My parents stopped going to church about the same time they quit driving after dark and going downstairs to the basement. It was about the same time Dad got earphones for the television so Mom could sew in peace without having to listen to John Madden shout explanations of NFL football plays.

My folks used to go to church every time the bell rang. When they became golden-agers, however, that became difficult. Potluck dinners served in the church basement were off limits because of the steep stairs. Children were too loud and the preacher too soft. The dim lighting of evening services made hymnal reading a trial and upped the chances of stumbling and falling. Eventually Mom and Dad just stayed home and watched church on television.

Editor's note: Download the full report on the ministry facilities expansion trends survey for free at YourChurchResources.com.

Churches in the United States spent about $7 billion on church buildings in 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But did these churches construct new facilities or add to existing ones? Building on their current property or elsewhere? What prompted these projects?

In early 2010, Christianity Today International and Cornerstone Knowledge Network attempted to answer questions like these by co-sponsoring a survey on ministry facilities expansion trends titled, "Does More Space Mean Better Ministry?" The goal of the survey was to better understand how churches view their ministry space and to gauge their feelings about recent ministry space expansion. The study also attempted to identify correlations between the types of expansion, church growth rate, and makeup of growth. For churches that have not expanded, the study explored what elements of their ministry space they would most want to expand if they could.

When I was a newly minted pastor's wife I was puzzled by what appeared to be an unexplainable correlation between long-time members' retirement from their jobs and their retirement from church involvement. Now that I am on the cusp of fitting into the "senior citizen" category, I have discovered at least one reason why retirees sometimes seem to diminish their ministry within the church: lack of accessibility to the sanctuary.

When senior citizens have difficulty participating in sanctuary worship services, the entire ministry of the church can suffer. Ministry comes out of worship, and when mobility and other health issues hinder attendance at worship services, the invaluable spiritual gifts, experience, and wisdom of seniors in the church's ministry can be lost as a result. As the body ages, pain, mobility, and health issues sometimes make just getting up in the morning a chore. If seniors who are struggling to function on a day-to-day basis run into access issues in the church, they can become easily discouraged in their attendance and involvement.

Grace Church is only halfway through its latest building project, but church leaders are already feeling confident that the planning and thinking they have invested is going to reap dividends like never before. This time around, years before the first bulldozer arrived at the work site, the church identified its primary ministry focus—serving the next generation—and aligned its design with that purpose.

Grace is a church that embraces the idea of creating worship and ministry space, rather than just more square footage. To accomplish this feat, a church must balance economics, aesthetics, and utility. Leaders need to be keenly aware of their community and what its people need in new facilities. But before uprooting a single blade of grass, a church needs to ask these baseline questions: What kind of church are we? What kind of church do we want to be?