Taking Care of Your Church Facilities When You Don’t Have a Congregation

Church services across the nation have been postponed until further notice to protect churchgoers. Many states have temporarily postponed congregations to keep gatherings below 10 people and prevent contamination. Some have completely postponed services. Others have encouraged members to keep up their spiritual studies at home. While others still have changed to offering sermons online so members can still feel connected to their spiritual lives.

This means a lot of church facilities are left empty and unused. Even if your facilities aren’t being used as often, they still need maintenance and care. Here’s how you can adjust your building maintenance routine while your members are worshiping from home.

Identify and Record Facility Maintenance Needs

What kind of maintenance and upkeep did you do when your members came together on a regular basis? Did you engage in weekly, or daily, upkeep? What sorts of things did you do regularly to keep your facilities ready to support member worship and use? How often do you need to come in to keep your building from falling into disrepair?

You can maintain, clean out, and work on things that haven’t been worked on for a while or areas that have been neglected because of other obligations. With some of those obligations on hold, you may find yourself with more time to work on these areas.

Determine How Your Church Facilities Are Currently Being Used

Maintenance of public areas in your church facilities may be happening less frequently because they aren’t being used and don’t need to be held to the same standard as before.

Are you holding virtual services at an altar or pulpit and recording them for your members to join? Are you live broadcasting? Or are you not using your facilities at all? Have you shifted to providing relief to members who have been affected by changes in the economy? There are still several ways in which you could continue to use your facilities.

Create Asset Records and Entries That Reflect Changes in Facility Usage

Once you know how your facilities are currently being used, you can find ways to record that usage in your asset tracking database. Your facilities are a fixed asset that your church relies on to carry out services and support members in their lives.

What needs may have arisen in light of the changes required by COVID-19? Recording those changes will help your organization better fill those needs. When you know what you’re facing, you’re better equipped to come up with solutions.

Not recording those changes will make it difficult for you to show what you’ve used donations for, which will make yearly paperwork more difficult. Better tracking can help you with your filing requirements when the time comes.

Asset Panda makes it possible for you to record all of your changes in your services, as well as the maintenance you need to do to keep your facilities in good shape while members are away. You can update notifications, postpone them, create new ones to help you shift with the changes.

Asset Panda’s customizable and flexible software can help you easily change your asset records. Custom fields make it possible for you to note the changes that came from COVID-19. Recording these can also help you connect the dots between low donation periods and a lack of visitors in your buildings. You can connect these asset records to donation records and get a full picture of what’s happening in your organization.