How to Audit Your Church Campus for Activation Opportunities

The majority of church buildings are empty throughout the week. Activating those untapped spaces is a great way to get your building to support your ministry and amplify your church’s impact in and connection with your local community. 

Understanding the concept is easy. A question we often get at Ministry Solutions Group, though, is how. How do you know which spaces to activate? How can you identify the best opportunities?

Here’s a building activation audit checklist to help you start that process.

1. Start by Shifting Perspective

Finding the best opportunities starts with shifting the way you see your spaces. How is your kids’ wing laid out? Do you have offices? Classrooms? It’s easy to see these as dedicated spaces when, in reality, they’re dormant and undesignated from Monday through Friday. 

Start the building activation process by redefining your dedicated spaces into flexible spaces. Resist the urge to mark a space as “reserved” simply because it has a specific function on Sunday morning. 

Your building isn’t your church. It’s just one of your ministry’s tools. Opening up your mind to other options for its use makes it easier to make the most of this critical resource God has given you.

2. Inventory Everything

Along with mindset, you need to consider everything you have. Again, this is an obvious but important first step. Don’t just consider your big-ticket spaces. 

Those are obvious and important. National Community Church in D.C. uses its main hall and auditorium as a state-of-the-art event center. The Brighton 2/42 campus in Michigan literally repurposes its entire building as a community center during the week. 

But there are other areas of your ministry that can also make a difference. Walk through your church like a first-time guest and take note of all of the areas you regularly overlook. 

A relatively small paved area outside can become a pickleball court. (And if you’re clever like NorthPoint Church in Johnston, Iowa, it can even double as overflow parking when needed.) Offices can become counseling and therapy spaces. Your Sunday morning cafe can transform into a local co-work space and gathering hot spot. Take the time to inventory everything so you have all of your options in front of you.

3. Map Out Use Vs. Mission

As you start looking for more ways to use your church, also ask: How are you using your church right now? What spaces are already utilized during the week?

Now ask a follow-up question. Does your current use of space align with your mission? This sounds simple, but it can expose some glaring oversights. Maybe you have a fellowship hall or gym you built because you have a mission-driven focus on reaching the local community. Are those spaces open or filled on a regular basis? 

If not, there’s a gap between use and mission, even where you are already trying to activate spaces. Understanding this can help you orient yourself and confidently choose where to focus your building activation initiatives.

4. Keep Partnerships in Mind

Don’t hold back the dreaming process with your own limited team and resources. Trust us, we’ve watched church teams dream about ministry. When you’re focused on God’s work, it’s easy to look ahead and plan for two, three, or even five times the capacity and impact that you currently are capable of having.

That’s a good thing! Vision is powerful, and it drives us toward better results. Use that mission-driven ambition with your building activation, too. Think big — and don’t think alone.

Consider partnerships wherever they can help facilitate things. The most common area where this makes a difference is with childcare. This underrated way to activate church buildings is often overlooked because a church doesn’t have the internal staff or infrastructure to do it in-house. 

And honestly? That’s the right call in most cases. Don’t overstretch or overexpose your ministry by trying to run a daycare center on your own. However, we’ve helped many ministries partner with highly qualified childcare organizations seeking spaces to operate. 

This takes the logistical and administrative part off your plate. It also provides a high-quality service for the local community, brings in new people who might have never otherwise visited your building, and even creates revenue streams to offset operational costs.

Auditing Your Church for Optimal Impact

Activating spaces starts with a proper audit. That’s why the first thing the Ministry Solutions Group team does is an on-site analysis of your building. We consider things like capabilities, felt needs, and potential, and then help you align them with ministry mission so that everything is working toward the Godly goals that guide you. 

If you want support in this auditing process, we can help. Reach out for our Clear Path Forward Ministry Solution. Together, we can create a building activation strategy for your church so that you can engage in each project and initiative with the confidence that you are making a balanced, God-centered effort to better your church’s impact.