PLANNED
FLEXIBILITY
1990

Every congregation has its story. Whether we have been members of many years or only for a few months, we sense that we belong once we know the story and actually become incorporated into it. Obviously part of what we all enjoy about being brought into the story is the sense of continuity, the familiarity, the security of the tried and true.

But if the congregation is alive, then its story is not over. It will continue to speak about a group that is either growing or shrinking, either aging or welcoming new youth, either developing new responses to different needs or resting from tasks accomplished. In short, a congregation’s story is also about change.

Each of us learns to live with this tension in our own lives. Why shouldn’t we expect the same of our congregations and our church buildings?

Planned Flexibility is the solution which the Building Fund recommends. It can be defined in two ways:

1. The ability to adapt buildings to a variety of uses over a 20-30 year life cycle. (e.g. The current large preschool population puts certain demands on the facilities. But after 10-15 years this population will be in their teens, with a different set of demands. And after 25 years the dominant parish group will probably be empty nesters, with needs for yet another kind of facility.)

2. The ability to use buildings either simultaneously or sequentially for different activities. (e.g. Worship Sunday morning, lecture Sunday afternoon, concert Sunday night. Spill over seating for overflow crowds in each activity.)

We can breath new life into how we think about our buildings by keeping both these types of flexibility in mind.

As a test of this theory, an interesting project for an adult church group might be to document how their own congregation and buildings have changed during a period of twenty years:

• How many births, deaths, weddings, graduations?
• Who has moved out and who has moved in?
• How is the neighborhood different now?
• What age group predominates now compared
to twenty years ago?
• How has the physical plant aged, been renovated, or expanded?
• How are the various rooms and spaces used now compared to then?

As all these changes are enumerated, note if possible whether people recall either the resistance or the excitement associated with them:

• Is there a pattern of resistance when changes seems to indicate decline, and excitement when linked to growth?
• Or merely general resistance to anything new and different.
• Did the existence of a long range plan give people a sense of control and direction of the uncertain future?
• Or did things just happen?
• Do you note with surprise how quickly many things that were once novel have become customary?

You will probably learn from such an exercise that things never stay exactly the same and that planning is a key ingredient is successfully "taking change by the hand," especially the kind of planning which includes flexibility, both current and future.

We can plan our buildings with this positive sense of "taking change by the hand" instead of being dragged kicking and screaming into the future by a changing world that has taken us "by the throat."

The remaining articles in this newsletters focus on various aspects of "Planned Flexibility." Most of them concentrate on flexibility in the worship space, but the same principles apply in program space and outreach space.

Six Easily Accomplished Tasks to Improve Flexibility in Worship Space
Contact us for details

1. Modular seating or stackable chairs that gang.
2. Uniform floor level with sectional platforming.
3. Moveable (but substantial) Altar and Ambo.
4. Moveable wall panels.
5. Functional storage space.
6. Removable altar railings.

Flexible Space is Good Stewardship
For a Small Congregation It May Be a Necessity

For a small congregation a single-use building is very expensive, a luxury few can afford. A heavy burden of debt and maintenance costs can sap the energy of a congregation and even call its viability into question. To get the most use out of your construction dollar, it makes sense to find ways to include flexibility, multiple use, and future expansion in a design. Of course, there are many ways to accomplish this. A flexible church building need not look like a gymnasium.

But what should the building look like? That is the LAST question to ask, not the first. Before jumping directly to design issues, take time to identify your needs and your values, the various activities you envision for your congregation, the financial parameters that are realistic for you, and put them into words in an "Architectural Program." The Building Fund has resources to help you with this process. Then use your "Program" to challenge an architect to help you visualize the resulting building.

Changes in our Concept of the Nature of Worship and of the Church Are Reflected in Building Alterations

J. G. Davies observes the following in
The Westminster Dictionary of Worship:

It has to be recognized that the minutiae of liturgical change can have little architectural effect. The addition of a prayer here or a petition there is not reflected in the buildings. New ideas only produce alterations if they are related to (1) new concepts of the nature of worship and of the church; (2) movement; (3) different ways of doing things.

Not just one, but all three of Davies’s points are operative in the Church today. The Prayer Book presumes more than one way of celebrating the Sunday Eucharist; the active participation of the laity has become a norm in worship; the rites of baptism, ordination, marriage, and burial are normally celebrated within a eucharist.

At one time our lovely old buildings possessed a wonderful congruity between their design and how we used them. But the original designers of these old buildings presumed different practices, different norms, different levels of participation, and consequently created spaces which today’s congregations often find narrow, cramped, and filled with other obstacles to their active participation.

Recapturing the integrity which these spaces have lost requires renovating them so that once again they manifest the congruity of design and function which their original architects intended.

Aesthetics and Renovation
Renovating and Existing Single-Use Building
to Increase its Value

Can we make our church buildings tools of ministry and enablers of mission instead of museum period rooms at best or stumbling blocks and albatrosses at worst? Can we find the happy middle ground between slavish presentation and total disregard for the fabric of the building? The following quotes from several sources address these challenging questions.

On "Interpretive Restoration":

The St. Louis Art Museum’s restoration and new construction program has been planned to accomplish change while maximizing the sense of permanence and history conveyed by its original building....The problems was to re-evaluate the Beaux Arts concept of a public building rather than reject it....

The concept of "interpretive restoration"....stresses the freedom to draw selectively from the past....to maximize the inherent advantages of the original Cass Gilbert structure,...while meeting contemporary standards. But in fact it is less a scientific recreation of the past than an adaptation of the past to contemporary need, using the spirit (if not always the substance) of the original.

--Permanence, Change and the Art Museum; James N. Wood, Director, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates Architects

On "Adding Throughout the Ages":

There is a certain obvious attraction about a building which is all in a single style....But there is also an attraction no less powerful about a building which has been added to throughout the ages. Unity is here sacrificed for continuity, as generation after generation has left its own particular mark upon the fabric---its own unique expression of its faith. To those who come to worship, rather than merely to admire, this mixture of styles coheres because there is a common thread in the living faith of the long procession of our ancestors, which each new phase in the architecture will represent in its own inimitable manner...a happy medley.

--The Cathedrals’ Crusade: The Rise of the Gothic Style in France, Ian Dunlop

Every wave of time superinduces its alluvion, every generation deposits its stratum upon the structure, every individual brings his own stone.

--Victor Hugo