The next time you are feeling like complaining that your church building is too small, too crowded, too cold, too dark, or that the building is preventing you from growing, think about this picture.
This is a picture of an unregistered Baptist congregation that met in the forest for 10 years because they were not allowed to have a building during the Soviet era. This picture was taken just outside what is now Kiev, Ukraine. No matter what you don’t like about your building, I would wager they would have been very thankful for what you have.
Notice the Lord’s Supper table in front of the congregation. How many of our churches would have 30 or more people for a service where they had to walk to church and then stand in the snow to hear a sermon, and do so in defiance of a government that was not too keen on human rights??
Photo & story courtesy of
FrontLine Missions, www.frontlinemissions.info. I urge you to support FrontLine Missions or any organization that is taking the Word into areas of persecution and oppression.
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I am hearing this question a lot these days, “Should our church build given the economic situation?” While a specific church situation may otherwise dictate, I believe that the general answer is that it should, if certain conditions are true. Here’s my premise. God is bigger than any economic crisis. He’s bigger than Fannie Mae, [...]
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Which Way is the Right Way? There are a myriad of ways for a church to contract for the design and construction of a new church. Today, many churches are built by what has become traditionally known as the design-bid-build method. This is the conventional general contractor approach, where the church hires an architect to [...]
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I have seen a number of articles recently that echo what I have been saying all along, that the “traditional” Design/Bid/Build (DBB) model is not the way to build churches. In DBB, the church hires an architect to design a building. That design is then put out to bid to a number of contractors. The [...]
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A popular theory with some in the church is that the church should wait to build until it has raised most, or all of the cash for building. This can be a good strategy if the church is forward thinking enough to begin to accumulate cash well before it needs to build, but may be [...]
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Need a guide to church construction? I’ve put up a new web site dedicated to my book, Preparing to Build. Here’s the official description, Written by an experienced church building consultant, Preparing to Build is over 170 pages of real-world, practical information that will equip your leaders and church building committee to properly prepare for, [...]
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Church construction projects (and their budgets) seem only to grow over time, not shrink. Here are three tips to prevent construction budget bloat. Tip number one is to make sure you have everything in the project budget to begin with. Your project budget should be one that includes everything including site acquisition, site development, architectural [...]
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As the poet Robert Burns so accurately stated, “The best laid plans of mice and go oft awry.”. Even more so, plans go even more awry when they are not so well laid, especially in church building programs. If your church building program gets into hot water, or never seems to get off the ground, [...]
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One of the things that fails to concern me is the general lack of financial skills in the leadership of many churches. If I had a dollar for every time a church of 50-100 people contacted me wanting to build a church of a million dollars, I could make a payment or two on a [...]
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The scriptures say that God is not the author of confusion. I had the pleasure of presenting the results of my needs and feasibility study today to a congregation that has needed to build for several years. In analyzing church and Sunday school attendance, it was apparent that this church had “hit the ceiling” several [...]
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