Grace Church holy of holies - part 2

The second holy of holies at Grace Church is the church office. The door to the church office can only be opened with a key, limiting access to the office and a small percentage of the congregation has the opportunity to enter the church office. Why is the office area restricted?

The layout is not people friendly - The church office layout is designed for function; getting office work done. The design does incorporate any area for receiving office guests or anything that remotely resembles a reception area. The floor space in the outer office area holds several permanent workstations that all face the wall; communicating that the space is task-oriented, not people oriented. I've analyzed it to pieces to try and find a cheap way to redesign the space to receive guests and serve people, but I haven't found a workable solution.

The open layout makes everything accessible to everyone - The floor plan is so open, there are no physical elements to control people traffic. Think about the CopyMax store, there's equipment in the general area that customers can access, but there's other equipment behind the counter that only employees can access. The church office isn't laid out in that manner, once in the office, a person has access to all of the equipment. Serving the needs of multiple ministries and hundreds of people requires a level of control. The layout of the office does not provide that ability.

Confidential and sensitive information - As the brain center for our facility, the office houses different types of information. It is difficult to protect this information within the open floor plan.

Here are some of the elements in my dream to renovate the church office. I'd like to see a balanced floor plan that adequately serves the two audiences of a church office: the employees who use the space Monday-Friday and the volunteers who use the space on Wednesday nights, Sunday mornings and sporadically during the week. The space requires a reception area for receiving people into the office as well as a general office area that ministry leaders can use to support their ministries. On the flip side, the office needs an employees only work area and an indirect way to limit access to the ministry staff offices so all guests can be appropriately screened. To try and accomplish those objectives with the current layout would require a lot of work to address numerous issues.

What's behind that locked door?
In addition to the general office area, there are seven individual offices, a break room, a men's and women's restroom, two storage rooms and a conference room. The staff will tell you that the area is one of the colder spots in the building (in fact, I think we tripped a circuit breaker yesterday because so many staff members were using personal heaters).

The conference room is used for staff meetings, the monthly Elder Executive Committee meetings, the bi-monthly Elder Board meetings, and a lot of other meetings as well as for the occasional staff lunch or social. The conference room is typically where the bridal party prepares for weddings and we even had a wedding in the conference room!

The individual offices serve in multiple capacities as well: workstations, nap areas, auxiliary storage rooms, computer data center and tree graveyards (because of all the paper we use). One of the offices is a lighthouse shrine, one is dedicated to Penn State and the Steelers, another might as well be a music shop and one is a train room.

The office area is one I hope to renovate at some point. I dream of using the space to be more welcoming to our guests, to be more user friendly to our ministry leaders/volunteers and more conducive to facilitating teamwork among our staff.