Do you feel like your church building has been more of a burden than a bonus in recent years? Maybe you saw it as an invaluable asset and central hub to your ministry in the past, but post-COVID, most churches have gone digital with their communications and many aspects of their community building, too.
Buildings are still important for churches, but they’ve become just another piece of a ministry’s activity — and an expensive one, too.
If your building is weighing down your ministry, you’re not alone. In November, the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability reported (via Christianity Today) that church giving has slumped two years in a row at a time when 70% of its member churches are struggling to simply keep up with inflation.
The growing burden of church buildings has made it imperative for church leaders to take their real estate strategies seriously. This is where Building Activation can be a game changer.
Ministry Solutions Group’s team specializes in this unique service of activating a ministry’s untapped brick-and-mortar potential. The two-phase process starts with gathering information, assessing options, and creating a plan based on data-driven decisions. This could be using your church building to set up a daycare center, coffee shop, or even pickleball courts. From there, we can help you put that plan in motion, guiding the framework into a reality where your church helps rather than hinders your ministry.
Building Activation is an inevitable part of the future of the church. The struggle for many church leaders is seeing that it isn’t a necessary evil. Activating your building is a positive for any ministry. Here are three of the biggest benefits of taking the building activation approach for your church real estate.
We get it. Churches aren’t in the business of making money. You’re focused on mission statements and having a kingdom-building impact, and we heartily endorse those priorities!
The issue is the reality of having a building and the expenses that come with it. Even non-profits have to pay their bills, and financial instability can make it hard to focus on their bigger vision.
Building Activation is a safe, effective, and positive way to address church buildings and finance. It helps you tap into the revenue-generating potential of your building during the 90+% of the week that it stands open and empty.
This puts less stress on your congregation to financially support basic utility and mortgage costs and can even empower your church to give more often and more generously. When we helped Chase Oaks Church in Plano, Texa, establish childcare, pickleball courts, and a cafe, the result was hundreds of thousands of income in net profit each year — something that empowered their ministry to continue doing their God-ordained work without fear of missing a mortgage payment.
The financial end of building activation is a great foundational reason to consider investing in that process, but it is by no means the only benefit your church can get from it. You can also use it to turn your church into an organization that actively and effectively addresses community needs.
Many of the churches we’ve worked with have found that their church buildings weren’t just underused. They were capable of addressing poignant and distressing needs in their local community.
The example that continues to resonate the most, particularly in the last few years, is the use of church space to set up daycare centers. When the American Rescue Plan expired, it left 70,000 childcare providers underfunded and 3.2 million children without childcare options. Churches have the potential and capability to fill that gap with their spaces, which often stand under-utilized Monday through Friday.
Of course, that doesn’t mean childcare is necessarily the best way your church can serve its community. We’ve put together a checklist you can use to gauge the greatest needs in your local area. Once you’ve identified the most pressing needs, you can work with an organization like Ministry Solutions Group to create a practical, safe, and effective way to use your space to help address it.
Along with stronger finances and meeting local community needs, Building Activation can use your church real estate strategy to help you with your ministry’s core vision and mission. We’ve found that investing in building activation can often lead to incredible outreach efforts — often through organic channels, too.
Returning to the Chase Oaks example above, once their community-oriented facilities were open, we found it sparked a flood of volunteers — not just from the church but from the local community, too.
Even better? The ministry estimates that its Building Activation initiative brings in between 2,500 and 3,000 unique visitors a month to use those utilities. That is a massive amount of organic exposure that outstrips even the most elaborate outreach programs (which typically cost money rather than generating income).
Building Activation is a powerful way to optimize your church’s real estate. It has the potential to:
However, Building Activation doesn’t come from flipping a switch, embracing a philosophy, or finding that jack-of-all-trades on your staff to guide the project. You need professional, experienced, data-driven decision-making to truly unleash these kinds of benefits.
This is where the Ministry Solutions Group team can help. We’ve worked with many churches of all sizes, from portable operations to multisite giants, to tap into the hidden potential of their church real estate.
We’d love to talk with you and your leadership team about whether you’re a good fit for Building Activation. Together, we can assess your church’s situation and potential and then develop a plan that can help you transform your real estate from a growing liability into a positive contributor to your ministry’s impact.