Multi-purpose rooms can be one of the most valuable assets your church creates. At Life.Church, we keep our spaces efficient and our budget frugal by planning rooms that serve multiple purposes.

When constructing new space, keep things as simple as possible. Try to only create rooms that can serve many purposes. (With restrooms being the exception, of course!)

For example, we design our auditoriums with flat floors and non-fixed seats—no theater seats or pews. This allows us to move chairs and reset the room for events requiring tables and chairs or youth events that may need a large open room. This eliminates the need for a separate fellowship hall and allows us to use our auditorium seven days a week instead of just on weekends.

Also, we don't design our buildings with bridal suites. If your church holds a lot of weddings, you may have a need for a bridal suite. Here, we don’t perform that many weddings, so we don't have a room dedicated to it. When we do have a wedding, we let the bride use one of our kids classrooms, an office, or a conference room. These rooms are kept purposefully simple so they can be transformed based on specific needs that arise.

Rather than creating four rooms for four different types of events, we build one room—it's easy to make one room fit four or five different kinds of activities when you plan for them when you're building. 

One of our core values at Life.Church is to give up things we love for things we love even more. Of course, we'd love to have unique spaces for every type of event, but we love an efficient budget and facility—and the extended impact those things allow us—even more.