Our recent building expansion has dramatically opened up the number of highly-accessible rooms on our first floor. Over the past several months, we’ve been growing into this new space and experiencing all of the new things we can do with those rooms. In particular, a number of the groups that used to meet in rooms in our existing mansion have excitedly moved to our new rooms A and B, and it’s no wonder they have – these new spaces feature rearrangeable furniture, climate control, adjustable blinds, and integrated technology for hybrid meetings.
At the same time, as we welcomed Rev. Sasha into our congregation last year, the first floor Parlor room returned to being our resident minister’s office. This space previously served as a ‘quiet space’ for folks to watch the service on Sunday mornings, while our Library served as the ‘vocal space’ for our young and young-at-heart members. This arrangement involved condensing those two spaces into one – and especially as we’ve welcomed a number of new members into our congregation over these past few months, the Library has gotten quite full on Sunday mornings!
While all of that has been happening, the Dining Room, which sits directly opposite of the Library as you make your way in and out of our Sanctuary, has actually seen a reduction in use. On Sunday mornings, while we used to hold Coffee Hour in the Dining Room or Terrace Room depending on the day, we’ve now moved to exclusively hosting it in our new Chu Family Hall.
The Dining Room and Library both have a number of issues, some that have pushed groups out of them and some that are troubling the groups that still meet in them. The Dining Room has very few electrical outlets – in fact, it only has four outlets, all near the fireplace, and two are on light switches. This means that folks who want to use the room as a meeting space and expect to be able to bring a laptop with them might have trouble plugging in a charger.
The Library also has its own fair share of issues. On top of being an already dark room, since it sits on the western side of the building, very little light manages to make it through its windows on Sunday mornings. By contrast, it has far more electrical outlets… but that’s actually a problem, since it hosts so many little ones on Sundays that all of them have to have socket covers.
Faced with the issue of an overflowing Library and an unused Dining Room on Sunday mornings, an idea has formed between both staff and members to try an experiment.
We’d like to try swapping the furniture between both rooms. We would turn the Dining Room into more of a Family Room with a small table with chairs, plenty of comfortable seating, and a TV for watching the live service and for use in meetings.
Meanwhile, the Library would become a place for quieter meetings, keeping its TV but centering the dining table in the middle, acting almost like a study room. No matter where you sit around the central table, you’ll have an outlet nearby for your laptop.
Folks would be able to stretch their legs in the new Family Room on Sunday mornings, and if they need a quieter space, the refreshed Library would feel similar to how the Parlor did last year.
The more we thought about this relatively simple swap, the more it felt like the solution was right in front of us this whole time, and we just hadn’t seen it.
We’ve reached out to almost every group that utilizes each space, and the feedback we’ve gotten so far has been extremely favorable towards the change – so much so, that we’re planning to trial it starting this coming Sunday, March 9.
We recognize that these are very important spaces for our members, with quite literally decades of experiences shared within them. While this feels ‘right’ to us, it may not feel ‘right’ to you, and we respect and honor that history.
To that end, we’d like to gather feedback from our members – your thoughts on this change before it actually goes into effect, as well as your thoughts on this change after you’ve had the chance to experience it for a few weeks. We’ve opened up a Google Form where you can submit your thoughts. This Form will stop accepting responses on Sunday, March 9, as it serves to capture everyone’s thoughts before this change goes into effect.
We’ll be sharing a new Form with our Weekly Newsletter on Wednesday, March 12 where we’ll be asking for your thoughts on the new spaces once you’ve had the chance to try them out yourself.