1. Plan For Facilities From Day 1 – If you just planted, in 5-7 years you’ll need a building or a new job!
2. Build A Long Runway – “Church Building - How long does it take…really?
3. Track Everything – Good financials and attendance numbers put the bank’s bean counters at ease.
4. Define “Healthy” Early - If you aim at nothing you’ll hit it every time. Understand what the metrics of healthy are for your church.
5. Measure “Healthy”- What gets measured gets done.
6. Put Off Building Until You Can’t Stand It – People don’t solve problems they aren’t experiencing. If your worship venue doesn’t feel full people won’t fund a new one.
7. Understand Your “Wow Factor” - We all want to wow people with our church building. But every town has its own level of WOW. Don’t out punt the coverage on this. Every dollar spent on WOW is a buck not spent on critical ministry space.
8. Educate Yourself – Every conference you attend has 40 guys telling you how to build your church and nobody coaching you on how to build “A” church. You gotta dig for it. Nothing kills momentum and influence like a bad church building or a bad church building project.
9. Ministry Plan Before Church Building Master Plan - The next step you take needs to be in the direction of the ministry plan for world domination for Christ. If the next step doesn’t line up with the vision, the vision is no longer destination.
10. Model Don’t Imitate – Check out different church buildings. Learn from others, but run your own race. Just because your ministry is similar to theirs doesn’t mean your buildings should be. Break the model. Build for function.
Bonus: Trust God to do the ministry he’s called you to inside the margin he’s given you – Don’t spend offerings that haven’t yet been offered.
I would also add to get involved with someone that knows how building projects work from the financial end because it is really easy to get over budget.