vision casting

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Review: Your church's building is a ministry tool. It should be built or renovated in order to help your specific ministry do the specific work that God has called you, specifically, to do. It should express and serve the vision of your church, which means vision is important to your building process.

Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback sent me an email this morning (alright, I'm subscribed to a newsletter and it probably wasn't even him who sent it). The first section highlighted an article by Pastor Warren called "How to share God's vision for your church."

Vision is important to your building process in two ways:

1. Building projects can put undue strain an unhealthy church. A healthy church, however, is united behind the vision for their collective ministry, and can see how a new/renovated building is going to further that vision.
2. The building project itself needs an acute vision. It's part of your over-arching vision, but let's face it: this is a big project. Just like your children's ministry has a specific vision that fits into the vision of your whole church, your building project needs specific vision.

So while Pastor Warren's "seven things" to help people understand your vision is referring to the first kind of vision, they can easily be applied to the vision behind your building project.

1. Who you are. This is the VIP factor that Thom Rainer talks about in Breakout Churches.
   
2. Where you are going. How does the new/renovated building fit into the bigger vision?
3. Why you are going there. Why can't you do that in your current space?
4. What it feels like to be going there. "To get people behind your vision, you need to communicate to them how fulfilling it will be to join God in what He's doing through your church. People are looking for significance."
5. What people can do. Help people see how they're needed.
6. How you're going to do it. Share the plan with people. Show them the floor plans and the BIM images.
7. What the rewards will be. This goes back to 1 and 2, but months into the process people will need to be reminded. When the new building opens, how will it make our ministry more effective? How will it please the Lord that we've been faithful to do a hard thing in order to expand His kingdom?

For the whole article, with Pastor Warren's comments and explanations on each, go here.

the gothic conversation continues, continued

The Wildesign blog is moving. I've been duplicating posts here to make it easier for you, but at the end of the week I will no longer be doing so. Please update your links and bookmarks, we're here now.

So where do all these ideas get us? No where in particular, but probably closer to understanding what the results of this LifeWay study mean for us.

• We decided that, as much as we might like to, we can't completely ignore LifeWay's findings.
  
  
• It may be possible to capture what the unchurched and the emerging generations like about the cathedral-type spaces without actually hunting down someone who can sculpt gargoyles. We can design the outside of the building to be recognizable as a place of worship. We can create vast worship spaces that reflect the majesty of God, with niches that allow visitors to have an intimate experience. We can incorporate lighting schemes that help transform a space from a public setting one day, to a personal setting the next day.
  
  
• When it comes down to it, we'll continue to do what we've always done. We'll meet the pastor, the leadership and the congregation. We'll survey the neighborhood and the surrounding community, and we'll help the church discover why it's there. From there we can design a facility that will demonstrate the beauty of our God, as well as serve the people He died for.

There simply is no formula. It would be nice to survey the general population once every year or so, get an idea about the trends, and decide on a cookie-cutter church building model that will appeal to the most generic crowd.

But you and your ministry are not called to appeal to the most generic crowd. You're called to the highways and byways; you're called to the suffering and the destitute; you're called to find the lost. We could grab a hold of the latest survey and start stamping out church facilities, but we're called to help you.

the gothic conversation continues

The Wildesign staff had lunch together today, and the conversation about the recent LifeWay study continued. Nothing was resolved just yet, but we got a little closer to wrapping our heads around the implications of the thing. Here are some of the ideas/comments that came up:

• Designers today, church designers especially, frame a building around cultural norms or according to what we reasonably believe the public wants. That's not how early houses of worship were drawn up. Moses' tabernacle, Solomon's temple, and early Catholic church buildings were all designed to communicate God to visitors. Floor plans and decor and vaulted ceilings revealed God's character. The focus was God, not people.
  
  
• It's easy to blame boring or ugly church buildings on "stewardship," but that may be a very western mindset. In Haggai, the Lord gets upset with people for having nice homes while His temple is falling apart. He tells them to fix it up so He can take pleasure in it. As temporary as this all is, God does occasionally take pleasure in what we create.
  
  
• Gothic cathedrals were designed to teach people about God. Stories were represented in art and the structures themselves inspired awe at the majesty and the magnitude of God. Illiteracy is not such a problem today, but young people especially are growing up with no Christian influences. Is there a time coming when church architecture should once again help to demonstrate some of the basics about God's nature?
  
  
• The arts are fading from places of Christian worship and an emerging generation notices. It's not to our credit.
  
  
• On the other hand, none of the exterior pictures that the unchurched were given to choose from is really contemporary. They all have steeples and they're all moderately unattractive. There are no big windows, no adapted store fronts or warehouses, and no landscaping. It looks like they were given one cathedral and three traditional churches to choose from.

So where does this discussion lead us? We'll talk about that tomorrow.