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Grace Fellowship Church of Johnson City, Tennessee, is only halfway through its latest building project, but church leaders are already feeling confident that the planning and thinking they have invested is going to reap dividends like never before. This time around, years before the first bulldozer arrived at the work site, the church identified its primary ministry focus—serving the next generation—and aligned its design with that purpose.

Grace is one of the churches that embrace the ideal of creating worship and ministry space, rather than just more square footage. To accomplish this feat, a church must balance economics, aesthetics, and utility. Leaders need to be keenly aware of their community and what its people need in new facilities. But before uprooting a single blade of grass, a church needs to ask these baseline questions: What kind of church are we? What kind of church do we want to be?

There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism—and an almost unfathomable divergence of local congregations. Most churches will likely be confronted with the need to change their facilities. Churches meet in homes and then grow enough to force the issue of finding new space. Other churches meet in rented facilities and eventually feel the need to build a home of their own. Some longstanding congregations face the choice of patching crumbling historic buildings or constructing new space. A church growing at an explosive rate ponders whether it wants to become a megachurch at one site, go multi-site, or plant daughter churches.

Brad Eisenmann, vice president and general manager of church design-builders The Aspen Group, compares the process to a family searching for a home. "A family wouldn't say, 'We'll just take any house—we'll move in and make it work,'" he says. "Instead, they search for a home for that family. How many bedrooms do we need? How often will we entertain? What do we like to do? In the same way, churches are unique entities with certain things they do and don't do."

Churches need to discover the kind of ministry they want to carry out and the kinds of people they want to reach. Matt Evans, pastor of Rock Bridge Community Church in Dalton, Georgia, is emphatic about the value of asking these kinds of questions and planning facilities in alignment with the answers. "A lot of times, the tendency is to let the facility dictate the ministry," Evans says. "We just refuse to get pigeonholed into that. We always want to have ministry dictate everything."

The Aspen Group and Cogun, Inc. are founding members of The Cornerstone Knowledge Network, which examines the intersection of ministry, culture, and facilities, and provides resources to help churches become more intentional when they plan building projects. Research by Cornerstone and other thinkers has identified some features of contemporary society that churches should consider:

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