Amazing Pace

Church Building Booming in the Metroplex

By Steve Freeman

Photo courtesy Manhattan Construction Co.

Contractors and architects in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have seen the light.

Dallas, often called the "buckle" of the Bible Belt, has its fair share of "megachurches," congregations with at least 2,000 attendees, and the area in general and Texas in particular are experiencing record-breaking large church growth.

The growth in Texas is second only to California, said Tom Greenwood, director of church services at The Beck Group of Dallas. His is a title with responsibilities increasingly common for DFW building and design firms.

Today, more than ever, building and design firms are discovering that an increasing number of large and growing Protestant and nondenominational congregations ? especially those with multiyear master plans ? offer multimillion dollar projects.

During the last few years, Dallas-Fort Worth firms have led the construction of several large church projects:

• Potter's House Church, Dallas, $32 million
• Fellowship Church, Grapevine, $31.5 million
• Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, $80 million
• St. Andrew United Methodist Church, Plano, $22 million
• Hillcrest Church, Dallas, $13 million
• Westside Baptist Church, Lewisville, $12 million
• Calvary Temple, Irving, $10 million
• Irving Bible Church, $10 million.

And there's more. Currently under construction is the $35 million Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas. The Beck Group is the general contractor.

Dallas-based Cadence McShane Corp. is nearing completion of the $2.5 million Cornerstone Baptist Church in Mesquite. And Manhattan Construction Co. of Dallas will complete the $18.5 million Fielder Road Baptist Church in Arlington in December.

advertisement

The Making of a Megachurch

Work at Fielder Road Baptist fits trends in megachurch construction. Manhattan Construction Co. is erecting a 96,000-sq.-ft. metal-frame structure with an exterior of masonry and EIFS (synthetic stucco) in suburban Arlington. Its fan-shaped, 3,500-seat sanctuary maximizes the visibility worshipers have with each other and their closeness to the minister at the pulpit.

Theater seating is on an elevated floor with a 4-ft. gradation, far below a cloudlike ceiling of convex-shaped sheetrock with recessed lighting, which hides a catwalk.

The Beck Group designed the structure.

Construction project manager David Lansford said he was hired by Manhattan because of the many churches he has built during his career. His first Manhattan job was the 7,000-seat sanctuary and some surrounding campus facilities completed in 1999 and totaling $50 million for Prestonwood Baptist Church in suburban Plano, one of the largest churches in the nation.

As is common in today's sanctuaries, the walls at Fielder Road will hold a pair of I-MAG screens, often called "talking walls."

Lansford said both Fielder Road and Prestonwood desired acoustic quality at RC 25 ("room criteria" level), which approaches the quality of the Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, a structure he also worked on.

Fielder Road will also feature an orchestra pit embedded in the main stage area, a balcony, a proscenium-shaped stage and a fully functioning three-story backstage with loading dock, ideal for elaborate music and theater productions such as Easter and Christmas pageants.

The new building features 30-ft.-wide walkways around the sanctuary, typical of the corridors called "main streets" in buildings traversed by thousands of people.

Contemporary designs are prevalent, and Fielder Road is testament to that. Traditional architecture of Georgian or colonial looks are rarely requested today.

Also disappearing in today's churches are traditional steeples. At Fielder Road, Christian crosses will signify that the rectangular building with a bowl-shaped cap is a church.

Another distinction of church construction is often the choice of tilt-wall construction. This provides large yet cost-effective programming space, frequently requested by churches. Traditional masonry construction is twice as expensive as tilt-wall design.

Keeping the Faith

Many of the larger Christian churches in the DFW area have experienced a decade of growth so that they now draw 2,000 to 10,000 worshipers each Sunday. In time, growing churches are in the market for mall-sized or campus facilities. The main building in these plans is the sanctuary, equipped with sophisticated multimedia capabilities.

The new-style sanctuaries rival state-of-the-art regional performance halls and often surpass in size any nearby municipal and university auditoriums.

"The general public doesn't understand the sophistication of these auditoriums," Greenwood said.

A heavyweight in the Dallas-area church construction business, Beck gained clout by its selection as designer for the 4,000-seat Fellowship Church in Grapevine that opened in 1998. Since then, the company has won numerous church projects around the state and the nation.

"During the last six years, the church market just mushroomed," Greenwood said. "We've done $115 million in church facilities. Over the next three years, we expect to do another $200 million."

Church projects represent about 13 percent of Beck's nationwide business, up from 2 percent six years ago. In recent years, as much as 40 percent of the company's design work in the Texas office has been church jobs.

Other firms confirm the market surge is too attractive to overlook.

Precept Builders of Dallas has done $150 million of work for churches in five years. Church business makes up 60 to 70 percent of Precept's business today, and the 5,000-seat, $12 million renovation of High Point Church in Arlington has recently joined Precept's portfolio.

Billy Goff, vice president of Precept, said the market segment kicked in about the same time his company was looking for a market less susceptible to economic uncertainties. His firm has six active church projects online this year, and he said that the next phase for the market is moving smaller churches with 600-seat sanctuaries to 1,200-seat buildings.

The strong church market has propelled Precept into becoming a national builder. Goff said as much as half the company's business is now outside Texas, usually the result of word-of-mouth referrals between church leaders.

Some see an eventual cooling of the market.

"It's been fairly hot for a few years, but I think it will soon get saturated," said Charlie Reagan, principle with Alliance Architects of Dallas. Having designed four large houses of worship in the area, the firm has seen church projects climb to 40 to 50 percent of its total work load.

Churches as Clients

Churches have different needs, requiring new approaches for firms seeking their business.

Beck hired Greenwood from the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000. He served that denomination as a church architect, assisting churches nationwide. At Beck, he provides various services to cultivate church projects, including counseling churches on fund-raising, real estate purchases, municipal clearance and critical-path scheduling of crews and equipment on the church grounds.

"They are nonprofits and haven't had to deal with complex issues much, so we help," Greenwood said.

Churches typically require long fund-raising periods - lasting several months to several years - that occur after the initial design work but before groundbreaking.

"For that reason, we put a lot of churches in the pipeline," Greenwood added.

Firms initially compete for the jobs based on their expertise in performance hall and stadium construction. A few have now designated employees in charge of church development and preconstruction services.

Lansford said Manhattan offers its stadium expertise, which he said is a natural fit for megachurches that desire new sanctuaries with thousands of seats in an intimate setting.