I led Hendersonville First United Methodist Church through a “Re-Imaginging” process of their youth ministry space a few years back. The group came up with an “Industrial Cathedral” idea. The concept was to fuse art, tradition and with the trendy industrial looks they had seen at other youth group rooms.

This is a view from the back of their main gathering room. You can see a large circular ‘island’ to the bar area. This is used for serving food and drinks. You can spot the steel trash can as part of the design for the ‘industrial’ look.

This blue wall is actually a large rectangular pillar that just stuck out in the youth group space. So we worked around it as a focal point. The bar was built around the pillar, the blue color is the only place this color appears in the room as well. Eventually we had a family purchase a new 50 inch flat screen for the ministry that we hung on the wall. The corrugated metal on the bottom is cut in the wavy pattern to give dimension, there’s a wood trim put on it because we couldn’t pay enough to have the metal milled down to where it would cut someone. There’s just basic rope lighting behind the metal illuminating it. The ceiling has a matching metal drop down set up with lighting embedded into this. This was all done by a professional carpenter. The only thing the youth did here was put in the wiring in the walls for the sound and visuals. That stuff is in a cabinet on the other side of bar area.

This is one of the entrances of the room that comes in from the elevator, so it is pretty popular choice. This is what folks would see upon entering. Organized chairs, the eye feature of the bar, lighting and the carpets.

Here you can see a pair of chairs we had made from Church Chair out of Atlanta. The table was a leftover from prior set ups. With the new designing they fit into the eating area really well. The carpet is a recycled high traffic carpet that comes in replaceable squares. It had this circular pattern that was really sharp but worked with the overall concept really well. The black walls were used for B&W photography by the youth group. We payed a bit more money for a nice trim to go around the walls of the room.

This view of the seating area shows a few things. The seating in this area was set up for worship and other gathering events. The stage isn’t done here, but eventually it had laminate top to go on it that reflected the industrial theme. You can see the artwork from the youth group that extends all the way around the room.

The group wanted to have an eating area of the youth group space. What they came up with was recycling some old pews from the basement of an old church. We cut them in half, painted and used them as booth seating. We found some old restaurant tables at a salvage/antiques stores for a really great price as well.

This concept took over 3 years to complete. We had a 6 month discernment process and then spent a huge amount of time and energy trying to get the permission to fund raise. Our building committee passed our plan with no problem. Our original budget was around the $40,000 range, but we brought that down dramatically with my parent who was a general contractor’s ‘creative engineering’ plus some sweat from our teenagers. Big ticket items were the media bar which was professionally done, the chairs and the carpet. Luckily the whole entity was funded by individual families and many ‘year end givings’ with some other bills payed through small fund raisers or special funds (ie. parties people had in the space).