Is your congregation struggling to keep your church building? Selling your church isn’t always the only solution. What if instead you opened your doors and turned your building into a centre for your community… a place where groups of people pay you to use various rooms at various times for various activities. What if in addition to your choir practice and Sunday services your building became home to the local writers’ workshops, cooking classes, art exhibits, concerts, drop-in tutoring, monthly strata meetings, Saturday workshops, wedding ceremonies, ethnic congregations, and more?

Many congregations have thought about doing just that but then decided against it because they didn’t know how to start or figured they would have to hire someone to run such an operation. Katja Brittain specializes in helping congregations turn their buildings, which are liabilities, into assets once again by using creative techniques like this.

In this course she shares her wisdom and experience by providing a step-by-step method to build a team, formulate a plan, get the word out, determine the right prices to charge, figure out how to make sure it runs smoothly, and most of all, reach your community in a most natural way while earning revenue to help the congregation turn the building around from barely surviving to thriving.

Not only does she tell you how to do all this, but she gives you her blueprint for success … her contracts, forms, and spreadsheets that you can use on day one as though you had been doing this for years.

At the end of the course, you will:

• learn how to manage your church building effectively and efficiently by engaging with both the community and the congregation.
• acquire an overall framework of what is needed to manage a building that is open for external users.
• learn to appreciate and understand three different responsibilities involved in managing external users in your building.
• become familiar with a collection of resources related to building rentals that can be adapted to use in your own situation (contracts, forms, spreadsheets, and other examples from different contexts).