Walk the streets of Disney World, and visitors are transported into a magical world of creativity and inspiration. Mel McGowan, a former Disney Imagineer and now president of Visioneering Studios, a national church architecture firm, brings this same expectation for creativity and inspiration to ministry facilities.

Since the 12th century, Christian church buildings and steeples have been practically inseparable. Noted British architect, mathematician, and astronomer Sir Thomas Wren, who was commissioned to rebuild many churches destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666, placed special emphasis on steeples and spires. His designs continue to be embraced, resulting in churches that are as beautiful as they are useful.

Steeples have long been used as means of communication. Steeple bells ring to tell the neighborhood, town, or village that services are beginning (or ending), or that an important announcement will soon be made. And on April 18, 1775, two lanterns displayed in the steeple of Boston's Christ Church, also known as the Old North Church, warned Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British were attacking by sea.

Today, steeples remain an icon of American churches. But choosing a steeple for a church building, or even deciding to have one, is far from a simple decision. Fortunately, manufacturers and providers of steeples understand their church clients, and offer a wide variety of steeple products that will last many years.

Growing churches can be stopped by the stress of deciding what to do next. Fortunately, there is a clear way to overcome these growing pains.

Christ Church is a rapidly growing denominational congregation in a suburban area of a midwestern city. The church has been around for 160 years and is on the National Register of Historic Places. People love the church's history, but they are more excited about their future of reaching the unchurched people in their community. Church members unanimously agreed that a building was needed to accommodate growth, not only in worship, but also in education and ministry activities. In fact, the church already had some money in the bank for a building program.

When church leaders envision their next building project, many are selecting interior and exterior styles that may deter the very people they're trying to reach—the unchurched—from visiting.

According to the Church Facilities Expansion Study, a joint research project in 2009 between the Cornerstone Knowledge Network (CKN) and Christianity Today International, church leaders consistently chose building designs that are the opposite of what the unchurched said they preferred in a prior study, Sacred Space, conducted by CKN and Lifeway Research in 2008.

In the Church Facilities Expansion Study, most churches that are planning to build within the next 18 months say they will go with a more modern look for their exterior, sanctuary, and foyer designs. However, Sacred Space respondents, all of whom are unchurched and do not currently attend a church, said they prefer churches with a gothic-like design.

Should churches base their building plans on what the unchurched say they want? Not necessarily. According to Jim Couchenour, director of ministry services for Cogun, Inc, a design/build firm for churches and a co-founder of CKN, a balanced perspective is needed.

Each year our sister publication, Your Church magazine, publishes an annual Church Buyer's Guide. Check out the free, electronic PDF of our "Facility" section from the 2010 Church Buyer's Guide here.

You can see a digital version of the entire 2010 Church Buyer's Guide too!

As part of an alliance between the Your Church team at Christianity Today International and Cornerstone Knowledge Network, the two organizations collaborated on a joint research project to better understand the growth in U.S. churches and its underlying factors.

This research aims to understand overall church experience and church plans for facilities expansion. It explores church growth in attendance, types of worship associated with the growth, and how churches are accommodating such growth. In addition, the study aims to compare respondents' reactions to different images of church buildings (both exteriors and interiors) to learn what types of design they would most likely create if they are going to build or design a new church facility in the near future.

Download the executive report:

According to architect Mel McGowan, the Samaritan woman at the well would never have made her way to the 'holiest of holies' with all the hoops she would have been forced to jump through. That's why Jesus came to her. In the same way, churches are looking at creative ways to bring Christ back into the city square rather than forcing seekers to overcome unnecessary obstacles to find faith. Watch Mel's video for a quick look at the revolution of sacred space that's occurring.

This decade-old neo--Gothic Anglican megachurch is layered with stone walls, a thick tower that hoists a cross, and half-oval windows in the shape universally known as "church window." While its original building plan called for theater seating—the sanctuary seats about 3,000—the church instead opted for pews.

"When we built it, there was a lot of movement towards the warehouse look, with black ceilings," says Dana Blackwood, Church of the Apostles' director of facilities. "The church leadership understood that that look was going to fade. People wanted to have a sense of tradition, something that looked like a church."

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In the late 1990s, a property developer began designing Highpoint Community in Romeoville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His plans consisted of apartments and single-family housing oriented around a central village green featuring a community center. And in that community center he envisioned an anchoring presence that is seldom considered by commercial and residential real estate developers: a church.

Does your church facility encourage people to slow down, build trust, and explore what God is doing in their hearts? At the September 15th Cornerstone ALIGNMENT4 Conference in Chicago, Mel McGowan will help you answer these questions with his session on "Creating Connecting Space."

Wondering what you can do to make your existing church building more environmentally friendly? Here are 25 ideas you can use today.

Architect Steve Fridsma talks about the value of incorporating environmental design for churches.

Facility financing and operational maintenance are typically among the largest budget line items for churches, after staffing. In today's cost-cutting climate, churches are looking for ways to reduce expenses in this area. Building environmental features into church facilities may be one significant way to accomplish this.

The distinction between secular and sacred space continues to blur as a small but growing number of churches meet in movie theaters and consider eschewing traditional church buildings altogether.

The Protestant Reformation that followed the invention of the Gutenberg press in the 16th century ushered in an architectural revolution. To move the church into a print culture, in which people could read instead of simply absorbing what others told them, required massive changes in spaces that would be used for worship and teaching.

Today we are undergoing another kind of spiritual awakening as the church undergoes a postmodern Reformation from print to screen. That revolution can'y happen without altering the physical space of the church. What might postmodern church architecture look like?

Here are my 10 Commandments of Architecture for the Postmodern Church:

A recent survey probed nearly 1,700 unchurched American adults, putting photos of four different church exteriors in front of them. Respondents indicated their preferences for designs by allocating 100 points across the four images, giving more points to those they liked and fewer to those they didn't.

The medieval-style cathedral averaged 48 points, more than double the next-highest finisher, a white-steeple-and-pillar exterior that averaged about 19 points. The other two churches, possessing more contemporary, suburban-plex feels, averaged 18 points and 16 points, according to the study, commissioned by Cornerstone Knowledge Network and conducted by LifeWay Research.

So with increasing attention paid to evangelicals who are drawn to liturgical church styles, should church leaders weighing new building designs opt for traditional approaches as a way to attract the churched and unchurched alike?

Download a copy of research results.

If you pick up a Bible, you don't have to look any further than Genesis 6:14-22 to learn about God's approach to Master Planning. It was only through God's tremendous vision and skillful planning that Noah was able to successfully complete the task of building an ark large enough to save mankind. While this was certainly a God-sized task, the principles are the same today. Through Noah, the Lord was able to assess the problem, take stock of materials on hand, and carefully put together a blueprint for the construction of a three-story boat, capable of housing all of the species of the world.

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