When planning a building or renovation project for your church, you'll want to keep people safe, spend smart, and hire the right people. Below are a few simple tips that will get you on the right track to safeguarding your next building project.

Cover The Bases
Hire a reputable contractor. There are certain qualifications your contractor should meet. Before going with a contractor research the quality and trustworthiness of the contractor's work. Learn everything you can about the company or individual before hiring him.

Proper budgeting. Even if the church is planning to do a lot of the work with volunteers from the church, budget money for hiring a professional. Something could go wrong that only a professional can fix. Also, take into account any other expenses that will come along with the renovation or construction, such as renting equipment. A few other things to budget for if you're building a new building are quality air conditioning and lighting systems.

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It's hard to believe but your building project has finally begun. The strategic analysis is complete, the permits are posted, and the church body has warmly embraced the concept of spiritual giving. And for some reason the equipment operators seem to converge outside your window to rev their engines or drive in reverse (with that ear-piercing beeping) every time you pick up the phone or open your Bible.

The sounds of construction equipment should be a gentle reminder that it is time to begin a parallel phase of your building project focusing on your staff. Just as the foreman can't drive every yellow tractor, no pastor can do everything, especially in a growing church. Your own construction crew—your staff and lay leadership—must be prepared to handle increasing levels of responsibility that accompany a larger facility and a growing flock. To ensure your organization is ready to take on this challenge, you need to "get" a few things.

Funding a building project requires two kinds of thinking" big and small. "Churches need to think big for master planning, and think small (i.e. conservatively) for financial planning," says Jim Sheppard, CEO of Generis, a company that helps churches implement strategic financial stewardship. "People usually reverse this and become too aggressive in how they think they'll be able to fund building projects and that's where they get into trouble."

Here are some tips on how to strike the right balance between thinking big and small when it comes to knowing whether it's the right time to initiate a building project at your church:

Long before a shovel hits dirt, there are three mistakes that church leaders must avoid in a building project. And all three occur with the formation of the committee—the group of men and women who will lead the church through what often becomes a challenging, two- to three-year endeavor.

By recognizing these missteps upfront, and taking action to avoid—or at least minimize—any or all of them, a church has a much greater chance of seeing its building project through to a successful completion, with a healthier, happier staff and congregation in tow.

Mistake No. 1: Using the church pastor as the building committee's chairperson.

Too many churches add this responsibility to their pastors' already burgeoning list of tasks and duties. The burnout rate for ministry leaders tends to run high already. Imagine adding the role of leading a committee that is about to spend a lot of money, make a lot of decisions affecting every single member and visitor of the church, and interact frequently with numerous consultants, city officials, and other key decision-makers.

Recently I talked with a senior partner of TAG Consulting, Kurt Andre. Among his many talents, Kurt is a certified Executive Leadership Coach. So I asked him which books on leadership he finds the most helpful. Here are his top 5:

My daughter was reaching out to Daddy. What a joy to see our nine-month-old longing for me from the arms of the nursery worker following our mid-week service. Hannah was being gently rocked by the wife of one of our elders, but it was clear she wanted down. I thanked the woman for watching our daughter while I led a prayer group and my wife taught some of the older children. She assured me that she held Hannah the entire time, except when Hannah was sleeping in one of the stacked cribs. While I appreciated her diligence, I let her know that Hannah enjoyed crawling.

"I'm not comfortable with her crawling on this floor," the worker replied.

The floor was carpeted and vacuumed regularly, so I asked why. With a look that conveyed a terrible secret, she confessed, "The carpet may look clean, but it's laid on a wood floor that was built on top of the original tile floor because we have a water problem. I'm sure you smell the mustiness."

I acknowledged the damp smell. She continued, "I don't want to get anyone in trouble, but look at the wallpaper." She pointed out some dark spots that crept up from below the carpet level. "I don't let any babies crawl on this floor."

At the TAG Consulting Leaders Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona, this week, Jim Osterhaus spoke on a topic that comes up every day in church leadership, yet is so challenging: How do you navigate competing values?

Jim is senior partner of TAG Consulting, a veteran psychologist, and author of Thriving through Ministry Conflict: By Understanding Your Red and Blue Zones (Zondervan, 2005).

Jim says, "Competing values wreak havoc." Yet they can be hard to discover in yourself or in your church, because "Our minds can hold two competing values and then go about covering up the contradictions."

At the TAG Consulting Leaders Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona, this week, noted Christian leader Leighton Ford spoke on how to move from crazed busyness to focused attentiveness. Leighton is president of Leighton Ford Ministries. For 30 years he served as associate evangelist and later vice president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. His newest book is The Attentive Life: Discerning God's Presence in All Things (InterVarsity, 2008). In introducing Leighton, Jim Osterhaus pointed out that Leighton has been at the forefront of 4 major church movements of the past 50 years: mass evangelism (with BGEA), reclaiming the social dimensions of the gospel (with Lausanne), the study of leadership (with Arrow Leadership Program), and now the reintroduction to evangelicalism of the good of contemplative living (his books).

Kevin Ford is the Chief Visionary Officer and Managing Partner of TAG Consulting, a management consulting firm specializing in strategy, leadership and ministry development. TAG's client list includes Merrill Lynch, the Federal Aviation Association and the Salvation Army. While Kevin loves consulting with companies and ministries of all sizes, his passion is to help leaders of the local church.

In his workshop at the 2009 Cornerstone Knowledge Network Conference in Charlotte, Kevin presented on the topic of "Leading Through Change." Here are some of the highlights:

The primary task of leadership is to distinguish between what needs to be preserved and what needs to change. Work on what to preserve before tackling what needs to change.

How do you take your church through the process of change? First, determine what you need to preserve.

Churches may be taking a hit from the economy, but there is still much that can be done to generate a culture of generosity. Here are five specific field-tested ideas (in no particular order):

1. Be a generous leader
Generous churches are led by generous pastors and leaders. You can't take people where you haven't been—especially in the area of finances, which so often gets a bad rap in the church context.

I help churches navigate change. As a Transforming Church consultant, I meet with leaders of churches and non-profit organizations across the country and help them through a journey of discovery, vision clarity, personal transformation, and community impact. No matter how diverse their situations, they share one thing in common: they all struggle to admit certain truths. Here are five of them that, once understood, may set you free:

1. It's okay to say no.

I am thankful for my friends in information technology. For all my exposure to IT, I still have not been able to get past the "novice" stage. One thing I do know is that, if you are using a certain software application to accomplish a project and it is the wrong software or, worse yet, viruses, you are unlikely to have a successful project. In a similar way, the building committee is like the software the church uses to accomplish the building project. If the software isn't right, it is unlikely the church will end up with what they need to facilitate their ministries. That makes the selection of the building committee members critical in every program.

If you pick up a Bible, leaf to the first page and read the first three words, what do you learn about God's approach to creation? He started, "In the beginning..." Pastors often find themselves in a bind because they didn't follow this approach with a construction project.