Use of the Local Church Building

I know of a church who had this problem. They do not charge to use the facilities, but they started charging a $100 cleaning fee for weddings.

Your church may want to require a cleaning deposit up front before the building is used. Then, if it is not cleaned properly, the church custodian can keep the cleaning fee for their extra work.

 

In a church we attended ten years ago a new set of by-laws were proposed. After the vote to accept these new by-laws and after a long delay, the new rules were distributed to the membership. We discovered a slight alteration to the original language.

"Use of any facilities of XYZ Baptist Church must be approved exclusively by the pastor, in writing".

We left soon after that.

 

The church I spoke of had a fellowship hall. The main problem came when people would hold weddings and the poor janitor would end up cleaning the entire sanctuary and fellowship hall (sometimes on a Saturday night) before church the next morning.

 

One thing I forgot to mention--have a checklist on hand for the groups using the facilities. On the checklist, let them know what is expected, like lights turned off, dishes washed and put away, trash picked up and taken to the dumpster, floor vacuumed, bathrooms supplies restocked, etc.

 

We allow outside groups and people to use our facility so long as they meet certain requirements and are qualified by our facilities team. Given that we have a pretty large facility we want it used by the community. The challenge is that we usually get around a thousand requests a year. We screen them and then have them go through the team.

We also have baseline pricing to offset our facility costs for external events. For instance we just approved a graduation in our worship center. We are charging the school $1500 for the use of the facility. That us very close to our actual costs for that event. Its also cheaper than any other civic venue. We have some pretty rigorous guidelines so it discourages extraneous requets.

If you're considering opening up your facility for outside, and inside, groups make sre you have definite guidelines in place. Talk to other churches, even the huge ones because they are definitely helpful.

 

We charge a reasonable fee mainly to cover the cost of clean up. We also have clear guidelines as to its usage.

 

If they don't clean it, don't let them use it. Or, they can pay for the custodian (or someone else who wants a job) to do it ahead of time.

 

Well just this week a Jewish group asked us if they might use our facilities for their weekly meetings.

Rob