Rebuild: What Do You Do When The Church Burns Down?

Nathan VonMinden · November 6, 2017

Insurance and Internal Struggles

Then the doldrums.

Fifteen months of displacement, departmental assumptions, poor communication, fluctuating timelines, dashed expectations, and adding a fourth Saturday service to accommodate everyone.

I think it might be worth each church reassessing their insurance coverage. Ours was woefully underestimated, years after the policy was in place. There was decent coverage for our up and running costs, but the coverage on the actual building was bonkers and backwards.

There was a bucket for structural things and a bucket for contents, materials that go in the building. The structural bucket was pretty big, but the contents bucket was way, way, way too small for a church of our size.

So a conversation with one of the guys that comes and looks at our burnt stuff would go like this:  I would say this rack is structural,” and he would counter, “If you flipped the building over would it fall out?” I would reply, “It would, but by that definition our lights would be structural, since they are attached,” after which he’d say, “No they won’t, because if you left, you would take it with you.”

I would then be left saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you can’t change the definition on what’s what just to suit you.”

Multiply that by a bunch and you get yourself a stress headache.

Rebuilding a Church

I really loved it when it came to for the design phase for rebuilding Grace Point Church.

We were able to rethink our worship, lobby and office space. I was able to redesign our worship center to be more inclusive and hospitable.

Along with Ryan Brown, the student pastor, we totally redesigned the office space. Before the fire, our offices received no natural light and it was just kind of gross how unkempt and cobbled together everything was. Honestly, it was a huge turnoff for myself and anyone looking to join the team, knowing they would then spend a third of their life in there.

We went from grubby little hobbit holes to a combination of larger collaborative open spaces and smaller private places to get work done.

We used a free program called Homestyler that was pretty neat and helped us cast vision to all of the staff and contractors or what we were thinking.