Building Expansion

Our Building Team spent perhaps more time on this question than any other in the design process. We wanted this decision to be based on principle, and thus some key factors shaped the auditorium design rather than setting out to reach a certain seating capacity. First, we love how our current auditorium feels, so we were able to use it as the starting point for the orientation, stage height/shape, seating, and other aspects of the new auditorium. Second, we highly value the intimacy of the worship environment. Our staff and elders made trips to other churches and gauged how to preserve this intimacy while increasing seating capacity. They observed that factors such as making sure the last row of the auditorium reached back only to a certain distance and keeping the ceiling height from growing too high would help greatly toward this end. Prioritizing these values led to the design of an overall space that we felt good about, and it was from there that we determined that around 1,500 chairs would fit in that space. 

In the near term, we would love to keep the existing auditorium as close to its present form as possible. This will continue to be a great space for The Salt Company, Equipping, and Youth (as they are already outgrowing the Equipping Room!). In the meantime, we will be able to both assess how Veritas can best use that space going forward and also save up the funds to make changes at the proper time.

The estimated monthly payment on our loan is $75,532.88. We believe that this is a sustainable number for Veritas for several reasons. First, this number represents only 24% of our income from the last fiscal year. Second, since paying off our current building, we have been setting aside far more than this ($100,000/mo) towards a future building as part of our annual budget. We believe that it is a sensible amount both now and in the future as we see more people joining our church family and giving regularly.

We would love to have offices someday, and have especially noticed a need for places to have one-on-one conversations (both on Sundays and during the week). To this point, we have never fully finished our current office space, and a large portion of these "offices" are devoted to storage. We have a design in place to finish the offices, but we want to prioritize our ability to fund the new auditorium and kids classrooms first because of the cost and time demands of such a large project. We also want to wait for a little while to see if the offices might function better if located in the proposed shell space, the old auditorium, or even some of the existing kids classrooms. Our staff team is very understanding and they want to put the needs of the broader church body first, so we are planning to see how these other pieces fall into place first.