How We Helped Cross Life Asquith Get Their Renovation Off the Ground
I’ve seen enough church renovation projects up close to know how hard they can be to get off the ground. It’s rarely the design itself that stalls a project — it’s reaching agreement. A congregation needs to agree on what the space is actually for, wardens and committees need to agree on priorities within a tight budget, and everyone needs to hold onto the reason the whole exercise matters: using the property to further ministry, not just patch up a tired building.
That’s the tension at the heart of almost every church renovation I’ve worked on. Being a good steward of a congregation’s resources means staying practical — realistic about budget, site constraints, and what a building can actually do. But a renovation also needs a vision behind it, or it becomes hard to justify the disruption and cost at all. Getting both right, together, is most of the job.
A case study: Cross Life Asquith
One project that captures this well is our work with Cross Life Asquith. It’s a good example of a genuinely low and challenging budget, and of what it takes to bring a church group to agreement on a brief.
We spent a good deal of time early on working with the church group to formalise the brief, testing several options before landing on the right one. A big part of that conversation was how much of a very limited site should be given over to foyer and welcoming space versus everything else the building needed to do. On a constrained footprint, every square metre given to one function is a square metre taken from another, and that trade-off needs to be made deliberately, not by default.
In the end, the church reasoned that their existing kitchen space could be reduced, and the rear meeting space consolidated, to make room for an accessible toilet and a creche room — while still keeping a kitchen that worked properly for the congregation. The result was an improved worship space with accessibility genuinely solved, not just tacked on, within a footprint that hadn’t grown at all. None of that was obvious from the outset; it took several rounds of testing options with the church group before the trade-offs made sense to everyone at the table.
Why the vision has to come first
This is where I think Sydney Anglican Property’s Ed Hercus, writing about church building fundraising, gets something exactly right. He describes the difference between a project pitched as an obligation and one pitched as a vision: “A flawed campaign that focuses too much on convincing people to give something up can feel like trying to get water from a stone… if you develop a really powerful way of communicating the vision, people will want to be on board, even to a sacrificial level.”
That matches what I see on the design side. A church renovation framed purely around cost — “we need $200,000 to fix the roof and toilets” — asks a congregation to agree to inconvenience. A church renovation framed around what the building will let the ministry do — welcome families who currently can’t get a pram or wheelchair through the door, run a creche so young parents can actually be present in worship — asks people to agree to something they want anyway. As Hercus puts it, “If a cause requires so little sacrifice, it can hardly feel worth supporting.”
The stewardship angle matters just as much. Hercus notes that giving, at its healthiest, “comes from a place of freedom and joy, not obligation or guilt” — and I’d say the same is true of the decisions a church makes about its own property. The best outcomes I’ve been part of came from committees who saw the building itself as something to be stewarded well: not preserved at all costs, and not spent on lavishly, but reshaped deliberately so it serves the ministry for the next decade rather than just getting by.
Starting your own project
If your church is at the point of putting a renovation on the table, the practical groundwork matters as much as the vision. Get an early, honest read on your site’s real constraints — kitchen, foyer, accessibility, and meeting space are almost always competing for the same limited square metres, and something will have to give. Formalise a brief before committing to a design direction, and expect to test a few genuinely different options with your congregation before the right trade-offs become clear. And hold the vision and the budget in the same conversation from day one — a church renovation that’s only ever discussed as a cost will struggle to win the agreement it needs, no matter how sound the numbers are.
Quotes from Ed Hercus sourced from “The architecture of generosity: Moving from obligation to joy in church property fundraising”, Sydney Anglican Property.