Greetings from Jesus Loves Ministry!

He said to them; “Go into the world and preach the good news to all creation” (Mark 16:15).

It is really privilege for me to introduce my ministry to you. I am from Pakistan ; I and my team felt the need to establish the Jesus Loves Ministry. We day and night struggle to preach the word of God and real teachings of Holy Bible.

We also make them realize that how great is to be a Christian, because the Jesus Christ has bought us by shedding His blood on the cross. We thrust to bring many people close to God who are faraway from God and are fallen in sin. Apart from the spiritual development ministry is also concerned for the social and economic uplift of the poor, depressed, marginalized and downtrodden people through education, skill trainings.

As I was visiting your site I found that you are doing the marvelous work to preach the Word of God.

Our ministry is doing the following work.

· Door to door Preaching

· Sunday Schools

· Bible Education for Youth

· Prayer Meetings

· Street Prayers.

· Conventions

· Home Schools

· Adult Literacy Centers

· Vocational Training Centers for Women

· Economic Development program for People

· Bible correspondence school

· To show the religious movies

I watch your website and read your valuable material in English, as in Pakistan most of the people are uneducated they are not able to read and understand the English. I can translate your work in our local language so that people may read and understand it in the better way. As we don’t have any regular support for our Ministry work, the income generated by the translation work would be a great help from your ministry or church to run our above mentioned ministry work and activities

I hope you will consider my humble request favorably.

God bless you, your family and work abundantly.

Yours truly, In Jesus,

Evangelist: Saima Benjamin

House #. Street #.

Phn +93003562128

Before continuing in the debate of delivery methods, it does not further the discussion for you to call into question our firm’s level of experience. We are not a firm that has only designed 10-20 projects and we have taken over projects that have been botched by other architects or design-builders.

You speak a lot about taking responsibility and guaranteeing a maximum price. We like to structure projects with a construction management approach, rather than a traditional design-bid build or a design-build approach. In the construction management approach, we bring a construction manager on board early in the process, and they do provide a guaranteed maximum price. Single source accountability (Design Build), means that builders can hide costs and deliver a poorly constructed building because the church does not have an advocate that can keep the builder accountable. By using the construction management approach, the builder is held accountable and rather than hiding costs and the BUILDER keeping the savings, the CHURCH keeps the savings. You mentioned your involvement in 9 projects, but in only one did you get savings back with the design-build approach. It is irresponsible to “not care how he categorized his costs” as long as the budget expectations are met.

When you are comparing costs of the ‘architect and his team’, the architect is providing an estimate for his design. If the builder gives a cheaper price, that does not mean he is giving you the same quality of building - it may be cheaper, but that is not what is beneficial to the church. Comparing apples to apples, the design-build method may actually be far more expensive.

You may be sold on the Design-Build method, but I would suggest you continue to re-examine the issue before you abandon traditional design-bid-build, and that you would continue to examine the construction management approach and integrated delivery methods that are superior to both traditional design-bid-build and design-build.

My husband always required our Building Committee to choose a professional that had experience in designing and building churches. Our building committee was always comprised of bankers, attorneys and over the years even architects and engineers along with a contractor or two. Several years ago, after studying all options our committee presented a strong case for going with the design build option. Thankfully after many projects both small and large, we have been very pleased with the results.

To make the assumtion that the architect of an experienced design build team would not be able to create a functional master plan for the site is absurd and shows just how little experience you actually have in church planning and designing. A church design builder and there are several very good ones, has far more experience than an architect who has only deigned a few facilities. Many have built over 500-1,000 churches and honestly an architect who has designed 10-20 projects cannot hope to compete with such experience.

As a primary member of several building committees over the years I know firsthand that trying to bring an architect, engineer, and a general contractor together to work in harmony and in the best interests of the client has proven over and over again to not work. Architects do not take responsibility for their errors and ommissions even though the claim they do. when an event in the field actually happens, they always end up laying the blame on the owner or their engineering consultant (it is always blatantly evident that the error or omission is print related) The engineer always points back to the architect and in every case and there there have been 3 I am thinking of, the owner (the church) always ends up paying for the problem. In 9 design build projects, we have never had this happen because of the single source accountability process of the design build method.

Our lender also always forced us to add large contingencies to our projects because of cost overruns that are now considered normal to the industry. However on our last four projects, we were able to have this waived because the Design Builder gave us a guaranteed maximum price and demonstrated to the bank they had experience to back up their guarantee. I have never found an architect who would guarantee a project. I understand why; simply because they are only responsible for a portion of the project.

Single source accountability (Design Build) has proven to be the best method of building for a church. I would only suggest that a design Builder have at least 500 churches on his project list. If I had to go with an architect, I would require that they also have at least 500 or more churches on their project list and each of their consultant on their team also have the same qualification. Do you have that much experience?

You stated that Design builders typically hid their costs in the construction portion of the project. We have not found this to be true either. Actually we have never had an architect create a true cost efficient budget. they simply did not have access to the numers the way a design builder has. Also, since a design builder guaranteed to meet a fixed construction budget, we simply did not care how he categorized his costs. We were only concerned that he meet our stated budget expectations. In one case, we had a shared saving option and got back over $122,000.00.

To determine a true cost analysis we require our builder team to show the average of their last 10 jobs that were similar in square footage to what we were building. We then compared the costs of the architect and his team and that of the Design Builder. The Design builder had cost savings in some cases of over $25.00 a square foot. The architect always budgeted their proijects at around $150-$200.00 per square foot whereas the design builder had costs ranging from $90-$150 per square foot.

After multiple projects, we are sold on the Design Build method.