Putting Your Facility to Good Use

Church facilities often sit vacant.  A lot.

Outside of Sunday morning and Wednesday evenings, you'd be hard pressed to find a facility that is less used than a church facility.

There's an opportunity for churches to steward the use of their facility to benefit the community.

This last month, our facility has been used by a several different groups:

• Several soccer teams practiced here because we've had a less than ideal spring.  
• Pampered Chef consultants met here for a monthly consultant meeting.  
• The boy scouts use our facility for weekly meetings and a girl scout's den also meets here  
• Kindermusik  uses a classroom for music classes.  
• A youth ministry from the twin cities is staying here this weekend on their way to a youth conference.
• A neighbor used our parking lot to sell her truck
• A Sudanese church uses our building each weekend for their worship services
• This last weekend someone used our gym for a high school graduation open house as again, our less than ideal spring threatened their planned open house at a park

Do we charge these groups to use the facility?  Depends.  If there's a Hillcrester connected with the event (it's their daughter's soccer team or son's open house), then no.  No charge.  It's a simple way for Hillcresters to use our facility to bless the community they are a part of- their teams, their scout groups, etc.

If you're not from here, then we do charge a little, but from what I've heard, we're way under the market rate.  

A church facility shouldn't necessarily be a revenue stream; instead, it's a simple way for the church to tangibly demonstrate care to its community and neighbors.