(As published in the January 2016 newsletter.)
What Has Been Done:
We dreamed of the spaces we wanted for ourselves, for our children, and for the people who are future members of this church. We had deep talks about whether to buy in another location or stay here at the end of Grover Avenue. Deciding to stay, we began and are continuing to work hard to raise the money through our six-year capital campaign. Even though we didn’t hit our dream goal, it was a triumph nevertheless, with pledges totaling more than five times our annual giving. That is as much as the boldest consultants will project for a capital campaign.
We put together a building team from names given by the congregation and from members who have experience with building projects, from design through permitting through construction. After interviewing a group of architectural firms, the team chose to work with McKinney/York (mckinneyyork.com). This firm was budget conscious, they listened well, they spoke both in concepts and practicalities, and they knew Unitarian Universalism and its proud architectural history.
As part of their talk about practicalities, they let us know that, with a building of this vintage, we were bound to run into some hitherto unseen problems. We were dismayed but not surprised, then, when the engineers combed through our site and our building last month to make an in-depth analysis of what they had to work with and found that the roof on the religious education wing rests on walls that had never been meant to be load-bearing walls. The stress of that extra weight over many years is buckling those walls, which must be shored up. This cost will take 120,000 dollars of our budget. One possible solution would be to build a structural frame just inside our concrete block walls that will support the roof and face it with sheetrock, which will provide a new interior finish for the RE rooms. This and other elements are crucial for the safety of adults and children in the building, and for code compliance.
All in all, the practical “must-do” elements like shoring up the RE wing, replacing water pipes which are too narrow, sprinklering the sanctuary, making the bathrooms ADA compliant, changing the way the air in the sanctuary is vented, doing asbestos abatement, strengthening fire walls, and other such unglamorous but necessary work will take nearly half a million of our budget, leaving us about 2.7 million dollars to work with for the rest of the project.
What will be done:
What can we get done for that? What “scope of work” can we reasonably expect? That’s what we are trying to figure out. Meeting as many of your desires from our Town Hall Meetings last year is our task, and the good news is that we will be able to address many of the priorities within the budget you have given us. There will be good new ADA compliant bathrooms. We know that having an upgraded, workable kitchen was at the top of everyone’s list. Also high on the list was expanding the sanctuary to enable church growth. A new entryway and expanded Gallery area will ease the flow on Sunday mornings. The building team and the architect’s team are now hard at work to allocate our available resources in the very best way so as to accomplish as much of these priorities as we can, creating a more intentional welcome for the people who come through our doors.
In the last meeting with the architects, we were shown various exciting plans, most of which would have required us to stretch above the budget. We mixed and matched various elements, cut others, stoically accepted the news about the obstacles to be overcome, and asked the architects to go back to their drawing board to make a new plan, pared down to what we could afford. My expectation is that, when we meet with the congregation at the end of January (watch the announcements for the date) we will have diagrams of a plan in which you will see beauty, practicality and, above all, welcome. At that point, the architects’ team will invite questions and comments. After that, they will make a dimensional design, and will ask again for a meeting with the congregation later in the spring before proceeding with the final design and construction documents.
Any building project takes time, adjustments, negotiation, and management of expectations. You must articulate not only what you want, but why you want it. In a congregational building project, you must not only want for yourself, you must want for the people you don’t even know yet, you must want on behalf of the future. It’s a spiritually deepening and challenging exercise.
When the last congregation I served as settled minister built its new sanctuary, I warned them that we would have conflicts. The Episcopal Church in town nearly split over how far toward the altar the carpet should come and what portion around the altar should be slate floor. Another church I attended in college was having a discussion about whether to install a brass cross at the front of the sanctuary or a rough-hewn wooden one. One Sunday morning people showed up to see that some anonymous person had installed a rough wooden cross the night before, and no one even knew who it was. And no one ever had the nerve to uninstall it. Feelings about church buildings run high. It’s natural, since this is the container for our worship, our child rearing, our life event ceremonies, fellowship dinners, times of being soaked in beauty by the music, and planning our social justice outreach. It’s ok to disagree with one another here. All the church asks of us is that we disagree with curiosity and respect, as the covenant states. The guide for all of our decision-making is our mission, values and our ends. Those are on our website.
