SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Despite the struggling economy, local architects specializing in church and religious facilities design say that business is strong.

According to the Sacramento Business Journal, Don Comstock, senior architect with Comstock Johnson Architects Inc., said church-related work makes up about one-fourth of his firm's portfolio this year.

Brian Wiese, president of Stafford King Wiese Architects, said his firm has worked on a handful of church-related projects in the past decade. In the current year alone, the company is working on three.

Jeff Jennings, a principal with TPC Architects Inc., estimates that his firm works on about 20 church-related projects per year, and adds that church work will represent about 70 percent of the firm's billings in 2003. That's a drop in percentage from last year, but only because the firm's total billings have increased.

Architects believe church work is likely to remain a mainstay.

"Spirituality in this country is growing," said Jim Shively, a vice president at Carissimi Rohrer McMullen Shively Architects & Planners Inc. "We're getting calls monthly from people inquiring about church-related building. Some want to remodel what they've got, some want to expand, and there's a lot of requests for youth-related (centers)," he said.

In many cases, the new projects reflect the changing role of worship centers from a place to spend two hours a week, to a community center equipped with multipurpose rooms, small classrooms and even gyms.

Some of the new project demand may be population driven, but not all, Wiese said.

"The concept of religion has gone past 1 1/2 hours on Sundays, and the facilities have responded to that," he said. A church "is not a part of their life; it is their life."

Designing churches, architects said, isn't boilerplate work.

Comstock, of Comstock Johnson, said worship centers in particular are uniquely developed buildings.

However, church building design can be circuitous and time-consuming, some said, because approvals come from committees.

"If you do an office building, you tend to have (a) developer client, and you pretty much understand what their needs are," Comstock said. "With committees … it's tough to get a final decision. You (get) a lot of opinions, and your job is to facilitate their ideas and come up with a solution, because a building can't have 10 solutions."

Jennings of TPC added that the key to church work is accepting that the pace of progress typically is slowed by committee involvement.

"We've also had some very educated clients who could build circles around us," Jennings said. "But more often, there's a lot of education involved, such as educating them as to what it takes to go through the process of construction. They're thinking, 'All we want to do is build a church!' But the 'raising of the barn' concept no longer exists. You have to have permits."