Interview with Mel McGowan

By Brad Dupray

How Church Architecture Can Tell a Gospel Story

Mel McGowan discusses “architectural evangelism,” the idea that church meeting spaces can communicate the gospel through design, hospitality, and community connection. In this interview, he explains how buildings can either create barriers or become gathering places that invite people toward deeper spiritual connection.

• Church buildings can either communicate “members only” or lower barriers for the community.
• McGowan describes church facilities as places that can tell stories and create meaningful encounters.
• Good stewardship, flexibility, and contextual design are central to Visioneering Studios’ approach.

Mel McGowan grew up with a passion for great storytelling. Whether at a Disney-inspired theme park or in the art of film, he saw the life-changing value a story could bring. Mel has converted that passion into what has been called “architectural evangelism,” using the design of church meeting spaces to preach the gospel to people in ways that meet the eye. As president of Visioneering Studios, which he founded in 2002, Mel has provided architectural insight to ministries across the United States and around the world, including Southeast Christian Church (Louisville, Kentucky), Christ’s Church of the Valley (Peoria, Arizona), and Saddleback Church (Lake Forest, California). Visioneering Studios received “Best Church Architect” Solomon Awards in 2007, 2008, and 2009 and is the only national architecture and design firm wholly owned by a Christian ministry, the Provision Ministry Group.

What drove the passion to get into “architectural evangelism?”

Getting a taste of it by working with Gene Appel and Barry McMurtrie. That taste of kingdom impact and eternal significance was enough for me to want to shift from corporate profiteering to kingdom building. It was the idea of walking away from lining another developer’s pockets to creating an environment that could actually change an eternal destination. It’s pretty compelling.

Did you ever have a desire to be “in the ministry?”

From the time I became a Christian in high school, I was a frustrated evangelist, missionary, and pastor because I didn’t have the speaking skills. I was too chicken to be a missionary, so it was the idea of following God-given wiring. Personally, I had never been able to make that connection between drawing and eternal impact. God had to kind of open the door, tear the curtain, for me to see the connection.

How does architecture evangelize?

Let me talk about how it can de-evangelize—in other words, scare people away. I’ve become convinced church walls really can be seen as one of the biggest obstacles between Christians and non-Christians, between the lost and the found, between the body of Christ and the community. Part of our job, even as we’re designing and building walls, is, ironically, to metaphorically tear down walls that exist between the ekklesia that’s meeting on Sunday and those who are so desperate for eternal life they’ve never heard about.

Aren’t the walls an indicator that “the church meets here?”

At one level, conservatively, we’re going to try to not let the walls get in the way. For example, not just tossing up things that are beacons to Christians or the rechurched but basically communicate “members only” to the unchurched. More aggressively, when we talk about architectural evangelism, it’s the idea that if you’re going to be called to be “fishers of men” you should put some bait on the hook.

How do you bait the hook?

One of the things in our contemporary, especially suburban, car-oriented society is people have this deep hunger for connection, authentic relationship, community. A lot of times they perceive it as hunger for horizontal connection, and we believe we can provide that while producing the deeper need for a vertical connection to the Creator and his creation. What that looks like is what we call “destinations that lift the sprit.” In other words, compelling environments that are a uniquely appropriate solution and response to the community and the context we’re working in—an opportunity to create a postmodern version of Jacob’s well, where someone could come for a drink and encounter living water, eternal truth, and a relationship that leads to a shift in their eternal destination.

What message does a structure send to a community?

Architects use the phrase “Form follows function.” But there’s an unspoken reality that form also follows fiction. In other words, buildings tell stories whether intended or not. Too often, church buildings convey “members only” or, you need to “prepare thyself before stepping foot in here.” Or, “we really don’t care about this place, we’re going to be as cheap as humanly possible.” Part of good stewardship is understanding you not only meet the bare bones functional needs, but when designed with excellence, you can actually convey the church’s unique identity and story to people driving by and entering the front door.

As you’re trying to convey story, how do people interface with the space?

We don’t rely on the structure alone to convey the story. We’ll use techniques like environmental graphics or media projected onto surfaces to convey values through culturally relevant imagery. We’ll use things like building orientation. Many churches have their back to the “100 percent intersection” and their front door facing a parking lot. Urban planners call this “mooning the community.” We’ve been able to integrate churches as performing arts centers, sports venues, coffeehouses, and third places that represent the heart of the community.

Are churches simply pandering to pop culture?

The easy target is the church that’s kind of a traditional church that goes to Starbucks and tries to copy the paint colors and the menu to replace their cheesy doughnut and hot-pot coffee stand. What our clients are looking at is a bit more revolutionary in basically reconceiving the whole development paradigm of church facilities as something other than Christian country clubs.

But can’t a church get so tied up in its facility that it becomes a “Christian country club?”

Part of it is going back to our first-century roots, where Jesus declares the temple irrelevant. It’s more about “wherever two or more are gathered in my name.” What you find is more of a blurred line between sacred and secular, rather than an artificial concept of sacred space or church in a box—as people were meeting in the courts, on the side of a hill, around a meal table, and underground in catacombs. I think there are a variety of environments that can facilitate ekklesia.

How does a church find the balance between meeting on a hillside and having a functional, inviting facility?

Good stewardship is one answer that drives a lot of this. The idea of a multimillion-dollar facility that sits empty six days of the week and is an economic and social black hole in the community is something that just isn’t appealing to a lot of next-generation leaders. So, they have a choice of hiding out in living rooms and schools and ultimately saying, “No room at the inn,” or they can investigate new paradigms and rediscover ancient models of gathering places.

Have we come full circle, back to the “ancient?”

Let’s go back to the woman at Jacob’s well. In a Middle Eastern climate, where there’s water, there’s life. A couple of times a day people are going to have to gather at the well—it’s a natural gathering place. If you take the same woman who is at the well just trying to get a bucket of water, she never would have made it to the temple in Jerusalem—or church on Sunday. She couldn’t have gotten past the geographic, economic, and cultural hurdles to get to the court of Gentiles. She definitely would have been stoned before she ever got to the Most Holy Place. But that didn’t stop the God of the universe from coming to her where she was. She was at the community “third place.”

In today’s context, a young pastor might prefer to be where culture is already gathering rather than requiring outsiders or the unchurched to come to him. There are two ways of doing that: one is to plug into a mix-use town center type development as an anchor tenant (performing arts venue or sports venue, etc.) and take advantage of parking that someone else has built that sits empty on Sunday morning; the second is to blow up the concept of a “members-only” church campus and introduce community uses that lower the drawbridge to the community.

Is the idea of “visioneering” a space an American obsession?

We’ve worked in Africa and Asia, in contexts of medical missions and sex-trafficking shelters. In each case God has revealed a unique and compelling story that can be communicated through the environments. The idea of visioneering is really to move beyond just coming up with a technical master plan solution, but rather to prayerfully seek “the Master’s plan.” For example, in Cambodia the village center that we designed communicates the theme “from the killing fields to the harvest fields.” It brought us, and the congregation, to tears when it was rolled out.

What’s the difference between the “visioneered” buildings of today and the cathedrals of the past that are now empty monuments?

There’s a saying that didn’t quite make it into the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the flexible, for they will not break.” Many of the cathedral builders, as well as church architects of today, have a paradigm of wanting to recreate that temple model that’s designed to last for a thousand-plus years. We believe in the power of redemptive space and place as well as being good stewards of God’s resources. It tends to result in buildings that are rather simple structurally, but are rich with story in the spaces between the buildings and between the walls. This ends up being a far more cost-effective way of communicating than relying on the structural acrobatics of either gothic cathedrals or much of today’s contemporary “starchitecture” (or celebrity architecture).

How do you design something that has the “wow” factor but is also functional?

A starting point with the wow factor is God’s architecture. Walking the site and understanding what God created and being able to build on that foundation. For example, at Heritage Christian Church we built a pre-engineered butler building, but what people remember is a glass-enclosed front porch that overlooks this pristine wooded lake that the previous church architect had never even noticed. That’s one strategy. Our bag of tricks is a lot bigger than that.

How do you do it without costing the church a fortune?

The “special sauce” stuff might be just 5 percent of the total cost, and we can easily pay for that when we cut 20 percent out of the structural acrobatics cost that most church architects cling to. Most church architects want to create some custom structural solution. They tend to rely on the unique roof profile to convey the identity of their building. We think a lot of the internal square footage can be housed most cost-effectively in simple structures that are more like blank canvases or empty sound stages that are intended to be repainted or redressed with some frequency to keep up with the culture. So keeping the cost per square foot of the core structure down gives us the flexibility not to forget the special sauce—things like color, environmental graphics, outdoor furniture, audio, video, lighting, and landscape architecture—that creates more of a multisensory experience, in addition to keeping the rain off our heads.

Brad Dupray is interim president of Church Development Fund, Irvine, California.

Author: Brad Dupray