Gottlieb Foundation of Texas

This is a guest post by Craig McIlroy, the Chief Investment Officer for Soli Deo Gloria Group, a consulting firm that specializes in church equipping, planning, and development services.

If you are planning a worship center to seat 300 in one service, are you willing to waste $1M in construction costs? That’s what many congregations are doing, without even realizing it until it’s too late!

“Right-Sizing” is what we call our process of design, which takes into account not only agency requirements but also our 30+ years of experience in church design and planning throughout the country. “Right-Sizing” results in space and place for ministry that fully utilizes every square foot of land and facilities.

Parking defines your worship attendance!

In most jurisdictions, your local planning department will tell you to design for one car to serve every four people in worship. Architects will use this ratio to design the worship facility and site plan, since part of their job is to get the design approved by the planning department. Telling their client this ratio is inadequate and more parking (land) is needed, though, can be unpopular and may even cost them the commission! There are always others lining up who are willing to simply follow the rules. However, the truth is that blindly following agency guidelines, no matter how much pressure is applied to do just that, will result in failure to fill the sanctuary . . . ever!

Let’s look at the earlier example. In order to seat 300 people, the planning department would require 75 parking spaces, or a ratio of 1 car per 4 people. Simply polling your Sunday morning attendees or watching how many folks get out of each car, however, would show you this ratio is actually closer to 1 car per 2 people, maybe even less. This means that your newly designed parking lot, designed in full compliance with local planning department requirements, accommodates not 300 but 150 attendees at 1 car per 2 people. You will be unable to fill the worship center, no matter how hard you try to strengthen the worship experience, without realizing the entire fault lies with following local ordinances that don’t match the reality of today’s culture.

To make matters worse, you will have built a brand new worship center for 150 attendees that will never be able to be there because there is no parking for them! At an average of 35 square feet per person and an average of $200 per square foot construction cost, that’s an average of $1,050,000 wasted to build a facility with inadequate parking. $1,050,000 that could be used for other ministry purposes.

“Right-Sizing” applies to your entire church campus

While this brief discussion of parking ratios and their impact on worship attendance is significant, your common sense will tell you there are many other possible applications of “Right-Sizing” on your land and facilities.

Walk around your church campus on Monday at 10:00am. How many rooms are fully utilized? How much additional land would be available if you had built earlier phases to their maximum height instead of a single story? Have you missed opportunities for “financial engines” like a bookstore or coffee house simply because of the layout of your site? Would others in the community rent space from you five days a week if it were configured with them in mind, giving you valuable additional space for prime time on Sunday morning?

Instead of building for your ultimate congregation’s size, would it be possible to “Right-Size” facilities for your congregation’s next five years, planning to move every five years until you reach your maximum potential and then build your ultimate campus? Or could you build for your 20 year vision and rent out the space you don’t need today, paying your debt service along the way with tenant leases?

Thinking outside the box

As you can see, “Right-Sizing” is all about the stewardship of valuable resources for ministry. In today’s uncertain economy, God will still fully resource His ministry in His time. But we are still responsible for managing those resources, using our common sense and disciplined creativity. By using “Right-Sizing”, we can think outside the box and develop space and place using every square foot to its maximum utility, to His glory!