The good news: Your ministries are growing by leaps and bounds. The bad news: You have nowhere to put everyone. Sounds like a problem most church leaders would love to have, right? To a certain degree, yes — but the issue of whether or not to expand your facilities is a potentially costly one. This is doubly true if a better alternative might be to divvy up the space you already have.

It's precisely this dilemma that Rich Maas, vice president of Lake Zurich, Ill.-based Screenflex (www.screenflex.com), says prompted him and his colleagues to devise their company's portable room dividers in the first place.

"We're architects by trade," Maas explains. "We sat around with church committees for decades designing churches, and they needed a product like this to make better use of their space."

The usual suspects

All this working with churches has taught Maas and his associates a thing or two about "dividing and conquering" — first off, that two areas on church campuses are broken down most often: fellowship halls and gyms. More often than not, this is to accommodate Sunday school, daycare or both.

Maas cites Canaan Baptist Church (CBC) in St. Louis as a model example of how to make more room for Sunday school. At this church, the only unused space on Sunday mornings was the gym. Freestanding partitions let teachers create eight different classrooms, each of which seated 24 people at four tables. That way, they could lead the entire group as one, with the option of breaking into small-session discussions afterward using the partitions.

Dividing expansive spaces with partitions the way CBC did makes a lot of sense on three levels. First, these spaces can house, for example six classrooms one month and eight the next as space needs increase. All that's required is some reworking of the partitions.

Second, the same units used for Sunday school can function for daycare during the week. As such, no space that can be used week-long sits empty for no good reason.

For example, Living Lord Lutheran Church (Bartlett, Ill.) also offered an extensive daycare program but wanted to improve the experience for the children. Five-foot-tall partitions provided a classroom feel for the children but allowed the teachers to see all the activity in the room. Being tack-able, these dividers were also handy places for teachers to display children's artwork or lessons.

Third, using partitions make these large rooms more intimate. Whereas a sports event might require the entire gym, if you wanted to host baptisms or funeral receptions in these spaces, you could use partitions to bring everyone closer together. (As an added bonus, this also lightens the load for your clean-up crew.)

Height, weight, density and more

When shopping for partitions, it's important that they be tall enough, durable enough and sound-absorptive enough to meet your needs. Although Screenflex dividers are soundabsorbent (being constructed of honeycomb and fiberglass), Maas says they are "by no means soundproof." Luckily, this is less of an issue than it might seem.

"The fact of the matter is, you'll be able to hear the lessons going on around you," Maas explains. "But what happens is the same thing that goes on when you go to dinner with your friends: There might be a dozen conversations going on around you, but they become background noise. It's there, but it's not."

And your dividers' height can diminish how much sound escapes between sections, but even this decision has its guidelines. "Height is more a function of the room in which the dividers will be used," Maas explains. Specifically, he says Screenflex works with many clients whose ceilings measure eight feet, in which case a 7'4" divider is recommended.

In gyms, however — where ceilings might soar — Maas and associates actually recommend six-foot partitions instead of the eight-foot variety. "If your ceiling is 20 feet high, what's the difference between cutting off six feet or eight feet?" Maas explains. "When you're sitting for a lesson, your head is still going to be four or so feet off the ground, where you're actively learning."

Sound absorption and weight greatly affect one another in terms of a partition's design. Basically, the more material you have, the more quiet your spaces will be. On the other hand, the more material you have, the heavier partitions will be — not a good quality when portability is key.

"The harder it is to use, the harder it is to set up and take down," Maas says of a divider's design. "We've reached a very happy medium of all these things in our industry," he adds, citing in particular the standard 29.25-inchwide end frames on each partition. These, he says, guarantee even an eight-foot partition will stay standing and be easy to operate.

Uses for partitions beyond the traditional abound as well.

Organizers at one Illinois church assembled small, closed-off areas using dividers — and single chairs in the centers of each — to give nursing mothers private places to slip away during worship, yet remain involved in the service.

Volunteers at other churches don't particularly enjoy setting up and taking down tables, so they push them to one corner of the room, set up an attractive partition border, and call it good. "Is that ‘creative'?" Maas asks. "I don't know — but it works."

At an Arkansas church, a youth group used its church's partitions to set up a maze for a Halloween party. Since each partition can be curved, turned at a right angle, etc., the options were endless.

"Our 13-panel unit, for example, has 12 hinges, each of which turn 180 degrees," Maas explains. "So, for the total number of combinations, you'd take 12 to the 180th power — that's a lot of configurations."

Yet another facility — this one in Arizona — divides its "cafetorium" with partitions. Because it gets too hot outside in the late spring for children to safely play outside, the dining area is separated from the gym with tall dividers. "What's out of sight is out of mind," Maas explains. "So, if a ball happens to get loose, it won't roll into the cafeteria."

It's been such a good solution, in fact, that leaders have bought as many as 30 dividers per year for the past five years.

To everything, turn, turn, turn

Of course, there's a time and a place for new construction as well. Fortunately, given the nature of how churches navigate change — i.e., through committee-based actions and reactions — Maas says unnecessary construction doesn't happen very often.

"You might have a strong-minded individual or two, but there shouldn't be any dictators," he says of the typical church committee. "The very nature of the governing of a church makes it unlikely for someone to be able say, ‘Let's add a new fellowship hall!' and have it happen."

One of the most tell-tale signs that a new facility in order is severe overbooking. "If a room is getting double-booked a few times a year, it must be a mistake and you can work around it," he explains. "But if it's happening twice a week, maybe you'd better look into some new space."

Much depends on your seating capacity to begin with as well. Maas cites one Boulder, Colo. pastor whose church was attracting 1,700 worshippers on Sunday 18 months ago; today, that figure exceeds 2,500. "If you have a church that's designed to comfortably hold 200 or 250, it can usually absorb another 10 percent or so," Maas explains. "If that same church held 2,000, that's a different thing."

If you aren't seeing these signs at your church, but still need more useable space, maybe it's time to consider multi-use, multipurpose portable partitions.

Reprinted with permission from Church Business.