Building Together: FUMC Denton Master Plan Process
Dear Church Family,
Over the past several months, your Building Steering Team, Trustees, and Administrative Board have been laying the groundwork for an important season in the life of our church: the development of a Master Plan for our campus.
What is a Master Plan?
A master plan is a long-range, comprehensive vision for how our physical campus can best support our mission and ministry for decades to come. Rather than tackling repairs and renovations piecemeal, a master plan process brings together architects, church leadership, and the congregation to ask bigger questions: What does our campus need to serve our current ministries well? Where are our facilities holding us back? What will our church need ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? The result isn't a single blueprint carved in stone, but a flexible roadmap that guides decisions about renovation, new construction, and campus use as we move forward together, phase by phase.
Why now?
Roughly a third of our current campus has long-suffered from issues with the foundation that are fundamentally irreparable due to their original construction. Church leadership has known for decades that portions of our building would need to be demolished (including the structures that currently house Modern Worship and Church Offices), but recently, the cost of maintaining these specific spaces has forced the issue of taking more proactive and future-oriented action. Rather than simply replacing what's lost, we believe this moment calls for a broader, prayerful look at our entire campus—one that lets us build not just for today, but for the vision God is calling us toward.
We've put together a short video that explains this need in more detail and introduces the process ahead. We encourage every member of our church family to take a few minutes to watch it:
Who's leading this work?
This process is being led by our Building Steering Team, chaired by Chuck Rives, under the oversight of our Trustees, and with the approval of our Administrative Board (Committee & Lay Leadership Guide Here) To guide us through this work, we've engaged GFF, an architecture and design firm with decades of experience and a studio dedicated specifically to churches and sacred spaces (click here to see some of their work). We're grateful to be partnering with a firm that understands both the practical and the sacred dimensions of the spaces we gather in.
How can you be involved?
This plan will only be as good as the voices that shape it—and that means yours. We want to hear from you in two ways:
Take our 90-second survey. This short survey will help the Building Steering Team and GFF understand how you use our campus, what's working, what isn't, and what you hope for in the years ahead.
Join a listening session. In the coming weeks, The Building Steering Team will host a series of listening sessions where you can share your thoughts and ask questions to help guide our work with GFF. Dates and times will be announced soon.
This is a significant season for our church, and we're grateful to walk through it together, trusting that God is doing something good in and through this process. Thank you for your prayers, your voice, and your presence as we discern the future of our campus and our shared ministry.
Grace and Peace,
Raegan and Scott Gilliland, Co-Pastors
Chuck Rives, Chair – Building Steering Team
Tim McGuire, Chair – Trustees
Dalton Gregory, Chair – Administrative Board
First United Methodist Church of Denton