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Every Sunday, more than 200 children come through our children’s ministry. We have the privilege of families entrusting these kids to us during some of their most formative years. Between their start in CM at one year old to their graduation from fifth grade, our kids will have walked through the entire Bible three times through our Gospel Project curriculum, learned to memorize Scripture through song, and built relationships with friends, uncles, and aunties, and been prepared for what we hope will be a lifetime of following Jesus.
This ministry is, both spiritually and physically, a big deal. And one of the priorities we had in designing our building was to design a CM space that would allow us to disciple our children as effectively and safely as possible. By God’s grace, he’s allowed us to develop a plan that will accomplish just that.
Of the 36,000 square feet in the new 529/531 building, about 10,600 square feet is designated specifically for CM. Considering how tiny children are, that’s a lot of space! Even Pastor Wayne, our family ministry pastor, was pretty shocked when we showed him the layout: “That’s really big.” But we will need every last square foot, and our children are worth it.
The heartbeat of the CM wing is a larger Group Room. This is a centrally located space where our elementary CM kids will begin their day, singing God’s Word together before breaking up into their grade-specific classes. Our current group worship time takes place in Room H, which is cramped enough where some enthusiastic hand motions may threaten a minor injury each week. Our new larger Group Room will be 1,500 square feet, a 60% increase from our current room. Music leaders will lead songs from a small stage located at the front of the room, and plenty of open space will allow for our kids to sing and dance to their little hearts’ content.
This Group Room also serves another function: it will be the primary check-in and check-out area for elementary students. Right now, kids are dropped off and picked up directly from their classrooms, which can make our tiny hallway feel as crowded as a Costco on Saturday. With the new building comes a new check-in and check-out procedure: all elementary school-aged kids are dropped directly in the Group Room, and at the end of service, they are all picked up directly from the Group Room. CM Director Jamie Collier visited some larger churches that utilize this workflow, and she was amazed at how efficient and effective it is. In addition to allowing for easier, less crowded movement of children, the result is a more secure CM area, with fewer people accessing the space.
After group worship time, the elementary kids will transition to their amply sized, grade-specific classrooms. Currently, many of our classes are combo classes, with 500 square feet being shared between two grades. The new layout will allow for a larger room for these combined classes, but with the added flexibility of splitting the room in two with moveable walls.
Our youngest kids (1- to 3-year-old) will also have their own dedicated rooms, and parents will still be able to drop them off directly in their classrooms. Astute observers of the floor plan will notice that these younger children’s rooms are actually larger than our elementary classrooms. This is where Visioneering’s expertise really shines: from the hundreds of church projects that they’ve done, they know that small children come with disproportionately large accessories (specialized furniture, equipment, storage, etc.), so Visioneering designed larger rooms to accommodate larger stuff!
We’ve also included a CM-only restroom, centrally located within the CM area for easy access when nature calls in tiny bladders. Our CM administrator Kiane Tsukamoto had one of the best ideas of our whole expansion project: “What if we moved the sinks outside of bathrooms?” GENIUS. Moving the sinks made room for more toilet stalls, as well as making sinks more accessible for kids that just need to wash their hands after a particularly sticky craft. Kiane is brilliant, which is why we are going to name these bathrooms after her.
We take the safety of our children very seriously, so designing a highly secure CM space was non-negotiable. Visioneering understood the assignment and created our CM wing to not only be functional and fun, but safe and secure.
The whole CM area is completely self-contained, able to be locked and secured from the rest of the building. The dedicated, CM-only restrooms will only be available to children in CM and will not be accessible from the building’s public spaces. The new centralized check-in and check-out area in the Group Room means that children will have one way in and one way out of the space, and adults not serving in CM will not have access to the rest of the CM area. Even though the CM area will be easily secured, there are readily accessible emergency egress points in case of evacuation. We’ll also be deploying a new access control system that will allow for our CM staff and volunteers to quickly get in and out of their needed spaces, while making sure that doors will be locked for those who are not able to get in.
Our current resource closet is a tiny and mighty space that does a heroic job of holding CM supplies that are shared across the whole of the ministry. It is such a blessing! And it is very small!
The new Resource Room is almost as big as our new classrooms, which will give us ample space to store the myriad supplies and materials that we utilize every week for CM. Imagine our very own Hobby Lobby! Paper! Colored pencils! Glue dots! NO GLITTER! We’re dreaming of having a large central island that will function as a massive prep surface, and we also hope to create a proper resource library, filled with books that we can recommend to our volunteers and families.
Our Bridge ministry is in a class of its own within our church. We deeply love these families that are affected by disability, and our church is better because they are with us. We long to serve them and allow the whole family to participate as fully as possible in church life, both in CM and our adult programming, but our current space limitations make that a very complicated task. We want our church building to express the way God feels about them: that they won’t just have space to use, but space where they belong.
We love having our Bridge kids participate as much as possible in the rest of our CM program, but there are times when they need a little bit of separate space and time to themselves (I think most of us can relate!). So when things get a little too loud or a little too stimulating, Bridgers can slip into our dedicated Bridge room, which will be directly attached to our CM Group Room. There will be large windows in the Bridge Room so that Bridgers can still look into the main room, and there will be adjustable lighting and sound so that they can experience the worship time in a way that is comfortable for them. Our Bridge team has been scheming and dreaming about how to design the room with specific attention to sensory regulation: ways to cool down and reengage, always with the option to rejoin the rest of the class when they’re ready.
Our adult Bridgers also get their own dedicated room! Right now, our adult Bridge participants are encouraged to sit through as much of our worship services as they would like, and then they meet in the conference room, which has to get set up and torn down each week, with all their supplies currently being stored in various closets across the building! But no longer! The adult Bridge room will be located on the west side of the building, easily accessible from the sanctuary. We can’t wait to see our adult Bridgers grow in discipleship in their own space.
Next: What we’re doing to make the building puuuuuuuurdy.
