written by Chris Swann, Director of Church Planting
During August, we had the privilege of hosting the first in a series of webinars with Stanton Dahl Architects – designed to help people serving in church plants think more clearly about their venue and space.
It was an excellent and energising time, and has impressed on me afresh how church planting needs the experience and expertise of the whole body of Christ.
The team at Stanton Dahl is led by Shayne Evans, and has worked extensively alongside churches and faith-based schools to help them find built environment solutions to their disciple-making and strategy challenges.
In the webinar, Shayne walked us through a framework that addresses the physical and social space a church inhabits – even a church plant that's renting a space.
This framework helps to shift churches away from thinking about space as the primary challenge. Commonly articulated sentiments like "we don't have enough seats," "we're running out of suitable kids ministry spaces," and "we can't make the hall we're in feel warm and inviting given the size of the gathering we currently have" are all valid – and fairly familiar to planters at various stages. But they are all downstream from the real challenge.
The real challenge – and the primary problem that needs to be solved – is that of strategy and clarity of purpose.
We have seen this to be true with the church plants we have supported at City to City. For example, a church plant in Melbourne's western growth corridor was investigating potential venues before it launched.
Many of them would have accommodated the core group they had gathered and at least the initial growth they hoped to see – with space for hospitality, kids ministry and gear storage. But none of them were particularly visible or centrally located in the community (near the major strip of cafes and shops etc).
Getting clear on the priority of being close to a focal point of the community – what we see called the "city gates" in the Old Testament – helped them slow down and prayerfully open their eyes.
Eventually, this church plant had the opportunity to hire space from the local Australian Rules Football club, which is a key gathering point for the local community. They even got discounted room hire when they started to volunteer to cook sausages for the barbecue on game days. And now one of the planters has been appointed Chaplain for the club!
I'm grateful for the way Stanton Dahl is already helping City to City's planters gain this kind of clarity by providing a process, naming the critical questions to ask, and supplying a practical tool in the form of a workbook developed with another planting agency.
The follow up webinar, which is planned for mid-September, will take this further by shifting the focus from space to place. It will explore how matters of group identity, belonging, purpose and connection can be baked into how the physical environment is set up – even for churches that are still "bumping in" with a temporary set-up in a hired venue each weekend.
You can register your interest in the next webinar by emailing chris@citytocityaustralia.org.au. Please reach out if you're interested to see the recording and slides from the first webinar.