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When the congregation at the Immanuel United Methodist Church in Lakeside Park, Ky., decided to renovate, they were interested in making room for more members.

“We had experienced a couple of growth spurts,” said chairman Jere McIntyre. “Then we ran out of facilities and it hindered our growth.” In planning for a renovation, McIntyre said church leaders were interested in making the new space flexible. “We were cognizant of the fact that we wanted to be prepared for the next growth spurt.”

While the new space, completed in 1998, doubled the size of the facility, the congregation's growth has also doubled. “We're almost out of room again,” said McIntyre.

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“The space was not just designed for us. It was for us and the people we didn't know at the time, for our district and the surrounding community, and the city uses the facility, too.” In fact, McIntyre said the church started an after-school program in large part because they found the building was not being used during that time of day. They want their new facility to be full 24/7.

The new facility includes ramps and elevator access to all seven levels of the existing building, and the existing worship space was renovated to provide handicap seating.

The new facility includes Sunday school and daycare classrooms, a commercial kitchen, gymnasium and restrooms.

All of those changes were challenging in the urban area where the church is located. But according to Tom Walker, a regional vice president at Myler Church Building Systems, many churches choose to renovate to better use their space.

In fact an estimated 40 percent of all Myler's renovation work comes from a popular combination of new construction and renovation to existing structures, “to improve the efficiency of existing square footage,” said Walker.

“Typically what happens is when we do new construction, the rooms used for fellowship are converted into classrooms, for example,” he said.

“One of our themes was flexible space,” McIntyre said about the Immanuel church. “We didn't know what we'd be doing in the next five years so we tried to design space that would fit all sorts of ministries.”

The new space includes a fellowship hall that doubles as a recreation and worship center. The classrooms on the first floor have flexible walls. And the congregation continues to grow.

Time to grow

Church growth experts say there are simple checks to determine when it's time to renovate for growth. Increased bottle-necking in the hallways may indicate it's time to widen that space. “It's important that people are comfortable in the facility,” Walker said. “People are going to interact with the facility and if there's not enough room they will be uncomfortable.”

“After the facility reaches 80 percent capacity, attendees (especially guests) will assume that it is full and will not feel welcome,” Rainer said.