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    Quarterly Unstuck Church Report

by Mel McGowan

I recently visited the campus of one of the biggest churches in America, which had just spent about $900 per square foot building one of the most impressive meditative “light chapels” in the world, using a local celebrity “starchitect.” I was given a few minutes to give my impressions of their campus and what I felt were missed opportunities that could be addressed with our Visioneering approach to “Design Intervention.” I quickly, summed it up with three words:

Soil

Story

Stewardship

Soil: The high modernist chapel and gardens was a glass box. It could have been built anywhere. I’ve learned that good placemaking, like good ministry/missional work needs to be soil-specific. Paying attention to the shifting ground in terms of demographics, psychographics, just makes sense if you’re trying to transform people and place. The cultural, built (man-made), and unbuilt (God-made) context can’t be ignored, without risking irrelevance, obsolescence, and opulence.

Story: The space I was experiencing not only could have been built anywhere, it could have been built for anyone…for an Apple store, the board of a modern art museum, or any congregation. My decade with the Walt Disney Company taught me that the top human magnets on the planet have always been where space & story intersect. My urban/ architectural education and background have taught me that for millennia, space & story were inseparable. We distill our client’s story and express their unique people, their unique passion, and their unique place through our strategic partners like Auxano and Plain Joe Studios. This is articulated in a “Big Idea” which drives every one of thousands of design decisions, leading to a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Stewardship: Some would argue that it is worth sparing no expense to build the temples and cathedrals of today to last a thousand years. We believe that we are the temple, not a structure, and that we are called to be digging wells instead of building sacred temples with a “Most Holy Place.” The Samaritan woman (disconnected from Christ and ecclesia) of today isn’t planning on going to church any time soon. That didn’t stop the God of the universe from busting through space and time through the geographic, spiritual, and cultural barriers to connect with her where she was trying to get a drink. In the same way, we believe that “postmodern wells” can be dug which facilitate the horizontal connection between people, as well as vertical connection with the Creator and his creation simultaneously. Ironically, even as we are designing walls, we are seeking to tear down the walls between the lost and the found, Christ and community, the audible message and those so thirsty to hear words of eternal life. We have even blown up the internally oriented “campus” term to shift paradigms. Granger Community Church is no longer the name of their property. It is one of the anchor tenants to Granger Commons, which draws the internal (faith-based) and external community to its postmodern well with café, sports, arts, and communal gathering spaces open 24-7.

Click here to download Design Intervention: Revolutionizing Sacred Space, a FREE eBook by Mel McGowan.

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This is a sponsored post from Visioneering Studios, one of our Strategic Partners at TonyMorganLive.com.

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