Project Overview
To be sure, a permanent facility is not required to just keep doing what we are doing now, and with the number of people who are currently involved. But God is calling us to more. God is calling us to the great vision of city-wide transformation through the gospel by both word and deed, by letting God use us to join in the renewal our community’s infrastructure, systems and social ills and in the redemption of lives through the saving and transforming work of Jesus Christ.
In keeping with this vision that values remaining in the city center, we have selected a location in the St. John’s neighborhood to purchase a tract of land on which to build a permanent facility. Click on this map to see where this is in the city.
The design team has worked through one major iteration in the site planning and several exciting changes are incorporated in the current plan. Key changes in how the buildings are laid out on the site will help us use the site features better, save cost, and especially will create for value for the non-profit organizations who will share our site. Below is a view of the new masterplan for how the buildings on the site may be arranged. A few refinements still remain, but even on this version you can notice the campus-style layout of the buildings that allows for a great deal of outdoor circulation space, making it easier to handle large numbers without extensive lobby space, and also make it more open to people from the community to engage with our church and the non-profit organizations who will share our space. The campus and buildings will not have the look and feel of a traditional church setting. This is important to our cultural context to serving the St. Johns community and the greater Austin area.
The Auditorium
Since we love meeting in a high school gymnasium, we plan to keep much of the same feel. Inside will be concrete floors, exposed ceilings, and garage-style doors that open to the outside. We'll use flexible seating with the same black folding chairs that we currently use where we meet in Austin High School. These chairs are inexpensive and very space efficient, but most of all can be configured and reconfigured so that the auditorium can be used for everything from prayer services and community theater to job fairs and fund-raising events for non-profits. We'd even love to see it be used as a quality live music venue. This is where the values of excellence in worship, high multi-functionality and straightforward no-frills design will all come together.
Children's Facility
The Children's facility will be where we make more of an investment in environments to effectively engage kids with God's word. In our kid's programming, lessons taught in a large group theater setting lay the groundwork for age-appropriate small-group driven learning time. The facility design is based on engaging kids in this way. As compared with using high school classrooms, having a space designed with these uses in mind will not only be a benefit to security and order but also will be a huge improvement in our ability to create interactive environments that help us teach the Gospel to children of every age.
Non-profit/equipping facility
The non-profit and training space will serve as the office facilities, central meeting ground and cooperative space for like-minded organizations whose purpose is city transformation. Training rooms that the church will use on weekends, and some mornings and evenings will be available to our non-profit associates for conferences, meetings, training sessions or any other venue that requires this kind of space. In order to make this space available to these organizations in phase one, we'll be building far fewer training rooms than we currently use in the high school. We plan to pursue leasing off-campus facilities in nearby locations to use for classes in our Get Trained equipping ministry. This building will have great visibility and store-front access to the main drive through our site. At the same time though, the new site plan creates a much more natural separation between the facilities more traditionally associated with churches (Children's and Auditorium) and the non-profit center while maintaining ease of accessibility between the two areas. We've learned that coming into what feels like a church facility can be a barrier to some clients of these organizations. We want to lower this barrier both in situation on the site and in design of the facility.
Other featuresThe new site plan features more parking space to save money long-term on remote parking and shuttles. And - don't worry - the pond on the drawing is not a swimming pool but a detention pond for storm-water runoff.
These are just a few features that help paint a picture for the kinds of things we hope to accomplish through the design of the site and these buildings. The facility God is leading us to build is to be a tool to help us and others in the renewal and redemption of Austin and beyond. With these facilities we can better strengthen and mobilize our church to transform our city and beyond. We can provide space and new opportunities for partnership and collaboration with other organizations whose purpose is aligned with city transformation. The building project, just like the vision it will help us to achieve, is for others. When a building is built and we move in one day, it will not signify that we have ‘arrived’ but only that we’ve just begun. Pray with us for God to work in ways that match the greatness of the calling of glorifying god and serving the city.