.
The thing is that “design thinking”—what architects and engineers are trained in—can often provide unexpected solutions for churches. Here are six ways that church designers can help with issues common to rapidly-growing churches:
Disconnect between finances and strategy
Rapidly-growing churches have to make decisions quickly. This can inadvertently result in a “success spending spree” or financial priorities that constantly shift as leadership navigates the very real expense priorities that pop up in rapid succession.
The pressure: Time, personnel, and cashflow are stressed by trying to keep up with the demands of ministry.
How designers can help: Designers can choose to lead every conversation through a strategy lens, with real-time reporting on financial impact.
Compressed timeline for developing the next generation of leaders
Most pastors of successful churches were never trained to be CEO’s of multi-million-dollar organizations. Instead, they learn on the job. The challenge is that rapid growth requires an ever-widening circle of leaders—often without the timeline needed to develop them.
The pressure: The church may not yet have a process in place for developing (or recruiting) the next tier of leadership, thus creating gaps in what is needed and overload on existing staff.
How designers can help: Designers can help by developing their own strategic planning facilitation and leadership skills. Becoming a more effective communicator, gives you the skill to keep from being sidetracked into solutions which solve short-term problems instead of supporting the broader strategic mission.
Compressed timeline for socializing concepts
Town halls where everyone expresses their wish lists for a campus often result in disappointed congregations when their expectations are not all met. Conversely, launching ahead without effectively socializing the ideas, results in a building campaign with no support.
The pressure: Quickly-moving leadership may feel like the whole congregation understands the need and intent of a project because they deal with the topic daily, when in reality, concepts need to be overcommunicated before they reach a saturation point.
How designers can help: Designers can help leadership develop messaging and visuals to communicate to the wider congregation. This can make a big difference in the momentum of a project.
Under-utilized existing space
When churches grow quickly, the way they use their spaces can shift subtly over time, eventually leaving things less workable as spaces are hastily converted, co-opted, and morphed into something it wasn’t designed to do.
The pressure: Churches have to create space for the people who are coming, and usually the most expedient way to do that is to use what is already there.
How designers can help: Designers can bring fresh eyes to the conversation around function, and bring new ideas to the table around utilization, not only to meet the current demand, but also to project years ahead.
Aspirational timelines for openings
It can be really tempting to go for the visionary opening. Christmas or Easter are usually preferred. The challenge is that there are a lot of moving pieces to construction. Not only that, but staffing needs change when a new building comes online.
The pressure: When feeling the crunch of a lack of space and upcoming major ministry events, it can be easy to give into the desire to fast track design, construction and operation decisions.
How designers can help: Present the option of a “soft opening” where there is occupancy of a project a month or more before a grand opening or major holiday to ensure that professional and volunteer staff have some time to get used to new space, new roles and new equipment.
Becoming driven by congregational expectations rather than mission
Companies are required to excel at customer-service to stay in business, but imagine if all of your customers had different ideas about what your product should be and what it should do for them? Then, raise the stakes by imagining they were highly emotional about it because your product had spiritual significance to them.
The pressure: Church leadership of rapidly-growing churches can be deluged by passionate congregational demands for how things should be run and exactly what is needed. These requests can drown them in so much minutia and conflicting directions, that is it all they can see.
How designers can help: By making sure there is consensus on the mission of a project in the beginning, every decision (or conflict) can be litmus tested against how well an option meets, or does not meet, that goal. This allows the word “no” to be used more effectively to control the scope of the project. Designers who require mission-driven decision making from their clients empower them with the skill to communicate those decisions back to the congregation.
Skilled design teams can be a rapidly-growing church’s best friend and advocate. We, as designers, just have to make sure that we continue to increase our skill, not only in the disciplines we are hired for, but also in the ones the church isn’t aware they need.
