The next time that you walk into your church lobby, pretend it’s your very first time there.
What does the room tell you about your church? Because it’s telling people something. The question is whether it’s the story that you meant to tell.
I had the chance to sit down with Phil Taylor from PlainJoe Studios. Phil spent 20 years in lead pastor and executive pastor roles before joining PlainJoe, where he helps churches with building, design, branding, and web projects.
In this episode, Phil and I talk through what telling your story through design actually means.
- Why your kids’ spaces need numbers instead of animal names
- How often your main spaces need an update
- Phil & my weirdest church lobby stories
How often do you think the churches should actually be updating their space? [episode 468] #unstuckchurch Share on X Whether you know it or not, you are telling a story through those spaces. The question is, what story are you telling? [episode 468] #unstuckchurch Share on X So how do you shrink or expand a room in a relatively easy way? [episode 468] #unstuckchurch Share on X
This Episode Is Brought to You By Tyndale House.
If Jesus walked into your church right now, would people recognize him? We’ve created a personalized Savior who exists primarily to meet our needs, bless our lives, and guarantee our spots in heaven.
But here’s the problem. That Jesus would be unrecognizable.
In the book The Missing Messiah, bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark More will help your church rediscover the Jesus based on Scripture, not on culture. Plus, check out the six-session companion study guide with free access to streaming videos.
Learn more at missingmessiah.com.
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, managing director here at the Unstuck Group. And here’s a quick exercise for you before we get into today’s podcast. The next time that you walk into your church lobby, pretend it’s your first visit, very first time there. Nobody greets you, nobody hands you anything. What does the room tell you about your church? Because it’s telling people something. The question is whether it’s the story that you meant to tell.
Today, I’m talking with Phil Taylor from PlainJoe Studios. Phil spent 20 years in lead pastor and executive pastor roles before joining PlainJoe, where he helps churches with building, design, branding, and web projects. He’s also been on the show, on the podcast here with us a few times, so he knows what he’s getting into in this conversation. We cover what telling your story through design actually means, why your kids’ spaces probably need numbers instead of animal names, and how often your main spaces need an update. I also brought a strange church lobby story into this conversation, and then Phil brought a better one, I think, to it. I think you’re gonna enjoy this conversation.
But before we get started, let me say thanks to our podcast sponsor, Tyndale House. Tyndale House is releasing a brand new book called The Missing Messiah by bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark Moore. This book and the supporting study guide and videos will help your church rediscover Jesus based on Scripture, not on culture. You can learn more about the book if you go to missingmessiah.com. Now, here’s my conversation with Phil Taylor.
Well, Phil, welcome back to the podcast. You’ve been here before with us. But for people who don’t know you or haven’t heard you before, would you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about PlainJoe Studios?
Phil:
Thanks, Sean. Yeah. It’s been, it’s, gosh, it’s been three or four times now that I’ve been on the show with you guys. It’s always a blast to be able to come back. And yeah, so I spent 20 years in various pastoral roles, mostly in the lead pastor and executive pastor role, and really loved being able to come alongside of leaders and help them bring vision into reality. And had the privilege of doing that in a few different churches. And along the way, one of my churches was growing quite a bit, and we had purchased a large, kind of big-box store to renovate into our new home. And I wanted to make sure that that building was just really told a great story. I came across PlainJoe Studios, ended up hiring them to do the design work on that building. They did an incredible job. The building came in, you know, on time, under budget, the whole deal, everything you’re hoping for, but it also really told our story really well.
And ended up becoming good friends with the team, and they brought me onto the team a few years later and said, “We need somebody who understands pastors, but also really understands architecture and large building projects.” You know, for me, throughout my ministry journey, I’ve always loved serving churches and serving pastors outside of my own church context. That’s just always been a passion of mine. And so to be able to get to do that now full-time for the last five, six years, and serve pastors and churches all over the country and internationally a little bit, both through PlainJoe Studios and through some of the writing that I’ve done. I had the privilege of writing a book called Defining the Executive Pastor Role and another one on elder development. And really the through line for my whole journey is how do I serve pastors? How do I serve churches?
PlainJoe Studios does an incredible job doing that. We come alongside of churches most often at the time when they’re getting ready to build a new building or they’ve got an existing building and it needs to be fixed or it needs to be updated or they’ve purchased an existing building and they need to rethink the whole thing or they’re adding a new campus or, you know, whatever it might be, and there’s a facility need. We also step into a lot of website projects and app development, web development projects, and a lot of branding projects. We’ve rebranded a ton of churches. We’ve renamed a ton of churches. Oftentimes a church will come and say, “We just don’t know. We know our name is 130 years old and it’s feels dated. We don’t know where to go with that.” We’ve got a whole process we take churches through to rename them.
So sometimes we’re actually renaming, rebranding, rethinking the buildings, redoing the website. We’re doing all of it, right? So we’re doing all of it over multi-years. And that’s always really fun to be able to partner with a church and partner with a pastoral team. The through line for all of that is how do we tell our story more effectively, right? Yeah. And so that’s what we do at the end of the day. It’s storytelling through spatial needs, through technological needs, through website, all of it. Yeah. So we love to do that. It’s a lot of fun.
Sean:
So I know, Phil, you guys talk about a lot about telling story through design. Can you explain exactly what that means? Because I think that that idea could maybe sound a little too big or a little too vague sometimes for pastors. So just get a little more into the detail in that.
Phil:
So think of it this way. When somebody walks into your spaces, let’s focus on spaces for a minute. You’re telling a story through those spaces. Whether you know it or not, you are telling a story through those spaces. The question is, what story are you telling? Is it an intentional story that you meant to tell or did it just sort of happen, right? Like is it an accidental story? Maybe it’s an inherited building that you took over from the last guy or whatever it might be, and you don’t really know what story you’re telling. Have you thought about it? Is it intentional? So the question you can ask yourself when you walk into, let’s use your lobby as an example. I’m a visitor. I’m new to your church. I walk into your lobby. You have a moment to tell me a few things about your church.
If I were to walk around your lobby and nobody spoke to me, what am I gonna learn about your church? We call that placemaking. So we’re telling your story through place. What are you telling me about your church? If your furniture is all like super dated, maybe kind of worn out, the flooring looks really worn out, everything kind of feels dated, the colors feel like late 1990s or 80s, whatever it might be, you’re telling me that the church is, you know, they haven’t really done much in a while. You’re telling me a story about a church that hasn’t really changed a whole lot in a while. If it’s like super old, maybe it’s a museum. You’re telling me that it’s a museum, you know? That we’re trying to preserve. And so all of those things are telling me something about your church.
And, you know, when you step into those spaces, you have the opportunity to really tell me what matters to you as a church. That’s storytelling, right? So if global missions is super important to you as a church, right, you give a huge percentage of your budget to global missions. How are you telling me that in the lobby space? Is it through a 1950s style light up map, you know, with a little, little bubbles pursing through like we had in my Baptist church growing up? Or is it something really engaging that tells some of the stories of the people that you’re reaching in countries around the world through the missions work that you’re doing? How are you telling me these stories? This is the opportunity you have.
Sean:
I love that. One of the mistakes that you guys see all the time, and it’s a huge frustration for me, I would say, Phil, in all public spaces, is around directional signage and just kind of the brand consistency, right? A lot of times there’s too much insider language or you just can’t find it. Can you talk about that, and why sometimes that leaves churches without a clear, cohesive experience?
Phil:
Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot of times we’ll start with something that we’ll call the user journey, right? So, or you could think of it as a visitor journey, a visitor visits your building for the first time. You know, they’re driving up to the property, they’re seeing a sign, they’re driving onto the campus, they’re walking up to the building, and they see multiple doors. Which one do I go to? I walk in the door. Now where do I go? Where do I drop off my kids? You know, where do I get a cup of coffee if I want a cup of coffee? Where are the bathrooms? All the key questions that you’re asking when you first walk into a building, right? And so, you know, all of that needs to be done in a really consistent way. There’s a few things that make it consistent, I think.
One is gonna be, you know, are the fonts and the colors in line with the brand story that you’re telling, right? So is it a completely different, you know, story, different from your brand, different from who you are as a church? Are you like a really modern church, but your signage is all like scripty fonts from, I don’t know, like, I don’t even know what it would be. When were scripty fonts popular? Never, perhaps. I don’t know.
Sean:
Right, right.
Phil:
But, right, you, so you go, “Can I read this easily?” If I’m walking down a hallway, there’s good research on what font size I could read from 20 feet away, 50 feet away. There’s good research on what styles of fonts are easy to read on a monument sign as you drive down the road at 50 miles an hour.
All of that can be thought through and planned effectively to create a very cohesive experience. As I get into like some of your different rooms, think of your kids’ ministry space. Is all the words that you’re using, is it insider language, right? A lot of times I see kids’ ministry teams wanna get really cute with the words that they use to describe their spaces. You know, they’ve got all these like cutesy animal names like, “I’m in the tiger room. I’m in the—” Right? And, you think about a visitor, right? It’s their first time at your church building. They’ve got three kids they’re dropping off at different rooms and you’re saying, “Take this one to the tiger room. Take this one to the bear room.” Like, can you just put the numbers on the door, have it sticking out, three-year-olds, four-year-olds, seven-year-olds? Like pre-K, elementary, just make it easy for me. Don’t give me cutesy names. Don’t tell me to go to the red room. Don’t tell me to go to the blue room. Just make it simple. Make it as simple as possible.
All of that starts with that user journey, which is what I began with, right? So what is the user journey like for the visitor at your church? I think that this is not just a question of branding, which can sound like marketing speak, right? I actually really believe that this is a gospel thing, that if we are going to do a great job at welcoming people who are far from Christ into our church homes, we need to think through our buildings with them in mind. They don’t know how it works. We have to help them understand how to navigate our spaces, and we need to do it in a way that is kind to their lack of knowledge, right?
Sean:
I, as a person who’s been in a lot of church buildings, I really appreciate that. And the thing that you just said there as you wrapped up, I think clear is actually kind, that’s Brene Brownism, right? And the clarity around just saying, “Here’s where the three and four-year-olds go,” rather than, “This is the little bear room.” s so kind to the people who are new to our church, it makes it easy for them to find where they’re going.
Phil:
That’s right.
Sean:
As I visited a lot of churches, Phil, I’ve noticed that a lot of spaces start to feel dated pretty quickly. And I think a lot of times, you know, for us as church leaders, we just get used to kind of living in that space, and we don’t see a lot of that. It just is what it is, right? So how often do you think the churches should actually be updating their space?
Phil:
Yeah. So think of a list of the key spaces in your building, and you think about what percentage of your people are going through those spaces on a semi-regular basis, right? So, a high percentage, if not 100% of your people are walking into the main lobby every time they’re at your building, right? So you think of those spaces that 100% of the people walk into, those spaces should really be getting some degree of updates every three to five years, right? Then you can kind of go down in a descending order. Secondary hallways, maybe you can go seven or eight years on that. The interior of a basic classroom, maybe that can go a little bit longer. The stage area of the large group room and kids’ ministry probably needs to stay pretty fresh, but kids ministry people are pretty good about keeping those things fresh anyway. So you wanna kinda think through what’s being used the most by the most people. Those things should be updated regularly.
But listen, I don’t think this has to be crazy and I don’t think it has to be super expensive. If you think through some of those larger spaces, those common spaces, lobbies, main hallways, the entry point into your church, if you think them through with the update in mind, right? So as you’re doing it, you think through what’s this gonna look like to update this in five years? It shouldn’t have to be expensive, and it shouldn’t have to be all that crazy to think through.
I remember when I was working on a building project for my own church, it’s a 78,000-square-foot building. We built the lobby so big that the city wanted me to add another 20 toilets because they thought I was gonna put another thousand people in the lobby because it was such a big lobby. And I had to convince them that it was actually just a hallway to the sanctuary, right? I had to kind of show them like it’s the same people that are here that are also in here. So, but nonetheless, when I looked at that lobby space, you know, most of the walls were sort of a basic gray color, right? Like, pretty simple.
Not boring, though, because at the key moments, there was a color pop, and this was PlainJoe’s design, right? So the main entry point into the sanctuary had a pop of color. The main area around the coffee bar had a pop of color. The main entry point into the second largest room in the building had a pop of color. That pop of color was super in when the building was built, right? But if you look at this giant lobby and you go, “What’s it take to update this?” You don’t have to repaint the whole lobby, actually. You just have to go around and update those pops of color. Then you update a little bit of the furniture, and you update some of your signage.
Well, for a relatively small amount of money, you could go through and update that space really well if you have a clear story that you’re telling. So those spaces really should be done on a regular basis. But it comes down to, you know, colors, flooring, furniture is gonna, something that really has to be updated, especially if it gets worn out a lot. Even lighting can be something that can feel kind of dated. Lighting can have a certain amount of trend to it. And so you need to think through, “Gosh, that lighting looks really old. You know, let’s update that.” That can be a really simple and cost-effective way to update things.
Here’s a piece that a lot of people overlook when they’re updating a space, and they overlook it in, like, kind of the monthly aspect of updating. When you think about your lobby spaces or your hallways, your common spaces in the church building, oftentimes things just appear there, right? It’s kinda like barnacles on a ship, right? Like you, every now and then you gotta bring an old ship in and clean off all the barticles. Your lobby will gather barnacles, right? You’ll walk in one day and all of a sudden there’ll be a random table in the corner and you’re like, “Where did that table come from?” I don’t know. It looks like it’s a folding table and somebody just put a tablecloth over it that looks like it was left over from last summer’s barbecue. I don’t know. I don’t know where. And then people start putting stuff on the table, brochures, you know? A little decor. Someone puts a candle on there. They put a stack of bot — like, and you’re like, “I didn’t even. Where did this come from?”
That stuff happens in churches all the time. Stuff just shows up. And so on a really regular basis, somebody on your team needs to be assigned and empowered to walk around these spaces and look at literally everything. Why is this item here? Like specifically here. Why is, why did, why is this table here? Why is this brochure here? Why is this light fixture here? Why is this little kiosk here? Look around at everything. And then just really ask yourself, does this need to be in the lobby? Do we need to have this in the lobby every single week?
And oftentimes the answer is no, right? And so you gotta just clean it out. Sometimes that requires having some hard conversations with ministry leaders like, “Hey, we’re not gonna have the senior’s ministry represented in the lobby every single week. We’re gonna do it three times a year.” “We’re gonna get rid of your little kiosk,” you know? Those are hard conversations to have, but you have to have them or else your lobby ends up just looking like some terrible conference where there’s too many things to look at, right?
Sean:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s so true. I was actually just working with a church a couple of weeks ago, Phil. Large church. And they, as part of our assessment that we were doing, we have the team actually do an assessment around all things weekend service. So we give them a tool to kind of guide them through that. And one of the things that they did is they started to notice a cross section of their feedback from their team was around some of the clutter that showed up around their building. And of course, they’re in it every week. So some of that clutter has kind of disappeared to them. But what a simple, good-to-great little move there just to reduce some of the clutter so the people who are walking in on the weekend see a space that it looks like you care about and you steward well. That means a lot to them.
Phil:
A lot of times when I’m working with a church, where we’re doing like a major update to kind of an older building, and I see all the clutter, one of the things I’ll do is I’ll pull the executive pastor aside, you know, before I leave and I go, “Listen, you got a lot of garbage around this lobby. If you wait until we update everything, the update is gonna be the bad guy.” People will be mad at the update because all their little sacred cows got taken away and not put back. I’ll say, you know, “We’re not gonna be back for six months to start implementing everything. We’ve got a lot of design work to do. So over the next six months, why don’t you just start having some things disappear?” Like, “Oh, I don’t know where that table went,” you know? Just go ahead and start working on that now. And then by the time we come in to do design work, we’ll have a clean slate to work with.
Sean:
Phil, I was in a church a number of years ago and in a side hallway, thankfully not their main hallway, I ran into a medieval coat of arms standing in the corner. Yeah. It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever ran into in a church.
Phil:
I’ll give you one better, Sean. Okay. I was planting a church in upstate New York, and we were renting like a 200-year-old Baptist church for our services. And the church made us, like, anything we moved, we had to put it back every Sunday after we did our services. And one of the things they, that we moved every week that they made us put back, it was called the death book. Literally, it was, like, you’re thinking it’s a visitor guide or a visitor book where you record names of visitors. No, no, no. It was a book recording everybody who had died in the church. They kept it in the lobby. It’s the strangest.
Sean:
That’s sad.
Phil:
Right? And so every week we had to put stuff back like, “Put that death book back. Okay.”
Sean:
What a sad way to enter.
Phil:
I know, right? That was literally the first thing you saw when you walked into that building.
Sean:
Oh, my.
Phil:
Crazy.
Sean:
Phil, you and I have both seen two different types of churches. Some churches that have underbuilt their facility, other churches that have, seems like, overbuilt their facility. So — you know, there are churches that have a really great seating capacity, but the parking lot can’t support the people in the seats, right? Maybe they have an adult space that is so large, but the kids’ ministry space can’t support the number of kids actually coming to the church. So what do churches need to do, I guess, to just to build the right size building, to kinda have that Goldilocks? It’s not too big, it’s not too small, it’s just the right size. How do they approach that?
Phil:
Yeah. So I think, you know, first of all, master planning your property and your building use is super important. You know, so a lot of times we don’t have this luxury because we’re taking over an existing building, you know, and we kinda have to work with what we’ve been given. But if you are building new, whether that’s a whole new building or whether it’s, you know, an expansion to an existing building, you have the opportunity to think through the future, right? So I think you wanna ask yourself, you know, we typically think of sanctuary, parking and kids as sort of your three spaces where you feel the pinch the most. You wanna ask yourself with each of those spaces, I like to think of three levels of expansion, right? So one level of expansion is something that you can pull off in a few hours, literally a few hours.
So what, let’s take your sanctuary as an example. If you’re designing a new sanctuary, what does it look like to have the back corner of your sanctuary be a giant theater curtain that gets used for storage, right, of like the extra chairs or tables and things like that? And that’s how it gets used most of the time. But then maybe, you know, Easter and Christmas Eve, you clear out the storage, you pull back the curtain, and now it’s another 200 seats or another 100 seats, right? Yeah. 20% jump in your capacity, whatever is appropriate for your building. That’s something that you can pull off in a few hours, right? So if all of a sudden you’re hitting a growth spurt where your church is just growing like crazy and you go, “Gosh, you know, we don’t wanna add another service just yet. Let’s clear out the storage area and pull back the curtains.” That’s something you could pull off in a few hours, right?
Then I think of what can you pull off in a few days? So again, if we’re planning ahead, you know, are there classrooms that are adjacent to your sanctuary and the walls are not, you know, support walls, they’re not made out of concrete. And you could say, “Gosh, we really need to add, like, we’re growing like crazy. We don’t wanna add a third service yet. If we knock down these walls, we can actually add 300 seats to the room.” And that’s something you could accomplish in a few days, right? So you’re planning ahead on that. And, for that matter, you could add the walls back, right?
Sean:
Sure.
Phil:
Growth patterns, sometimes you grow a lot and then something happens, you know, you go through a rough patch, and you shrink, and now you’ve got a thousand people in a room that’s built for 2,500. That’s depressing. So how do you shrink or expand a room in a relatively easy way?
And then you’ve got something that’s a bigger impact where you’re actually adding square footage, you’re building a new building. This is also an important part of your master plan because you need to know how you could do that, right? A lot of times the churches we’re working with, if their buildings have been built in recent years, we’re talking the last 25 years, a lot of times sanctuaries are just kind of big steel buildings, right? They’re relatively easy to knock down a wall, bump out that steel building by a couple of bays and add three, four, five, 700 seats to it.
But the key is you’ve gotta know that when you’re placing that building on the property, right? If you butt that building up against your property line, there’s no way to expand it 10 years down the road if you need to. So you wanna think through, if we have to double this sanctuary or add 50% to the sanctuary, how do we do that? Do we have a plan for that? Yes, we could build into the parking lot. Yes, we could build into that tree line. Like, just know what the answer to that is and have that conversation with your architect. We wanna know what expansion looks like.
Then you just take that same concept and apply it to every other aspect of your church, right? So is there a field that becomes parking if you need it, right? When you look at your kids’ ministry space, a trick I like to see is drop your office space right next to your kids’ space so that if you need to, kick everybody out of the offices, knock a hole through a wall and make that kids’ ministry space. Right? And move your staff into a house that you buy next door. Move them into an office space down the road. Put a portable out behind your building and throw all the staff out there. There’s lots of tricks you could do to get your staff out of the main building, but that also becomes space that you could really easily take over for kids’ ministry if you need to.
Sean:
That’s really good. So what I’m hearing, just in this whole conversation, Phil, is that planning ahead is really critical.
Phil:
That’s the key.
Sean:
Facility changes don’t happen overnight, do they?
Phil:
Nope. If you decide today that you wanna build a new building, like today you decide we’re building a new building, the money’s in the bank, we’re ready to go, it’s probably two years before you’re sitting in that new building. Probably two years minimum, right? ‘Cause you’ve gotta design, get permits, you’ve gotta raise money. You’ve gotta go through the construction process, which is usually 12 to 18 months on a relatively normal building. So you’re two years. If you’re already at three services, where does that leave you, right? Right. So you gotta start planning early.
Sean:
All right. So Phil, if pastors are listening, they’re thinking, “This is us. We need to get a plan together.” Either it’s on the facility, maybe it’s their signage, maybe it’s some of the web design that you talked about earlier. How do they get in touch with you or PlainJoe Studios? What’s the next step?
Phil:
Well, if you wanna just do a little more research on who we are, you can go on plainjoestudios.com, and you can check out a whole bunch of projects that we’ve got on there in every type of project that we do. You can just have fun looking at concept art and pictures of projects that have been realized and just see a lot of great projects on there. I’d love to do a Zoom call with you. You can reach out to me at Phil@plainjoestudios.com, and we will grab a Zoom call and talk through what needs to happen at your building and see if we might be a good fit.
Sean:
That’s great. We’ll drop that in the show notes. Thanks for doing this, Phil. Really appreciate your expertise.
Phil:
Good to see you, Sean.
Sean:
Well, I really appreciate Phil joining me for today’s conversation. There’s a few things, a few takeaways I wanna make sure that you don’t miss. First, your building is always telling a story. So walk your space like a first-time guest this week and ask whether it’s the story that you really want it to tell. Second, being clear is kind. Simple signage and plain room names help new people find their way. As Phil said, that’s not a marketing issue, it’s a gospel issue. And then the third, plan ahead. The spaces most of your people walk through need a refresh every three to five years. And if you’re thinking about a brand new building, Phil’s estimate is two years minimum from decision to move in. If you’re already at three services, your clock is ticking. So if you wanna connect with Phil, visit plainjoestudios.com or you can email him at phil@plainjoestudios.com. We’ll put both of those in the show notes.
And if you’re bumping into space limitations or you’re not sure the building is the real problem, that’s a conversation that we have with churches all the time. You can reach out to our team if you could just go to theunstuckgroup.com/start. Thanks for listening. Next week we’re back with a brand new podcast. So until then, have a great week.
Facility planning isn't just about what your church needs today. It's about making sure your facilities can adapt to where the church is going. [episode 468] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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