Criteria for Selecting a Property - Assignment Example

Disciples’ questions DISCIPLES’ QUESTIONS Titus Rock Manickam Order No. 277671 05 March 2009 DISCIPLES’ QUESTIONS Criteria for selecting property There is space crunch in the city I live in. Hence, it is difficult to get piece of land for church construction. Even if land could be procured, the cost is exorbitant. It is unrealistic to spend a fortune on getting a piece of land for the church and then spending another fortune on getting the church built. The criteria for selecting property are in its purposes. The church is a collection of people who are taught the Word of God by a priest or pastor. The church building is the temporal aspect of church. It is an asset which meets the requirement of a place to worship. The selection of property to accommodate the church must commensurate the number of people in the church and the finance they are capable of raising to buy the church premises. We need a church for 600-700 people. We are located in a busy suburb of a very large city. Ideally, we may settle for a hall that accommodates around a 1000 people. The hall could be located in a commercial area or residential place. The strength is in the cost because it is affordable. It is close to the houses of most members. If we get the complete floor in a commercial complex, we also get privacy. The weaknesses are that we will not have the church hall completely to ourselves. We will have to observe the rules and regulations of the commercial society and restrain the volume of our sound when we sing hymns and choruses. Evaluate the present building space for your church. What are the biggest pressure points in your church buildings? We now meet in a school hall. The hall is huge and is capable of accommodating 1000 members. It admeasures 7,000 square feet. The school building is strong and is capable of bearing the strain of 5,000 people in the entire floor. I am not aware of any pressure point in the school hall. The hall is such that it can bear pressure from all sides. There is no threat to it from human source, that is, it cannot suffer any harm from purely human strength. If pressure points are meant to be columns, beams and floors, the school is a ground plus four floor affair. Its floor space is about 20,000 square feet. So, considering all the floors, the total floor space is 100,000 square feet. The school has columns and beams and appears to be of robust construction. Discover how the last major construction project in your church was financed. How did this project correspond to what you learned? It is about five years since our church was established. We have not faced any situation of a major construction project in our church. We have grown numerically and in zeal. We are collecting funds for our own church premises. There is no problem so far as finance is concerned. We have enough money to finance a purchase. There is a steering committee which is involved in searching for the property. At any rate, I attended a different church before five years. This church has a regular church building consisting of the main church hall on the ground floor, and more halls for church programs on the three upper floors. The main church on the ground floor had high ceiling, almost double the size of the halls on the three upper floors. This church was very old. They had broken down the old single floor building some forty years ago and converted it into a building with ground plus the three upper floors. The finance for this building came from donations by the church members and more finance from the diocesan. No loan was taken. Interview a pastor or church staff member that has recently been involved in a major church construction project. Ask him about how closely they followed the safe borrowing limits suggested in this lesson. Record your findings in your notebook. Most churches in my region have a policy to not borrow money from banks or any financial institutions. They search for donations and grants. If they need loan, they may take it from well-known religious organizations. I interviewed a church staff member who is an architect and is involved in church constructions. In his view, churches strictly adhered to the borrowing limits in the event they took loans. The finance for any building project is large. The churches have funds. They have expenses too. Looking at the expenditure, they will only borrow when they are sure they have the capacity to make the repayments from the finance that is left after all the expenses are taken care of. Normally, churches frown on the concept of loan. However, they may resort to loans in case they find property prices rising fast. If they feel that taking loan will help them to manage with the construction cost now so that do not have to pay very high amounts for the construction in future, they might opt to go for a loan. Also, churches have their committees for overseeing finances. The members in these committees are reputable and distinguished people and capable of making the right decisions when it comes to borrowing funds. Otherwise, it will not be possible to go through the project. The project will be stalled due to fraud and litigations. Interview a pastor or church staff member that has recently been involved in a church construction project. Ask him which process they used for the designing and constructing of the project, and why? I spoke to the same church staff member. He says that process vary according to the requirement. A single church building is designed according to the requirement of the church members. Normally, the design includes accommodation of the pastor, the hall, and some place for visiting clergy. There can be a building with ground floor only, or one with ground floor plus up to three more floors. However, in the case of missions such as schools and orphanages, there may be a number of buildings spread over a large area to accommodate the schools, hostels, and halls. In these cases, the buildings are complemented by large grounds to serve as places where the children can play games such as soccer and hockey. Most of the time, once the design is completed the organizations do not change them. This is because being organizations it takes quite some time for the board members to agree on all the aspects of the design. And it is a practice that once the design has been approved there will not be any changes that may be brought about later on. However, it is a different matter with churches and missions. Churches and missions are usually run by pastors and leaders who base their decisions in the own capacity and may get them ratified by the committee later. Hence, it is not uncommon for churches and missions to change the design midway. In this situation, they are accommodated to the extent possible. It is not possible to carry out major design changes when the building construction is in progress. Interview an older pastor that has assisted with several church construction projects. Share with him the suggestions in Schmitt’s Notebook about special promotions during a church building program. Ask him which he used and have him tell you about them. Ask if he used any other promotional programs during construction projects. I am sorry the pastors and church members in my region are not acquainted with Schmitt’s Notebook. Can you please upload the contents of this Notebook? Nevertheless, I can share the experiences of an older pastor who is on the board of several missions and who helps in special promotions to raise funds for church building. He uses musical concerts, meets with Christian businessmen, issues directories, and hands out receipt books in order to raise funds. He raises good amounts through these means although they do not comprise the entire cost for the building project. However, he only takes a few cases in one year for large churches and church organizations. He undertakes fund raising for only the churches and organizations that have certain minimum level budget. Contrast the cleaning and maintenance program in your church with that you have studied in this lesson. What suggestions do you have for improvement? Record these suggestions in your notebook We meet in a school hall. So we are not in a position to carry out the cleaning and maintenance on daily basis. However, cleaning and maintenance is done every Saturday evening. So the hall is in good condition when we meet for worship on Sundays morning at 9.30 a.m. The cleaning is done so well I hardly have any suggestion for improvement. The cleanliness is an example in good housekeeping. The pews and chairs are neatly arranged. The floor is dusted. The altar and arrangements for the musical choir are also handled with use of proper space on a raised platform. The hall is decorated with paper ribbons of different colors. The place makes one feel welcome. However, at the end of the worship service there is some room for improvement. This is because the hall looks unkempt with the chairs getting pushed aside and not put back in their proper places. My suggestion is that the number of chairs in the church must be restricted. Have more pews and benches. Reducing chairs will also reduce the untidy appearance of a large number of chairs getting pushed out of their places. Describe the various audiences or publics that your church has within it. What are they? The pastor has done theology from a well-known Bible college. He is a man of good taste and teaches and preaches well. His life, his family, and his teachings have helped in developing the church in such a way that the church has grown from a few families to about 300 families in five years. By and large, the members are from upper middle class families. They are senior managers in large corporations and public sectors. There are even directors from the boards of large corporations. Some are from the film industry. And some members are very rich dealing in jewels and gold. The church is open for members from all walks of life. However, the dignity and personality of the pastor has been responsible for the big numbers of upper middle class families who have visited and made the church their own place of worship. These people are god-fearing men and women. Then there are a few who are not so well of. They are not so poor. However, they are from the lower middle class families. These may comprise about ten percent of the church membership. Altogether, the church has about 300 families. Review the internal media used by your church and evaluate it in the light of what you have learned in this lesson. What suggestions for improvement would you make? The church has a monthly magazine. It is basically for the church members only. The magazine has a main article which is invariably written by the pastor. There are other articles by members. There are games, birthdays, recipes and other entertaining features. In my opinion, there is room for plenty of improvement in the magazine. The magazine must be more professional. And it must carry articles written by Christian professionals. The magazine must be done by an editor and an editorial team who know their job. The church is run by the pastor, and the magazine must be run by an editorial team. There is fear in the pastor’s mind that if he allows an editorial team to control the magazine, it might spin out of his control. He does not say so expressively. However, this is the only reason some concerned members feel that the pastor has for not allowing a professional editorial team to take over the magazine’s responsibilities. I feel that the board of elders must take the initiative in putting in place the editorial team. The members can only express their opinions. The pastor might see reason if the board firmly express their views that the magazine must be more professional. Finance is not a problem. The magazine can become self-supporting if it is run on professional lines. Without the board’s concern, the magazine is not likely to improve. Even among the board members, there must be some reservations. After all, who wants to bell the cat? Source: How to implement repairs, http://www.churchcare.co.uk/building.php?CBE Read More