Over the years, I've helped many church plants and congregations with as few as a hundred members. And over the years, many of these churches have grown much larger. It is unfortunate that when pastors meet at a conference or leadership gathering that their identity is often tied to the size church they lead. (I am sure that the Lord is more concerned with how well a pastor is doing at making disciples than how many attend their services on a Sunday!) It may not be cost effective for me to provide full-scope architectural services for a small  church that is not close by. However, having my help with preliminary planning, assessments and design in the early stages of a project can help you avoid costly mistakes and may just prove to be worth far more than what you pay to have me involved. 

Here are some stories of 'smaller' churches and how they were helped

This church plant in Philadelphia started with well under 100 people. They purchased a former funeral home and the small 'chapel' was renovated to hold services. The next step was to build an addition to the side to seat about 100 people. 

After filling this space and adding more Sunday services, they moved to their current location, allowing them to continue their trend of incremental growth in a former multiplex cinema. (Click here to see where they are today)

The pastor of this rural church had been on staff with a larger church that  I worked with near New Orleans in Mandeville, LA. The congregation was not in a growing area, but badly needed a fellowship hall and additional classrooms. The challenges they faced included determining how much space they really needed, if existing areas should be re-purposed to reduce the size of the expansion, how to make the addition look like it 'belonged' with the existing church and how much they could afford. Furthermore, they did not want to build in such a way as to preclude the possibility of growth in the future. I developed existing space utilization options, a master plan and a conceptual design for the addition. This enabled the church to have a local design-builder provide preliminary pricing and then the formal permit plans for my review. In this way, they benefited greatly from my church expertise without any added cost to the project.