Space Frontiers

Facilities are supposed to facilitate. But too often churches find their buildings don’t facilitate, but limit or frustrate their efforts to proclaim and demonstrate the gospel. Pastor Rick McKinley frames the issue this way: “Are we creatively using our sacred space and making it missional? And are we finding space in our community and making it sacred? It is in this intersection where Jesus becomes real to us and to our neighbors through us.” Here are the stories of three churches that are creatively using space to further the gospel.

Making our sacred space missional

And making spaces in our community sacred

Gathering the people of God is a key aspect of shaping a church. Home, storefront, theater, or warehouse gets transformed into holy space when the people of God gather there for worship.

When Imago Dei outgrew our facility, several factors challenged us: (1) Would constructing a building help us continue our outward focus on going into the city? (2) Could we afford a building that we would not outgrow quickly, thus putting us back where we started? (3) What kind of building would facilitate our values instead of hinder them?

Here’s how we’ve answered up to this point (recognizing that ministry is always evolving, and where we are today is not where we will be in 10 years).

We decided to meet at Franklin High School. It has a well-worn 1,500-seat auditorium that sits empty each Sunday. Most church sanctuaries sit empty Monday through Friday. It made sense to us to meet at the school.

What the old school facilitates

That decision displayed key values we have tried to instill in our people the last nine years: We value going to the community, not simply getting them to come to us. Meeting in a school has put us in a long-term conversation with the local community and with city government. This had ramifications we never expected.

We all know there is nothing magical about meeting in a school, but this led to ministry with the school throughout the week that we’ve all appreciated. It is really easy to help in small ways. A pair of cleats for a student who can’t afford them goes a long way for the soccer coach.

We also upgraded sound systems, installed wi-fi throughout the building, and though we are able to use these things on Sunday, they were donated to the school for increasing their effectiveness. Every year the list continues, because we are asking how we can serve them. Last year we re-furnished and re-modeled the teacher’s lounge. Our people are doing the work and that brings them into relationship with many of the teachers and school employees.

Our people realize on a weekly basis that we are “sent” by God to this community. Inhabiting a school auditorium and turning it into sacred space helps them not simply understand but experience mission.

Had we built a building, we no doubt would have other missional stories to tell, but God has used meeting in a school to keep our hearts and actions dialed into a key area of the city.

The hidden costs

Tension does exist though. As you sit in the worship service and look at the wooden seat back in front of you, it is not rare to “F@#$ you!” scratched into the wood by some fine freshman from days gone by.

And because wood gets painful when I’m rolling into the 45th minute of my sermon, some of our older folk bring in seat cushions.

Parking sucks. I don’t know what else to say about it. To be a good neighbor, we sometimes tow our own people’s cars who park irresponsibly. That is an odd thing to have to explain to a first-time attender. My guess is they don’t come back, but you never know.

It’s not convenient. It’s hard to get to. The rooms are not conducive to children’s ministry. There is no air conditioning. It feels like you’re in high school. (My son actually got locked in a locker by his cousin one Sunday when they were cleaning them out the week after school let out and all the lockers were open. It had to be opened with a crowbar.)

The bucks don’t stop here

It still costs money. We had to spend $100,000 on equipment so that we can set up and tear down and still serve our people with excellence. It was a significant investment but worth every dime. And we pay over $150,000 a year to meet there on Sundays. But we could rent for 200 years before we’d spend what a new building would cost in Portland. To be fair, we only get the building on Sundays and an occasional special event.

So our “school solution” is not without its problems. Meeting at a school is simply not what a lot of people are looking for. It is simply not a full service experience, no matter how hard we try. But in some ways this helps us keep mission in front of our people.

Exploring new spaces

It may not work forever. At this time the relationship with the city is great, and we hope it will continue, but it could go away tomorrow and we would be out on the street.

Our approach is to ask: Is there space available in the community that can be turned into sacred space as the church gathers? A mid-week class in a coffee shop, an sacred art show in an actual art gallery, a staff-meeting at a pub—the list goes on and on.

The truth is we do own a building. It was office space given to us, and it’s not large, but we office out of it and hold classes there, and can do some smaller scale events.

We try to use even our dedicated space for missional purposes. For example, our building is an official site for the Oregon Food Bank for our neighborhood. We get to offer food to hundreds of families and do it with dignity and love. Our people get to volunteer and it makes a great impact.

The intersection where Jesus is

So the two questions are these: Are we creatively using our sacred space and making it missional? Are we taking space in our community and making it sacred? It’s in this intersection where Jesus becomes real to us, and to our neighbors through us.

Changing Neighborhood, Changing building usage

Our church building has become a community event center.

For years, like many churches, we worshipped in our sanctuary on Sunday morning and prayed for ways to reach out into our community with the gospel. But for most of the week, our building was dormant, a slumbering structure full of potential and good intentions but paralyzed by tradition.

Thirty years ago our church, Garnett Church of Christ, built a mega-facility for 3,000 in a growing, middle-class, white neighborhood. In recent years, however, the neighborhood has become the most diverse in the state where Hmong, Hispanic, White, Black, Indian, Native American, and Persian cultures intersect.

Church attendance dwindled.

Our options: (1) do nothing and watch ourselves slowly die, (2) fly to the suburbs, or (3) take a walk through our neighborhood and take a few deep, cleansing breaths.

We pondered. If God called us to this neighborhood, would he call us away? Could we sell this building where people came to know the Lord, where they were baptized, married, and made lifetime friendships?

Die? Fly? Or deep breath?

After months of congregational dialogue, we concluded that we would serve the Lord in Tulsa by doing business with our community and attempting to live out the Acts 2 vision. Could we live that out and be American capitalists, too? Could renting our facility be the unique way we “share all things in common” in such a diverse neighborhood?

Many balked. “The church can’t do business.” “Didn’t Jesus clear out the temple of hawkers?”

But in 2006 we re-purposed our facility for lease to community groups and began operating a business as a separate LLC, functioning under the non-profit umbrella of the church. We changed our sign along with our whole concept of how we view our facility. Our church still meets at the same time and place, but the facility is now known as the Green Country Event Center.

One of our first tenants was a school district that offers GED and ESL classes. They occupy the 10,000 square feet of space Monday-Friday that we had previously only used a grand total of three hours a week. We still use the classrooms as much as we ever did, but now the school district helps pay the bills for that space. Partnering with the school district and a few other tenants was a great start, but there was more we hadn’t imagined.

Stumbling into the Acts 2 life

It was our unsustainable building—too expansive and too expensive for us—that got us here. We were paying $500,000 annually for a building that we only used about 20 percent of any given week. That’s bad stewardship.

We have a 105,000 square foot facility on 35 acres, built on a foundation of mega-church dreams that, somewhere, turned into a nightmare. Our church that once peaked in attendance at 2,000 had dwindled to 500. We had decisions to make. We could no longer afford the place.

What started out being about money turned into the biggest missional opportunity for our church since the bus ministry brought in hundreds of poor children to learn about Jesus in the 1970s and ’80s. Yes, we’d love to tell you that ministry was the primary motivation, but it wasn’t. It was survival. Mission was the surprise.

A lot went on behind the scenes to make this transition. When we were depressed about our facility, Larry James of Central Dallas Ministries reminded us we sat on an incredible asset in a changing community.

Amid the most diverse neighborhood in Oklahoma, we learned that we could become a catalyst for bringing people together to experience the love of God in a neighborhood driven by fear of other ethnic groups. We saw that we are living in a microcosm of “the nations,” where languages and cultures do not just collide, but can learn from each other and absorb God’s love in a thousand ways. Our role is helping create an environment where diverse people gather for business, worship, and major life events.

We had donated space to community groups before, but now we asked them to share all things in common, including costs. Businesses that would never use a church for a luncheon or seminar, now lined up at the door. Five other churches, all differing denominations, also meet regularly at our facility.

Some members of our church felt we had committed treason by changing our sign and giving up our exclusive use of the place. Some insisted the church can’t do business of any kind and that the church is ours, alone. Why share, particularly with non-Christians who might not represent us well?

Turns out the “non-Christian” groups have been some of our best tenants and are becoming some of our best friends.

One night we had a Hindu group and a Southern Gospel concert in different meeting halls. Some of the Southern Gospel Christians wanted to know what the “idolators” were doing in God’s house. Apparently, they did not realize that by opening our place to Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim groups, we are “loving our neighbor,” and they are getting a picture of how Christians live, and what we believe about Jesus Christ.

One evening our Bible class showed up to find a gun safety class occupying the room. The gun instructor said we could go down the hallway. Bible class members thought, Hey, this is our church! But this was a learning experience for us all, and we discussed it in the class and reminded ourselves, over and over, that hospitality means making space for the stranger.

No, sharing our space has not been easy, but it sure beats seeing the empty, dark, and lifeless behemoth sit vacant all week, crushing us with payments for space we do not use.

Running out of room

Twenty-four tenants occupy space in our facility, and the event center’s client list reflects the diversity of our neighborhood. During a church meeting one evening, both Pakistani and Hispanic music met in the hallway outside of our office. Similarly, our church offices are now sandwiched between the national headquarters of the Worldwide Pentecostal Fellowship and the Hmong-American Association of Oklahoma.

While we keep the building itself religiously neutral (a sign hanging over our auditorium says “Welcome” in 26 different languages, and specifically Christian symbols can be removed for various events when necessary), we do tell our story to everyone that tours our facility. We share our vision of loving our neighbors as part of God’s kingdom with all our tenants so they can advocate and become part of our mission. We are also regularly in conversation with our city councilman, city planners, other leaders and a multitude of organizations as a way of networking and sharing what we believe God is doing here.

Chef Roy, who leases our commercial kitchen, had wanted for years to offer free meals to our community. In the summer of 2008, to supplement the absence of school lunch programs for students, we launched Neighborhood Kitchens, a weekly free meal program. We never dreamed, however, that the push would come from the invitation of a Jewish man named Jeff who shared the same vision and was seeking partnership. So it began. Two elementary schools soon joined us, as did the East Tulsa Prevention Coalition, a group working to prevent gang violence and drug and alcohol use among teens.

We all work side-by-side: principals, teachers, and neighbors. The hundreds who come to the meals are now our friends.

It has taken our church some time to get used to sharing “our” space with such a wide variety of people, but the conversations and resulting spiritual and relational growth have been worth the effort.

Jessica and Gene came for the free meal with their three children. They kept coming back, week after week, until they wanted to know more about the church that serves gourmet meals to poor families and homeless people in East Tulsa. They were struck by how we all share the meals together, rather than just serving. Jessica was baptized this year, and Gene recently recruited a long-time Garnett servant named Bob to help facilitate a church-wide effort to renovate a used mobile home for a woman who lost hers in a fire.

The event center is now a hub for a constellation of community services including health screening and job training. We host hundreds of events, large and small, indoors and outdoors, each year.

Who let the dogs in?

One Sunday, our church arrived to find that part of the lobby had been partitioned off to provide space for a dog show. The organizers approached the event center at the last minute because they had lost their previous meeting space. The set-up wasn’t ideal, but we decided to place a higher value on hospitality than on convenience, so we did our best to spiritualize the situation and asked the church to make room for the stranger who had come knocking at our door.

We had dog-haters who kept saying, “The Bible has nothing good to say about dogs!” And we had dog-lovers who kept insisting that “dogs are people, too.” Or at least man’s best friend.

Barking could be heard in the background throughout our assembly. We did our best to have fun with the absurdity of the situation, emphasizing that hospitality is one of our core values, even if our critics say our church has officially gone to the dogs.

The event center is teaching our church to do business in a ministry-like way. And it’s doing more than help pay the bills, it’s opening doors for the kingdom.

Kim, who used to teach GED classes, had been married to an Iranian Muslim for nearly three decades and went through a painful divorce. A small group in our church loved her through the heartache. Then on Christmas Eve last year she said, “This is the first Christmas in 27 years that I can freely say that Jesus is Lord.”

Her heart matched our desire to reach the hurting and desperate of our neighborhood. When Kim asked if the church could help her and the other GED teachers throw a shower for four of her students who were pregnant, we asked some of our women to get involved. They resisted at first because they did not know these mothers-to-be.

Keep in mind, we are not too far removed from a church culture where a shower for single moms would not be sponsored by a church. However, the women pushed through their uncertainty and had the shower on Valentine’s Day, complete with a heart-shaped cake and wall-to-wall presents.

The mothers-to-be were treated like queens and were overwhelmed. Two of them said so as they stood outside afterward taking a smoke-break.

One of the GED teachers who attended the shower said, “This is what church is supposed to be.”

… Deep breath.

5 Indicators of an Effective Facility

Dave Gibbons led NewSong Church into a large facility in Irvine, California, but his views about facilities changed dramatically after he lived a year in Bangkok, Thailand. There he realized that Western assumptions about large buildings, ample parking lots, and space dedicated only for church activities were simply not realistic in urban centers globally. When he returned to the U.S., he began planting a church in largely Hispanic Santa Ana, California, with whole new assumptions about church facilities.

We learned in Bangkok that big spaces in urban centers are just too costly in terms of both financial and human resources. What’s needed is a venue that fits from an indigenous perspective, something that feels like it’s a part of the community, something the locals can be proud of.

The place we’re currently renting in Santa Ana, for instance, is a good example of that. It’s a building that previously was an auto repair shop, right in the heart of the community. It’s got a clean cement floor, brick walls, and big garage doors front and back. I love those huge garage doors because they suggest fluidity (“we’re in here and out of here”), as well as the blending of the street and our space.

I’m certainly not against large church campuses. There’s a need for them. But they can consume up to 70 percent of the church budget, and we just couldn’t afford that in Santa Ana. We decided to decentralize and get more creative with the stewarding of our time, energy, and finances invested in space. The five things we expect of our space:

1. It’s adaptable. It has already served as an art gallery, as meeting space for community groups, and as worship space. I’m officing there most of the week. All our stuff is on wheels and can be rolled in and out.

2. It’s flexible. Because we’re renting, we aren’t stuck with a permanent location. The issue isn’t ownership but temporary usability. We’re just looking for what we need for the next phase of church life. If it works for us this year, we may purchase it if that makes financial sense.

3. It’s sustainable. It doesn’t require us to invest a large percentage of our resources just to maintain the building. In fact, we are hoping to turn the building, known as 511, into a small venue community event center that can help sustain the ministry financially. Such spaces can actually support rather than drain ministry resources.

In Bangkok we got free space. Often using a restaurant or nightclub on Saturday night or Sunday morning can be very low cost, if not free. We are currently doing a thing called Laundry LOVE (laundrylovesantaana.com/ ) next door to our Santa Ana facility. Once a week we offer coins and detergent to the community without any strings. We’ve seen these often drab, boring spaces become dynamic tutoring and learning centers. How much does it cost us? A few coins, but the owners love us! And the information and relationships we gain are beautiful.

4. It’s manageable. It doesn’t require an exceptional business executive type to oversee the usage of the facility. The building serves the ministry, rather than the ministry having to serve the needs of the building.

5. It’s holistic. It’s seen not as a separate church building but as space we share with the community. It’s their space to use, too. It has a feel of being part of the fabric of the community, where you’re doing the integral work of the community. So we frame this space as an event center where a church meets. Not the other way around.

Ideally, we are a church without walls. We’re trying to create “living temples,” people who live for Christ and make a difference in the city wherever they go. Buildings aren’t bad—we need creative, adaptive spaces. But we want our facilities to reinforce the message that the church is not primarily a monument but a people, living temples.

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