What to Do When Your Buildings No Longer Meet Your Needs – Transcript
Jim Latimer: Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministers: best practices and quick help from interims for interims – wisdom from the field. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Reverend Dr. Jill Small. Jill has done a lot of work around buildings and identity, and even did her Doctor of Ministry dissertation on that. But in particular for this piece Jill, what council would you give people when your building no longer meets your needs, whether it’s old or new or whatever?
Jill: Okay well thanks Jim for asking that question. You know our buildings are very much related to our mission and ministry. We are formed by our buildings and we in turn form the their identity. And sometimes there’s a disconnect, there’s change over time. I became aware of this, mostly in working with aging congregations in their aging buildings. And what I discovered in interim ministry is that many of those buildings were built in the 1950s and 60s during the baby boom. They’re large buildings. They were at that time when they were constructed, you know, everybody was investing and making big Sunday School wings. This, of course, is not true for every congregation. There are plenty of churches that have small buildings. But where this becomes a particular issue, I think, is in big buildings where the congregation now has shrunk. The building is the same size, and often the upkeep for that building has become more, a bigger demand on the congregation. And sometimes deferred maintenance will catch up. It gets the point where you really you cannot undertake a capital campaign that will allow you to get close to fixing your dilapidated building. And that presents a lot of stress for our congregation.
It hampers, I think, the ability to attract new members, because it doesn’t present in an attractive way. So if the congregation has shrunk and the building needs have become greater, the first thing is to acknowledge that. You know, now what are we going to do? And I think an Interim Minister is in a unique position to be able to to bring that to the fore. I always frame my first question for a leadership group as “How fast do you want to know what I see?” Because some, congregations will tell me, “Tell us everything you think in the first couple of weeks you’re here,” and others will say, “We can’t take it all at once, you know, give us bite sizes.” So I always ask, “How quickly do you want to know, and what would you like to know about first?”
Jim Latimer: Beautiful.
Jill: So that there’s a conversation. It’s not just, “Here I come and I’m telling you here all your issues…”
Jim Latimer: You’re building in ownership for what they’re going to hear.
Jill: So that has worked pretty well for me. So the first question is, how do you know if your building is not the right size for you anymore? And that may take a lot of a lot of soul searching and a lot of conversations. But, but if there’s consensus that we need to do something with our facilities, such as creating an income stream so that if your membership is not able to provide the income, that you need to sustain your physical presence. That’s possible.
There are some avenues you can explore. You could partner with another congregation that has a similar situation. Then there becomes the issue of who’s going to give up their building. That, you know, becomes a whole other conversation. But you could partner with another like-minded congregation. You could perhaps partner with a completely different faith community. So if a synagogue wants to use some space or a mosque wants to have a prayer room maybe there’s a way for our buildings to to invite ecumenical participation or broader participation and really be part of a broader community. So, is there a way to partner and to share the cost? Can you create an income stream by renting rooms for perhaps, a yoga instructor, or somebody who’s a spiritual director might need an office space.
Many churches have relied on kindergartens or preschools and their spaces, and that’s great as long as you don’t sacrifice your ability to be able to use those same spaces for your own needs. So there’s some thinking about that. When it really comes right down to it, there’s always the option of selling your building. That’s not easy to do though. There’s not lot of demand for that, for a big church building, but church buildings have been sold and become condos. They’ve been sold and become community centers. They’ve been sold and have become art galleries. If your church is positioned in a great location, that will be an advantage in looking at that kind of thing.
If it’s a rural setting, maybe a conference Center. Think broadly. And then, of course, there are also possibilities for capital campaigns if you think you have a big need for renovation or repair. Capital campaign is an option if you think that, over time, people can give enough to support you know that possibility. And many denominations have their own building and loan funds. UCC, for instance, has a building and loan fund, and I’m not sure that we’re always aware of these. I get letters from them pretty regularly that say we have money we’d like to loan you money! Now, of course, you pay interest on that, but, there is a resource that is not an ordinary bank that will have some empathy for what your congregation is going through and might be able to do in the future if they invest in their property.
So that summarizes the high points of what comes to mind for me when your building doesn’t meet your needs.
Jim Latimer: That’s beautiful Jill, and I appreciate how right up front is the question of its leadership to recognize and admit to itself our building is not meeting our needs; there’s a misalignment between what our needs are in ministry and what our physical buildings are, and that we can do something about it. Thank you so much, Jill for your generosity with your time and your ideas and your wisdom. It’s good to be with you again.
Jill: I’m happy to talk with you, Jim, anytime.
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