Alright, I'm here with Jack DeBartolo, principal architect of DeBartolo Architects.
It's an honor to be interviewing you, Jack.
I appreciate so much your work and what you're doing.
You guys have done a fabulous job working with churches, in the past you've done several
massive church projects.
So you know your stuff when it comes to church architecture, you've obviously gone beyond
that and helped many other people establish some great brands as well as buildings across
the country that you've just done a fabulous job at really reaching people in a unique
and very cool, expressive way.
So I want to talk today more about the future of the church and how architecture pertains
to the future of the church or relates to it.
Talk to me.
When you hear that phrase, future of the church, what comes to your mind?
It's an interesting phrase because the first word in that phrase is future and my fear
about the word future is that future always sounds like something that is tomorrow and
so there's a lack of action.
And I think my concern about, it's a catchy phrase, but the idea of the future of the
church doesn't seem to talk about the present of the church.
And I guess my question would be the church is an institution.
It's an institution of community.
It's a community of believers that get together and worship.
Or it's a understanding of a common faith that transcends place that really is about
people who become the church of Christ globally.
And so when you say the future of the church, it kind of makes me, as an architect, obviously
I think of spaces, I think of environments, I think of places and spaces and environments
for worship or for assembly or for new definitions of how people worship together, encourage
one another, but also are spurred on by leaders, by theologians, Bible teachers, pastors, preachers.
And I do agree it's important for us to look down the road and say, where are we headed?
So when I think of the future of the church, it makes me think of the new generation of
church leaders.
And I have huge optimism right now.
I used to sit with young guys and I would say things like, how can you teach genuineness
to your people?
And yet you sit in a room with artificial materials or materials that are imitating
other materials and you have plastic flowers and fake faux wood and all this faux walls
and all this stuff.
And yet at the same time you're teaching, we need to be really genuine and we really
need to be sincere and honest as believers.
And so I think finally that is resonating and it's being heard.
And so my optimism about this new generation is that it's a more cultured and yet not worldly
group of leaders that are rising up to start shaping the church.
I think the role of architecture is going to be more and more listening to the values
of the leadership, the values of the community and listening to culture and listening to
place.
And when I say place, I probably should define what I mean.
I mean that a church in Sydney, Australia should not feel environmentally and spatially
like a church in Phoenix, Arizona or New York City.
That there should be such an understanding of sight and trees and vegetation and wind
and sun and light that the sight and the larger macro sight and the micro sight are all affecting
the space you're in.
So that you're really feeling connected with place.
I believe architecture should be responsive, responsive to place, responsive to people,
responsive to function.
If it genuinely, and that's a key word, if architecture is genuine, if it's responsive,
then it will be permanent and it won't be temporary or trendy or it won't go out of
fashion because it will engage itself and lock itself in to the things that last.
Thinking of the next decade of church, what's an innovation architecturally that church
goers can come to expect when they go to church?
It's interesting.
I just recently in the last few weeks had the opportunity to attend two different Hillsong
facilities in Australia.
And they, I think, obviously have their hands very clearly wrapped around where they think
the church is going and they're creating really interesting environments for worship.
Both of the satellite campuses I went to were in urban settings, one in Newcastle, one in
downtown Sydney.
And these environments are black box, basically, environments where you come into a really
cool old building.
And I think that key is one point, which is adaptive reuse.
I think one of the key points we're going to see over the next decade is going to be
adaptive reuse.
I think you're going to have less churches doing ground up buildings and more churches
finding existing buildings and reusing them in really unconventional ways for church space.
I just returned from San Francisco yesterday and we're designing a church that will be
in what was a parking garage.
So it was a concrete parking garage and now the first floor is going to be a worship space
for 250 people plus classrooms.
I'm really wanting to engage place.
I think place is really important.
The Hillsong experience, once you come in the room, it's like it's a black box.
All environment is gone and you're in a black space that's totally focused on media and
totally focused on, you know, obviously worship, singers, you know, the community that you're
with, the church we're working on right now in Chandler.
It's the opposite of that.
You're actually going to go into a room where you're going to re-engage the place you're
in.
So it's set in a postage, an existing 30-year-old postageo grove.
And when you go into the church, instead of going up and entering into a black box room,
you're going to actually go down into the ground and we're going to reveal basically
a four-foot window all the way around the room, seats 1500 people, and you're going
to see out into the postageo grove above the community that you're worshiping with.
And it's in the round.
So unlike a kind of a stage or a thrust stage kind of environment, the worship leaders,
the pastor, the teacher will stand in the middle of the room.
And the idea is, in a very physical way, is the idea of coming to church as a community
of believers, realizing that churches are often today made up of small group leaders,
of all sorts of leaders, and leadership is often far more tribal as we know.
It's moving that direction versus this kind of super leader.
I think we're going to see a big shift away from super mega pastors, and I think what
we're going to see is a shift towards community leaders, towards more interpersonal learning.
I think we're going to see this idea that people are more genuinely learning in small
group environments than they do in 1500 and 15,000 seat rooms.
I'm sure there's going to be a place for that, but my guess is the scale is going to keep
coming down.
Most church buildings in America, they're not used all the time, obviously with the
exception of Sunday morning.
So how do we get more utilization out of our church buildings?
I actually think it's one of the key questions that's going to be facing all pastors in the
next 10 years, because we graft 10 years ago for a church here in our community.
We showed them with a timetable every day of the week, and we showed them every hour
basically from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. every day, and we just created a simple spreadsheet,
and we just said, do this, just fill each cell with an hour of use and usability.
So here's all the times in a week, and here's every room on your campus, and every pastor,
every church leader should do this.
Take every room, take every time in the week, Monday all the way through Sunday night, and
every hour of the day, and just color in when those buildings have what we would call net
assignable time, that they have assignable use.
We used to call, in school architecture, you'd call it contact hours.
So just color it in when you say, that space is being used every week from 8 to 9, we have
the women's meeting meets there from 11 to 3, we have this program going on.
So go ahead and fill them all in.
And it's remarkable, you look at this thing and it's less than 10%.
And you go, okay, I've just built a building for X million dollars, I'm paying the environmental
cost, the air conditioning, the electricity, all these issues.
We developed the site, not to mention the parking lot, which we wanted to talk about,
how much asphalt that is sitting there vacant, 90% of the day.
And we're using it maybe 10% of the available time.
So pastors are going, and leaders are going to start looking for new ways.
What you have to look for are overlays that don't disturb the uses that you need, but
compliment the uses and have their height demand when you have your low demand.
So that they fit in.
So schools, by nature, because they typically meet Monday through Friday 8 to 3, let's say.
And churches, which meet primarily on weekends and evenings, always fit very nicely together.
And it's always puzzling to me that churches and schools, instead of churches thinking,
let's figure out how to get a school, I don't understand why churches and schools don't
team up, and then go invest in a facility.
It seems really obvious.
And it works really well.
It's a natural fit.
So I think it's about looking for those complementary uses and being innovative, but not how the
church can start having then those complementary programs added to its complexity.
But instead, and this is where I think the younger generation is going to be smarter about
doing this, they'll team up.
So a really cool guy who wants to run a great Christian school that has no idea how to make
it work, another young guy who says, I feel a real need to really lead a great church,
they team up together and they figure out how to make it work.
So I think it happens on the ground floor, and it's going to happen with experimental
kind of startup kind of attitudes of new young entrepreneur-minded pastors and leaders.
You just talked about utilization of space.
Is there a world in which collaboration could work so that not just schools, but churches
combine forces, if you will, to become one building, and there becomes a central meeting
spot essentially for churches.
Have you seen that?
Is that a workable thing?
What do you think of that?
You mean where multiple churches are using one facility?
Correct.
I think it'd be great.
I think that you're going to see that environments can literally be transformed.
So I've got to tell you, this is really interesting.
The church in San Francisco we're helping that's in the parking garage, it's actually
two churches.
It's exactly what it is.
It's an African-American church that meets there, and literally over a 45-minute, I think,
to 60-minute transition, then redemption San Francisco will slide in and use the same
exact facility.
And you've got two pastors, like-minded philosophically, very different in their teaching style.
They share core beliefs, but they really share it very differently.
They hit totally different communities, obviously, different demographic.
They're right in the heart of San Francisco, and they're going to actually have two separate
congregations, and they're going to use the same room.
So absolutely, multiple churches that I know of typically have a minor church and a major
church, but they're typically often using one old building.
I would love to see that even happen on all new levels.
If we design great environments, why can't multiple churches have certain spaces that
are dedicated to their use, but common space maybe that they all share at different times
of the day?
You've got to create spaces that are almost like workshops that can be transformed, and
that's where I think the burden is going to heavily be on designing buildings that can
transform themselves.
Just like this church we designed, now it goes back to 2003 for a pastor in Richmond,
Virginia, where we literally designed a 80-foot by 80-foot square, and we created it so that
he could set up the stage in four different places in the room based on even his message
series.
So if he was teaching on community, he could teach in the middle.
If he was teaching something that he really needed to engage with everybody in a different
way, he could do a thrust stage and have everyone wrapped around him very tightly so he could
be really interacting with people visually.
So that kind of thing, I think we're going to see just even more and more evolution,
if you will, in terms of space and environments, but I do think there's an exciting opportunity
to see churches collaborate.
I mean, organizations like Surge where they're starting to really say, hey, let's be learning
from each other, let's as pastors no longer be competitive, I mean, I think it's a real
shame that I think the pastors of the 80s and 90s were very competitive and they were
almost like trying to, it was like fast food wars and they were going to, you know, who's
going to sell more burgers, I think that's the wrong model for church.
I think church is this attitude that we ought to be seeing that, you know, what does the
world see when they look at the church, you know?
And do we look like a lot of people competing over brands, denominations, and who's wearing
the red shirts and who's wearing the green shirts?
I mean, why aren't we all Christians in saying we realize there's hundreds of ways to connect
with people and to connect with communities?
And so we've created lots of different flavors, but they're all flavors of one thing.
They're all flavors of the gospel.
And we want you to feel it and to touch it and we want you to feel comfortable to come
in contact with it, but we want to create a way that we can all learn from each other.
I think that, one of the, go back to your early question, the future of the church.
One thing I hope is the future of the church is about young pastors kind of humbly saying,
I have a lot to learn from you and that they come together and start to learn a lot from
one another.
And I think that's going to just, you said it yourself, that's happening in a lot of
other technologies and a lot of other disciplines.
For some weird reason, it's not happening as much in the church.
And I think just what you're doing here and what other organizations are starting to do,
I think light bulbs are coming on and they're saying, wait a second, we could all be learning
from each other.
We could be helping each other do better job.
I mean, if this guy is doing it better in Seattle, why aren't we doing it better in
Texas and then why aren't they doing it better in New York and let's learn from each other?
As you think about the future of architecture and its relationship to the future of the
church.
What do you say to future architects about how I guess to motivate and or encourage them,
giving them ideas for how to guide this process of architecture and church?
In addition to practicing, I teach at ASU and the graduate program.
So I do get the opportunity to do exactly what you're kind of hypothetically asking.
I teach for one reason is that I feel like the best way we can keep things, if you understand
that, is by giving them away.
I think as architects, there tends to be this mistaken theory that, oh, if I want to invent
something, which I don't believe architects really purely invent, but if I want to be
ingenious and come up with something, I should, you know, hovel away and keep my ideas.
And the truth is the best way to keep your ideas given away is sharing the information
with the next generation.
So that's one of the big reasons I teach.
One of the other reasons is it just increases relevancy in terms of my staying connected
with young generation of new up and coming designers and design thinkers.
We've been really invested a big part of our practice into doing some work in the developing
world.
And the developing world has brought out for us what I would call essential architecture.
It's caused us to see indigenous people and cultures where they can't afford anything
qualitative.
They need water, they need sewer, and they need somewhere to prepare food and somewhere
to sleep under shelter.
And so the most basic needs, and yet you see this like amazing simplicity of bare necessity
come out and you're blown away by the essential quality of architecture when no longer is
architecture about, I want faux this or I want that kind of wall to have this effect
or to look this way, now all of a sudden architecture is about necessity.
It's about this is what I need to survive.
And so the survival architecture drives an essentialness that I'm very interested in
and that I think I try to take students into radical environments and shake them up where
they are faced and confronted with real facts about the hardness of people living in some
of the most poor climates, poor environments, poor communities in the world.
And then they're forced to say, how can design help this person and does design have a role
in the helping of the poorest people in our world?
And the reason I go to that point is because that's the purest place to find essential
architecture.
And then you take the qualities that you learn in those environments and you go apply them
to work you're doing and it changes, it transforms the way you design because now all of a sudden
instead of you designing purposeless architecture that's about fantastical form, now all of
a sudden it's about what is the essence of the purpose of what we're doing and you go
plumb the purpose further and you let the purpose inspire you so that you really create
an architecture that is specific and what I would call functionally accurate.
When people have nothing and they build shelter and they have nothing but essentials, what
do they do?
They use local materials.
They do all the things that everyone wants to do.
It's the most sustainable building in the world.
It's lead platinum because they got everything, not within 500 miles, they got everything
within 50 feet because they had to carry it.
If you had to carry everything to build your house on your property, you would definitely
be using local materials.
If you couldn't fly anything from Germany and you couldn't import windows from Switzerland,
all of a sudden if you had to carry it on your back, it would be the most pure essential
thing.
We have learned so much by getting back to doing work for some of the people in the poorest
parts of the world.
It's really brought us to thinking about essential architecture.
That's great.
Jack, I appreciate your amazing insights.
What you're doing, the work, the tomorrow architects, it's awesome.
Just praying for great blessings as you guys continue on.
Thank you.
Good job.
It was great.
Thank you.
