Some churches are making their facilities work overtime, combining the Biblical with the practical.
By TIM GRANT
Published September 26, 2003
[Times photos: Fraser Hale]
Converting Grace Family Church in Lutz from a place of worship to a sports venue is simple.
Pete Petrone rolls a table toward a closet.
Travis McClelland, in background, and Petrone set up volleyball nets for a Monday evening game.
CARROLLWOOD - High behind the pulpit where a cross might usually be displayed, a basketball scoreboard stands watch over the Sunday morning service at Bible-Based Fellowship Church.
Two miles west on Ehrlich Road, the parishioners at Carrollwood Baptist Church worship in a recreation building they renovated with purple carpet striped with faint gray lines that mark a full basketball court.
Members of Grace Family Church sit in dim lighting as they listen to sermons in a $2-million gymnasium they built on Van Dyke Road.
"With our vision, we think personally it is a waste of money to build a building that can only be used on Sunday," said Craig Altman, pastor of Grace Family, which intended its new building for both basketball and worship.
The three local churches, each with its own slightly different needs and agendas, are part of a trend in today's religious institutions. Congregations today want to use their facilities for worship on Sunday and nonworship activities throughout the week.
The multipurpose buildings give them more space to worship and a way to reach people who may be more apt to attend church for non-religious activities, although prayer is often included.
And when churches are able to rent the buildings to other organizations, it creates more income for the church.
"Also, it is a way of de-emphasizing that a sanctuary is a sacred place," said David Batstone, a professor in the theology and religious studies department at the University of San Francisco.
"It's a way of saying God is with the people who worship there, not with the place they worship."
A temporary fix
It's also a way to defray the huge costs of building or expanding a church. "I'm almost certain many ministries are faced with the same challenges we were faced with," said the Rev. Arthur T. Jones, spiritual leader at Bible-Based. "You have limited funds and only certain facilities."
Jones said the property at 4903 Ehrlich Road did not always have a religious use. It was, among other things, a cattle auction house before the congregation bought it 14 years ago. "We took facilities never built to have church, and we consecrated it for worship," he said.
Eventually, membership at Bible-Based outgrew that sanctuary. The church needed two Sunday morning services at the original building just to seat all the members. Then, Jones said, members discovered they could put a thousand chairs on the floor and seat 400 people on the bleachers in the Bible-Based Fellowship Church Family Life Center gymnasium.
"So the wise thing to do was to move the worship service to the gym floor. In doing so, we could take both congregations and bring them to one," Jones said.
Services will not be held in the gym indefinitely, though.
Members will break ground Oct. 5 on a new cathedral building on the Ehrlich Road property. When it's completed in early 2005, the new building will be used exclusively for worship, Jones said.
Reaching kids and teens
After six years of meeting in strip malls and renting other spaces, members of Grace Family Church fulfilled their dream of owning a building in 2000.
"Because of the vision and style of our ministry, which is to reach kids and teens, we wanted a multifunctional facility, something that didn't look churchy," said Altman. "That was the original vision.
"So we decided instead of having fixed pews in a sanctuary that could only be used once a week, we created this type of setup so that many days a week we could use the sanctuary for a variety of activities to reach the community."
On the same floor where they hold church, Grace Family has vibrant basketball and volleyball leagues. A few times a year, the congregation will set up round tables, dim the lights and hold banquets with jazz music and desserts.
The sanctuary has a heavy-duty hard rubber floor, a stage for the band and a pulpit with curtains that close to protect the stage equipment during volleyball and basketball events.
There are no drop tiles on the ceiling because they would be ruined by sporting events. The walls are double plywood and carpeted to about 7 feet up. Video cameras are protected by cages and all the sound and lighting equipment is on the ceiling.
"We've had a lot of people from other congregations visit the church to see how we've designed the building for this multifunctional use so they could maybe emulate what we've done," Altman said.
"We did everything this way because we knew our facility needed to provide a number of uses and activities."
Altman said the congregation plans to build a new 2,400-seat sanctuary on the 17-acre Van Dyke Road property. That building will not be designed for basketball since the current building already meets that need.
But he said, "We'll still find other ways to use the sanctuary for other functions. We will never put permanent seating in there."
Sign of the times
Batstone has seen such multiuse worship buildings throughout the country. They are most common, he said, in Protestant and non-denominational churches where members believe God is in the heart of an individual, not in the rituals and sanctity of the place.
"I don't expect you'll see too many downtown cathedrals renting the sanctuaries for non-religious entertainment," said Batstone.
Jones thinks it is simply a sign of the times.
He said 20 or 30 years ago, many churches were not as attuned to ministry as they are today. It was worship as usual. Only on Sunday. Maybe the usher board would meet Tuesday, choir rehearsal on Thursday and that was it.
"If you are ministering to the whole family, you need to be in touch with them more than once a week," Jones said.
"The traditional church movement does not satisfy Generation X, people less than 40 years old. The average age of the older churches in Europe and the United States is 50-plus. If you want to see people in the younger crowd, you have to go to a startup church."
The unconventional church settings often involve some unusual methods of worship.
There is a time of devotion prior to the games at Bible-Based and Grace Family Church. At Carrollwood Baptist Church, each team prays together before their games and prayer is a big part of the halftime show.
"During halftime, spectators will hear testimonies from the court," said Robin Singleton, a Carrollwood Baptist Church member and former coach for the church's Upward Basketball League team.
Singleton said the church league is more interested in its players learning good sportsmanship and teamwork, rather than winning.
"Even if they weren't playing the games in the sanctuary, because this is a Christian league, we expect appropriate behavior and language," Singleton said.
Startup churches are more likely to embrace the unusual marriage of Christianity and entertainment.
But one of the nation's largest and most affluent congregations recently moved its worship services to one of the most prestigious basketball arenas in the world.
Faithful Central Bible Church in Los Angeles purchased the Great Western Forum - the 17,600-seat arena that once housed the Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Clippers - about three years ago. The 11,000-member congregation paid $22.5-million for the facility.
When the mega-church is not holding worship services, it makes money off the facility through rents. The venue is still the home of the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks. And according to a Web site, the facility also hosts concerts and other entertainment events such as Disney on Ice, the Harlem Globetrotters and Sesame Street.
Closer to home, members of Carrollwood Baptist Church are enjoying the roominess of their gymnasium. Unlike other churches, they've installed carpet striped with basketball court lines.
"It works," said Tom Rives, the church pastor. "We've tried it out."
Rives says the unconventional renovation is practical and Biblical.
"The Biblical principal here is making wise use of what God has given us," he said. "For us it's not letting a building sit empty all week long."
Since only about 25 percent of the players using the basketball court will be members of the church, Rives said he considers the church basketball league "a tremendous outreach opportunity.
"It's a pretty neat concept to have a building where you can't tell it's a basketball or recreation facility on Sunday, then during the week you can't tell it's a worship center. This way, we've really made the building two in one."
