Recognizing that real-estate development is not one of the strengths of most pastors is key to successfully designing and building churches. Church Solutions places great emphasis on educating today’s church leaders on the process of expansion to help prevent the numerous pitfalls that may occur in planning their next facility.

The first major stepin building a church facility is preliminary design services. The more time you spend planning, the better your opportunity to steward God’s resources wisely. No church ever "saves" money once construction starts.

To begin the journey, your designer starts with a needs assessment (also known as "programming") to capture a snapshot of the present ministries, as well as a vision for the future. Experienced church designers offer a "church design workbook" that helps coalesce your thoughts and provides framework to involve other staff and lay people in the church.

Just a few of the questions asked are:

• How does your church fit into the Body of Christ?
• Where do you see your church in the next year? Three years? Five years?
• What is your mission emphasis: salvation, discipleship, both?
• What ministries are needed to support your mission?
• What facilities are required to support these programs?

The needs assessment should include a demographic study of a three-mile radius of your church (your "Jerusalem"). The information from this study can affect the amount and type of space you choose to build first. The results of the needs assessment are then summarized and translated into square-footage requirements.

A master plan is derived to lay out the square footage on your site. At this juncture, a building cost estimate, based on the square footage, is used to prioritize the project into phases to accommodate your budget. Once the first phase is identified, floor plans and elevations are drawn, identifying the spaces and their relation to one another. Beautiful computer-generated color models (in some cases a movie "fly-through") can be produced to facilitate stewardship programs.

Some designers stop there and wait on the church to decide to move into full document production. This often yields tragic results ("Our architect designed something we can’t afford to build!"). Insist that you are provided with a well thought-out preliminary design estimate that shows line-item detail for all architectural divisions (concrete, plumbing, structural steel, site work, etc.) and major assumptions and items excluded. A good goal is for your preliminary design estimate to be within 5 percent of the final contract price.