(Continuing to elaborate on what makes WPH Architects for Ministry unique / part 3) In his classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey suggests starting at the end of your life – how you would like to be eulogized – to help you establish how to live out the rest of your life. In the parable of the three servants highlighted in my previous blog entry, the last aspect was giving account to the Master. At WPH, we are keenly aware of the “accountability” aspect of stewardship as we serve churches. Our counsel, guidance, input and designs can significantly empower a church to do what God is calling them to do. If we don’t give good, wise counsel, it can do significant damage to a church. Understanding this, we try to approach the way we work with churches as stewards that will one day have to give an account. To that end, we often find ourselves in a position of telling churches things they do not want to hear. Usually the information they don’t want to hear has to do with what we think they can afford. We draw on years of experience, past mistakes we have learned from, observations of good practices of other churches, and prayer. We never want to underestimate what God may do in providing for a church, yet we also do not want to presume extraordinary provision either. The desire to build big or build more can be seductive to both church leaders and to us as architects. I find it interesting that several portions of scripture where Jesus speaks about stewardship He stages it against a backdrop example of abuse of religious position and power or greed. It serves as a warning to all of us about the deceptive nature of our hearts. We are not so immune to pride or the love of money. We must carefully watch our motivations so that we can build wisely
As noted in my last blog entry, stewardship is not primarily a negative thing when it comes to money, churches and buildings. Buildings are a necessary tool to do the ministry He calls churches to. The challenge is to provide for these practical needs in a way that keeps churches from getting overcommitted financially. We do this by providing a strategic plan for them to keep growing numerically and meeting the facility needs of the various ministries. Instead of just saying “you can’t afford what you want”, we develop creative solutions for churches to implement phases of growth and expansion over time, what we are calling Growth Planning Solutions (or GPS for short). We employ specially designed tools to accomplish this, such as our Field Guide . We develop detailed growth projections by ministry areas to quantify space needs over time, and marry these with specific phased master plans. While master planning per se is not unique to us (other architects and even some church design-builders provide these), the detailed strategic planning (GPS) approach is. By setting a master plan inside the framework of stewardship – both of ministry and finances – we provide churches with a realistic, attainable plan to accommodate growth. This helps enables a church – and us – to hear a “well done” when we have to give account.
My next installment in this series will elaborate on how our GPS approach accounts for costs throughout a project utilizing Total Project Budget Management.
