The process of finding an architect to build your new facility is a lot more complex than calling any architect and saying, “Hey, we’re building a church. Do you want to design it?” Aside from finding an architect who has experience with worship facilities, you want someone who understands your church’s mission, atmosphere and goals, as well as the role of the architectural firm.

“An architect that specializes in churches understands ministry words and terms, and they understand what those terms mean translated into facilities,” explains David Evans, president of Mantel Teter Architects in Kansas City, Mo. “There’s this global thought that architects know and do all buildings, but our culture and our marketplace has become fairly specialized, and there are a lot of architects who have never designed a church and don’t understand group dynamics and committees.”

An inexperienced architect – or an experienced architect who has not designed a worship facility – can inadvertently offer bad leadership and bad information early in the design process, Evans shares. Starting off headed in the wrong direction can leave the committee and the church faced with disappointment, guilt and often embarrassment.

“Be mindful that the committee will make 80 percent of its decisions in the first 20 percent of the project, and we haven’t turned any dirt yet and may have done very little design,” he says. “Churches need an architect who’s willing to come in and lead them through the process of the appropriate steps at the right time. That’s pretty critical.”

Start at the Beginning

The design process starts much earlier than during your building committee’s search for the ultimate design firm, though. Picking the right members of the building committee can be a crucial element in finding the perfect architect.

“A building committee will often get formed with the idea that the committee needs a lot of expertise,” relays Clayton Cole, principal at Slaterpaull Architects in Denver. “I guide churches to give us their most inspired visionary people who are just excited about what’s going on inside the church. If a committee just comes to us with a good sense of the vision of the church and they can all express it, we can go from there.”

Evans explains that building committees spend a considerable amount of time deciphering the vision and understanding what the church represents. These are the most important parts of choosing an architect. “It’s important that the committee understand and know that the architect should] get to the heart of the issues.”

Though a good architect will guide your committee through the process and be able to run with your vision, you still need to come armed with some sense of what your church needs. That doesn’t mean you need to know how many square feet the facility should be, but there are several critical elements – what Evans calls historical data – leaders need to give a potential architect.

“Most of the time, churches don’t know in much detail what they need,” Evans asserts. Providing three to four years worth of worship attendance records, as well as attendance data for Christian education classrooms will allow an architect to predict a potential growth curve and “design a balanced facility, so you don’t have a 2,000-seat worship center when you only have 600 people coming to your church, and you’re not showing any kind of growth indication that you’re ever going to be anywhere near that larger size,” Evans says.

If a church has a growth plan in place, Cole says part of the architect’s role is to determine how solid the plan is.

“If those two to three years of stats show growth, we’re comfortable with that,” Cole declares. “If the stats are kind of level but the church wants to grow, we have to talk to them very carefully about not just building a facility and hoping people come. There is certainly some truth to that, but it is a high-risk monetary investment.”

This “programming” stage also involves some careful detective work to find out the DNA of the church. “We like to visit the church, talk to people, go to worship services and see what the character is like, what the liturgy is like, get a sense of the lay people and organize a formal interview process of church staff, key leadership positions and some congregants,” Cole says. If the church is willing, he likes to send out a questionnaire, organize a potluck dinner or have some open workshops to get a deeper sense of who the church is.

The workshops function much like a focus group for Cole and his firm. They create a set of questions based on their visits to the church and conversations with members. Congregants can participate in breakout groups of five or six people, including a moderator for each group who will ask the architects questions and express congregants’ opinions. In Cole’s experience, the small groups seem to work much better than one large one because large groups can be dominated by a few strong voices.

“We’ve done our job well when we can listen to a large group and have them say, ‘Wow they got it all in there. They figured out everybody’s little issue,’” Cole says. “I always try to push committees outside of their thought process, outside of their comfort zone, outside of what they thought they needed, and guide them to the fact that they’re making decisions for the future of the church.”

How To Get Started

• Visit your local American Institute of Architects office or log on to their Web site (www.aia.org) for a list of resources.
• Consult industry resources that have a database of architects that specialize in church architecture.
• Talk to church leaders who have been involved in building similar facilities; ask who they interviewed and selected.

The Big Three

Key issues architectural firms want building committees to be most aware of:

1. Make sure the architect can design a facility that works for your church. It has to function the way you want it to, which includes aesthetics.
2. Look carefully for an architect who is technically savvy and can design a building that is well put together with some common-sense sustainability features.
3. You have to click with your architect and the architect’s style of work. Have a sense that the firm wants to work with you and that you will enjoy the process.

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Architect Vs. Pastor: How 7 Rules of Teamwork Can Improve Your Church Construction