How Do You Have Church in a Gym?

For those of you who don’t know, The Crossroads Community Church gathers for worship each week in a gymnastics and cheer gym called Tiger Cat Tumble and Cheer. We are so thankful that God has provided us with this incredible place to meet.

However, meeting in a gym comes with some challenges. Setup and takedown are a lot of hard work, but they are also an incredibly rewarding experience. Each week, we have to come into the gym and take up cushioned mats, move chairs, set up chairs, set up backdrops and instruments and sound system, put together our coffee area and welcome center, and create a nursery and children’s area.

The net effect is that the space is totally transformed into our unique worship area. Several people whose kids take gymnastics at the gym and the owner of the gym have told us how amazed they are at how things look. They say it doesn't even look like the same place. Which is great for us.

One of the primary things you want to accomplish in being a portable church is making your meeting place your own for the time you are there. Our team is doing such an incredible job at this. We set up bistro tables in our coffee area, hang coffee signs on the wall, and put out greenery and decorations to give it a coffee house feel.

In our worship area, we put up backdrops and use whatever props we can to further the theme of the message series. We actually worship on the gym floor where they ordinarily do tumbling. We remove the padded mats each week. Under the mats is a floor of plywood (actually oriented strand board for those of you who know about building materials). This floor is over some large foam blocks. The net effect is that there is still a little bit of spring to the floor, which makes it lots of fun when the band really starts rocking.

For our nursery, we actually use the mats from the gym to create padded walls. We have folding rocking chairs and toys and mats to put on the floor. It really makes the nursery an inviting area.

Our kids' ministry actually meets outside right now. One of the advantages of planting in Texas is that the weather allows us to do this for about 9 months out of the year (that is except for when huge gusts of wind come along). This allows us to do some neat games and activities with the kids, and puts them in an environment where they can be loud and have lots of fun.

The first time we did all this, it took us over three hours. We now have it down to about and hour and fifteen minutes, and we seem to be getting better each week. It’s hard work, but it is also an incredible way for us to connect with each other as a team and with new people as they come in and help us out. We arrive each Sunday morning at about 8 AM, and with a lot of prayer and a lot of coffee, we get rolling on setting up.