We frequently mentioned building committees in our articles. They form a critical communication component between our work and your church’s vision.
If you don’t have the right membership on your church building committee, it can cause problems during the church design and construction phases of your project. For that reason, we want to outline three guidelines for bringing together a church building committee that will provide the most effective support possible.
Choose Vision over Expertise
It’s logical to think that having construction expertise on the committee is important. While we believe there is value to that, we also believe there is a much more important criterion to use when choosing committee members: whether they understand your church.
In other words, don’t sacrifice vision for knowledge. It is far more valuable and helpful for us, or any church design and building professionals, to be working with a team that understands the vision of your church.
We need people who are plugged into what God has called you to do and who to reach. Those are the ones who will help us design and build a church that really will meet your needs.
Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew
So many churches dream much bigger than their finances allow. This is why you need at least one financial representative on your building committee.
He or she can provide a reality check to the visionaries on your committee and support a church design that is within your budget. This finance expert will also understand the connection between the vision and the building, and can explain that to the rest of your finance team in ways they can understand and support.
Involve Your Church Building Committee Every Step of the Way
In far too many cases, we discover that churches create multiple committees in the process of developing a church building project. They might start with a long-range vision committee, then add a planning committee, then start a building committee, and finally bring in a finance committee that’s supposed to figure out how to raise money for it all.
The problem arises when the building committee doesn’t understand the reasons for the decisions made by the earlier committees, and the finance committee isn’t on board with the vision and doesn’t want to support that level of fundraising.
With one committee, involved from the very beginning, everyone understands the choices made for the project and knows whether it’s possible for a church of your size and demographics to afford it. Nothing gets lost in translation.
Learn More
The information above comes from a recent McKnight Group webinar on the principles of a successful church building project, conducted by Philip Tipton, our vice president of architecture. To learn more about successful church building projects, visit our website, read about our 2016 series of free i3 webinars, and sign up today.