Most church building committees are set up to do one job and then asked to do another. They are assembled to represent the congregation, which is exactly the right instinct, and then handed the work of making decisions, which a representative group of a dozen or more people is poorly built to do. Anyone who has served on one knows the symptoms: meetings that run past nine o’clock, decisions that come back up a month after they were settled, and an architect holding three sets of comments that contradict each other. The fix is not a smaller committee or a more patient architect. It is a building committee structure that separates the people who are heard from the people who decide, and that puts in writing which is which before the first design meeting.

Representation and decision are different jobs

Denominational guidance has long recommended a committee large enough to speak for the whole church. A 2003 guide in The Alabama Baptist suggested six to 15 people depending on the size of the congregation, and architect Jim DePasquale, AIA, writing in Baptist News Global in 2010, recommended 10 to 15 drawn from worship, music, education, youth, long-tenured members, and the people who know the surrounding community. That advice is sound on its own terms. A building shaped only by the pastor and the finance team will miss what the nursery volunteers, the worship leader, and the person who unlocks the doors on Wednesday night already know, and those gaps tend to surface after the slab is poured. A broad committee is how a church gathers what the building actually needs to do.

The trouble starts when that same group is asked to approve a schematic design, choose between two roof systems, or decide whether the fellowship hall kitchen gets cut to protect the budget. Those are decisions, and decisions behave differently in large groups than conversations do. A conversation improves when more people join it, because each new voice adds something the others did not know. A decision gets harder with every person who has to agree to it, and the research on group size is blunt about how quickly that happens.

That figure comes from Marcia Blenko, Michael Mankins, and Paul Rogers, the Bain authors of Decide & Deliver, in a 2010 piece, and it should be read as a consultant’s rule of thumb rather than a law of nature. The same authors observed that a group of 17 or more rarely makes any decisions at all. Whether the true penalty is ten percent per person or something softer, the pattern matches what we see in church projects. A 14-person committee can listen beautifully. It struggles to commit, because every member who missed the last meeting has a reasonable claim to reopen what was decided there, and every reopened decision travels back to the architect as a revision.

What the AIA contract expects from the owner

The standard owner-architect agreement already assumes this split, even if most churches never read that far. Section 5.3 of AIA Document B101-2017 says the owner “shall identify a representative authorized to act on the Owner’s behalf with respect to the Project,” and in the same paragraph that the owner shall render decisions and approve the architect’s submittals in a timely manner. Section 1.1.7 is where that one person is named. Section 1.1.8 then asks the owner to list the persons or entities, in addition to that representative, who are required to review the architect’s submittals. In other words, the contract contemplates one authorized voice and a defined circle of reviewers, and it leaves it to the owner to decide who belongs in each.

The contract also says what happens when an owner cannot decide. Section 4.2.1 of B101-2017 lists services that the architect must stop and request written authorization for, and compensation for, before performing. Two items on that list matter here: services necessitated by a change in previous instructions or approvals given by the owner, and services necessitated by decisions of the owner not rendered in a timely manner. A decision reopened in design development because a committee member objected late is not just a frustration. It is a fee and schedule event, and it is one of the main reasons design schedules slip on owner decision time rather than on drawing production.

A church building committee structure in three layers

The structure we recommend keeps the broad committee and adds two narrower layers beneath it. The full committee, of whatever size the church needs to be represented, owns listening and communication. It contributes heavily to the building program, reviews the design at each phase milestone, and carries what it hears back to the ministries and classes it represents. It meets less often than people expect, mostly during programming and at the end of each design phase, and its output is input: priorities, concerns, and the questions the congregation is asking in the parking lot.

Inside that committee sits a decision group of three to five people, which keeps it comfortably under the size where Bain’s authors say effectiveness starts to fall. Typically this is the senior or executive pastor, the committee chair, someone who understands the church’s finances, and someone with construction or facilities experience. The board or elders authorize this group, in writing, to approve design work that stays within the adopted program and budget. When the full committee is divided, the decision group weighs what it heard and settles the matter, and it explains its reasoning back to the full committee rather than simply announcing a result.

Then there is one person: the owner’s representative named in Section 1.1.7. DePasquale put it plainly in his 2010 column, writing that “the chairperson must be the sole contact with the architect.” That does not mean the representative decides alone. It means that every comment, question, and approval travels through one channel, already reconciled, so the architect is never left choosing between the pastor’s preference and the chair’s. We generally advise that this person not be the senior pastor. The pastor’s voice belongs in the decision group, but the representative role takes hours every week during design, and a pastor carrying a congregation and a building project through the same inbox tends to become the bottleneck for both.

Above all three layers sits whatever authority the church’s governing documents reserve. Many church bylaws require a congregational vote to purchase property, to borrow, or to sign contracts above a stated amount, and in some incorporated churches the board holds that authority unless the bylaws grant it to the members. No amount of committee enthusiasm can delegate those decisions away. A building committee that has not written down who decides will discover the answer at the worst possible moment, usually in front of the congregation. Read the bylaws before design begins, identify every decision that must go to the board or to a vote, and put those votes on the project schedule as milestones rather than discovering them as obstacles.

Write the charter before the first design meeting

All of this belongs in a one-page decision charter, adopted by the board before the architect presents anything. It names the owner’s representative and the members of the decision group. It states the dollar threshold above which a choice moves from the decision group to the board, and it lists the decisions reserved for a congregational vote. It sets a turnaround time for design reviews, such as ten business days from receipt of a schematic package, and it says how comments are consolidated into a single set before they leave the church. It also says what happens when the decision group splits, whether the chair breaks the tie, the pastor does, or the question goes to the board.

The charter is also the place to deal with the problem Parkinson described in the 1950s. In our experience, committees spend an hour on carpet color and five minutes on the electrical service, because everyone has an opinion about carpet and almost no one feels qualified to argue about switchgear. The answer is to assign each kind of decision to the people best equipped to make it. Finish selections can go to a small subgroup working within an allowance the decision group sets. Decisions with long consequences, such as the building footprint, the mechanical system, the electrical service size, and what gets phased, go to the decision group with the architect in the room. Every decision, with the date and the reasoning, goes into a written log. That log is what protects the project when the person who chaired the committee moves away or the pastor who started the project leaves, and it is what lets a new member understand why the fellowship hall is the size it is without relitigating it.

Dissent and conflicts of interest

A narrow decision group can be mistaken for a way to shut out disagreement, and if it is run that way it will fail. DePasquale’s advice was to put a known skeptic on the committee from the start, hear the objections early, and build solutions with that person rather than around them, so the objection does not arrive later as what he called a bombshell. The full committee is exactly where that dissent is supposed to surface. The difference the structure makes is that dissent gets heard, answered, and recorded in the log, instead of being re-argued at every meeting. A church that silences its skeptics in committee usually meets them again at the congregational vote, with less time and less goodwill to work with.

The other recurring problem is the committee member with a professional stake. Many congregations have a member who owns a construction company, sells flooring, or practices architecture, and their knowledge is genuinely valuable. DePasquale advised against hiring an architect who also sits on the committee, and the same logic applies to contractors and suppliers. They can advise the full committee, but they should not sit in the decision group, and they should step out of any selection or pricing discussion where their own firm could benefit. Writing that rule into the charter before anyone’s name comes up is far easier than enforcing it after a bid has been submitted.

When this is more structure than you need

Not every project needs three layers. A congregation of 70 adults renovating its restrooms and lobby may have three people who are, in practice, the whole committee, the decision group, and the people who will paint the walls on Saturday. Forcing a formal hierarchy onto that group adds meetings without adding clarity. What does not scale down is the written authority and the single point of contact. Even a three-person committee should know which of them talks to the architect, how much they can approve without going to the board, and which decisions the bylaws reserve for the members.

The same principle holds well outside the church. A franchise operator answering to brand standards reviewers, a hotel owner with a lender and a management company, or a nonprofit with a board and a major donor all face the same question of who is heard and who decides. Section 1.1.8 of the AIA agreement is written for exactly those situations, and listing every required reviewer at the start costs far less than discovering one late in construction documents. Congregations with a strongly congregational polity may need more votes than this structure assumes, and that is fine. The charter’s job is then to schedule those votes at the right milestones, not to avoid them.

In more than a thousand church projects across UNITE’s history, the projects that ran smoothly were rarely the ones with the most money or the simplest sites. They were the ones where the church knew who could say yes. That is why one of the first things we ask a new client is who their owner’s representative is and what the decision group is authorized to approve, and if the answer is not yet clear, we help draft the charter with them. We align our review periods with the committee’s actual meeting calendar, bring the decision group options with their tradeoffs already priced rather than open questions, and use our visualization work so that the full committee is reacting to a building it can see instead of a floor plan it has to decode. If your church is forming a building committee, or already has one that is struggling to land decisions, we would be glad to talk through how to set it up for the work ahead.