Apr282005
Filed under: Inside GCC
Author: Tony Morgan
Yahoo! Tonight’s New Community service will be in the new half of our auditorium. We’re moving in to the somewhat unfinished space to allow for renovation on the older half of the auditorium. Both sides will be completed so that we can use the full auditorium within the next 5 to 6 weeks. Jason Powell has more details over on his site about the transition.
Here are some fun facts for you stats cats who want to know the nitty gritty details:
- The old auditorium held about 1,100 people. Ultimately we’ll be able to accommodate 2,200 in the expanded auditorium; however, our initial goal is to use 1,750 seats (because that’s all we can accommodate with current parking and children’s space).
- We’re also doubling the children’s center which is on the lower level just below the auditorium. I believe we’ll end up with about 30,000 square feet in the children’s center.
- We plan for one child for about every 3.5 adults who attend our services.
- We currently have almost 900 parking spaces and we’re planning to add another 300 spaces by the end of the summer to accommodate the 1,750 adults in each service.
- We plan about 1 parking spot for every 1.5 seats in our auditorium. In other words, it takes a lot of parking to be able to fill that many seats.
- Planning parking? You’ll need about 1 acre for every 100 spaces and around here it costs about $1,000 per space. In other words, it takes a lot of money to build parking lots.
- About 1,100 families pledged nearly $6,000,000 to fund the construction in our Come Together campaign.
- We used Injoy Stewardship Services to help us with the stewardship campaign. It’s worth every dollar to hire experts to help with stewardship campaigns.
Wish you could be here to join in the fun. Maybe you can join us for one of our WiredChurches.com events later this year to experience the new space on your own. We’d love to have you.
Most Commented Posts:
scott hodge
April 29th, 2005 at 1:30 am
tony - this is helpful info. we are gathering stats right now to help us decide & plan on adding a third weekend service. (Any good pointers in that regard? There’s a future blog topic for you…) :)
Brad Hinman
April 29th, 2005 at 10:32 am
Thanks for the stats Tony. My church is about a year into a capital campaign and I’m curious about a few things. What percentage of the $6,000,000 pledged do you plan to actually receive? I believe that past capital campaigns at my church have been between 80 to 90 percent. Also, do you take on debt (short term or long term)? Finally, what do you do to encourage contributors to stay on track with their pledge? My church sends out quarterly update letters with the contributor’s pledge and amount given so far.
tony morgan
April 29th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
scott, what specific questions do you have about adding services?
tony morgan
April 29th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
brad, we plan on 80% for budget purposes but our history is closer to 90% when we include non-pledge contributions; yes, we use long-term debt to help finance construction (tim & I cover that in SSS); we try to give contributors an update every couple of months to let them know what’s happening with the project, how lives are being impacted and how they’re doing with their pledge–part of the upcoming weekend series will be to communicate that to the entire church since we’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of our current campaign
Brad Hinman
April 29th, 2005 at 6:11 pm
Scott, my church added another service a few weeks ago. We had 20 to 30 families commit to attend the new service for 6 months. The first week we had around 250 people (including children). Just for comparsion, we typically have around 700 to 800 in total attendance for all services.