Collaboration Leads to a Warm and Welcoming Church Space
Custom design and woodwork creates a warm and inviting welcome center.
Project Type: Custom Woodworking
Client: Calvary Bible Church
Name: Eric Omdal, Associate Pastor of Leadership
Location: Neenah, Wisconsin
Year Completed: 2022
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Calvary Bible Church has been around for a long time, almost 100 years. We are a faith community that is actively committed to living out the life of Christ in all that we do. We like to say we are a large church with a small church heart. We are blessed to have the resources, opportunities, and ministries of a larger church, but we’re still small enough that you recognize the faces of the people in the church family.
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As a church family, we have certain values that resonate with us, contributing to how we have built our buildings. One of those values is teaching God’s word. That’s a big value of our congregation. It’s our focus on Sunday mornings and why our building has many classrooms.
We also value being a community, and that’s where our building before this expansion really didn’t support our needs.
Before the expansion, our building was constructed to be functional and utilitarian. It felt like a school and a worship center with many winding hallways in between. We had classrooms for teaching, but generally, the aesthetics were not very warm.
There was not much relational space. And so, this expansion was to provide the church family an opportunity to be together, to have coffee and conversations where discipleship could happen. We wanted a place where people would want to linger after church, talk about life and share life.
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During the project’s planning phase, it was important for us to be good stewards of the resources, but we also wanted to create a beautiful and nice space.
We assembled an interior team to guide the aesthetics of different spaces in the expansion. With a project like ours, where you’ve got a lot of different voices in the mix, there are many different opinions. Sometimes you have people that have functional desires because of how a space will be used, and then you have people that care less about the function; they can care more about the aesthetics.
Designing our welcome desk area was one of those situations where the team using the space functionally were on the opposite end of the spectrum from the desires of our aesthetics team. Troy did a great job helping us bring together the values of both of these teams so that we could accomplish the functional needs of our space while also making it attractive and welcoming.
Troy was very patient and accommodating when designing the custom woodwork for the project. He wanted to ensure that we ended up with what we were looking for, and in some cases, better than what we were looking for.
He would listen to what we were saying, and then he would bring us samples of curated hardwood and say, “Is this what you are looking for?”
We worked with all sorts of subcontractors on this project, and in some instances, it was almost like the subcontractors really weren’t listening. That was not our experience working with Troy, and it was refreshing.
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For the expansion to be successful, it needed to provide the right space for specific ministry areas. One of those areas was youth ministry, a relational ministry that includes many games and activities.
One of the coolest custom projects Troy worked on was the figured hardwood table in the youth room. It’s great because it serves the purpose of creating a warm, relational environment. It’s a beautiful piece of custom furniture, but also very functional.
We’ve hosted everything from pancake breakfasts to staff Christmas parties around that table. Troy and his team did a fantastic job building it and incorporating that theme throughout the other spaces in the rooms here.
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What’s been exciting is that as soon as the space was built, we saw its positive impact on our church family. People hang out after church and throughout the week. Since the new area opened a year ago, we’ve recorded 70,000 event participants between the additional ministries and youth group activities. The new space is warm and invites people to come together to worship, grow, serve, and share. It’s so wonderful.
“We worked with all sorts of subcontractors on this project, and in some instances, it was almost like the subcontractors really weren’t listening. That was not our experience working with Troy, and it was refreshing.”
— Thank you to Pastor Eric Omdal and Calvary Bible Church for allowing us to feature your project!
