Transcription
And everybody, how's it going? It's Andy from AG Financial, hanging out today with my friend Shawn Fink. Shawn's a loan consultant here at AG Financial, covering the Northwest Territory. But what's great about Shawn is his background in construction and how many churches he's helped all throughout the country when it comes to construction for their church expanding.
I know I mentioned construction, and that really covers a lot, right, Shawn?
It does. Yeah, I mean, you've got everything from a brand-new church campus, a church that maybe has an older building you need to relocate, buying new property—and sometimes that can be significant amounts of acreage where a master plan might be needed—right, all the way to, you know, say a minor renovation and/or remodel. So there's, yeah, that covers a pretty broad spectrum.
Sure. And so Shawn's helped a lot of churches all throughout the country with those kind of expansion opportunities. So we wanted just to take a few minutes just to talk through that church expansion process; what pastors and even church boards should know before getting into it.
So Shawn, when a pastor is considering expansion of all the different kinds that you mentioned, what are some of the things that they should consider first?
You know, I always think whatever a church does or is about to do, they should run those decisions through a filter. And I think that filter should start with taking a good look at who they are—their DNA—who are they as a church? And then, and then I typically would go to mission and vision, or I should have said vision first. So basically, who are you? Right? What has God called you to do? And then the mission would be how has He called you to do that. And the idea being, whether whether this is the campus expansion on 20 acres or down to renovating a sanctuary, decisions on at any end of the spectrum should be run through that filter, because truly what should happen in any any church facility—it's a tool for ministry. And going through your DNA—that that who are you, what are you called to do, how are you called to do it—ensures that your your ministry is as effective based on the way you're supposed to do it, what God's called you to do.
Sure, that makes sense. Malaga article on church construction, and you talked about something called source and use. What exactly is that, and and what should someone watching this know about that?
Very good question. That's really another point of consideration. So source, source and use, meaning what's the source of the funding? How are you gonna pay for this potential project that you're looking at? And and use being the project itself, or the cost of construction or remodeling or whatever it is you're going to do. So we typically recommend that you would get a handle on the use, or pardon me, the source first, to know, right, what can you afford? And then as you as you kind of flush out the use and decide what what's that gonna be, what is it going to look like, how much is it going to cost, you can be sure that that stays within the parameters of what you can afford, or the source. And when we talk about source of funding for a project, usually that comes from three areas with a church, okay? First, it's cash that you would have on hand, and maybe that's something you've saved over the years, or maybe it's a building fund that you've had established for a while. So it's cash that you have. Then it's cash that you would raise. So often churches that do, particularly a larger scale or major projects, would do some some sort of a capital campaign, okay, a stewardship campaign. So there's money you have, there's money you would raise, and then there's money that you would borrow. And I intentionally put that third and last because the first two—that's free money. What you have to borrow obviously costs you. So one, it's critical to know that source and what that really totals up to, because if you begin planning a project and that project is not affordable, the likelihood of you actually doing that is is quite quite low. And certainly we're not we don't say that the limit God or what He can do, right? But until and unless He provides those resources to to a level beyond what you have in hand, you should be planning based on what you have in hand, and in the result, the rule should be a project that is very feasible.