The building sits empty five and a half days a week. A scout troop needs a room on Tuesday nights. A recovery group wants Thursday evenings in the fellowship hall. The community food pantry would like to store boxes in the old nursery. Each request sounds small on its own, and each one asks you to answer a question your church may never have written down: whose building is this, really, and on what terms does someone else get to use it?
There is no universal right answer. A rural church with three members on staff and a leaky roof faces a different calculation than a downtown congregation with an underused annex. What follows is not a case for “yes” or “no” — it is the list of things worth deciding on purpose, before the first ambiguous phone call, rather than case by case under pressure.
Name what you are actually deciding
“Should we let outside groups use the building” is really four smaller questions: which groups, which spaces, on what schedule, and at what cost. Most churches never separate these. They get a request, feel a vague obligation to be generous, and say yes without deciding any of the four — then discover six months later that they have three overlapping users, no fee schedule, and no memory of who agreed to what. Decide the four questions once, in a calm meeting, and every future request becomes a matter of checking against a policy instead of relitigating first principles.
The honest case for saying yes
A building that only opens for services is a building the neighborhood has no reason to walk into. A scout troop, a 12-step group, a tutoring program, a blood drive — each one puts people who have never attended a service inside your doors, on a low-stakes errand, with no pressure attached. Some of those people eventually walk back in on a Sunday, not because of anything you said, but because the building had already stopped feeling foreign. That is a real return, even though it is slow and you cannot put a number on it.
There is also a plainer case: a mostly empty building still costs money to heat, insure, and maintain. A modest facility-use fee from a handful of regular groups can offset a real slice of that cost, and it does so without asking your own members for another dollar.
The honest case for saying no, or saying no for now
Every group that uses the building adds wear, a scheduling conflict, and a small slice of risk you did not have before. A kitchen used by an outside group needs to be cleaned to your standard, not theirs. A nursery used by a daytime program needs the same background-check diligence you apply to your own volunteers, and outside programs rarely arrive with that documentation ready. And a building with more keys in circulation is a building where “who was in here Tuesday night” gets harder to answer.
None of this means refuse every request. It means the honest cost of “yes” is higher than it feels in the moment someone asks, and a church that says yes to everyone eventually says yes to something it regrets. A church of any size can absorb one or two steady outside groups. Ten is a different building to run, whether or not anyone decided to run it that way.
Build a short, boring policy before you need one
The churches that handle this well are not the ones with the most generous instincts or the strictest ones — they are the ones with a policy written down before the first request arrives, so nobody has to improvise an answer under social pressure. A workable policy fits on one page:
- Eligible uses. Community groups, nonprofits, recovery and support groups, civic organizations — named categories, not a vague “community-minded” standard that changes depending on who is asking.
- Excluded uses. Anything that competes with a church ministry on the same night, anything that conflicts with the church's stated beliefs, anything for-profit or partisan. Write the exclusions down so declining a request is a policy decision, not a personal one.
- Spaces and hours. Which rooms are available, during which windows, and which rooms — the office, the nursery, storage — are never included regardless of who asks.
- Fee, if any. A flat rate or a suggested donation, applied the same way to every group, so nobody has to negotiate in the moment.
- Who signs off. One person or a small team who approves requests against the policy — not whoever happens to answer the phone that week.
Put every agreement in writing, even the easy ones
A scout troop that has met in your fellowship hall every Tuesday for six years still deserves a written agreement, even a short one. It should cover the dates and times covered, which rooms and equipment are included, who is responsible for damage or a lock left unlocked, and who cleans up. None of this implies distrust. It just means that when a new troop leader takes over in two years, or a new church treasurer starts asking questions, the answer already exists on paper instead of living in one person's memory.
This is the same discipline that makes any part of church administration hold up over time — a decision written down outlives the person who made it. The same logic that pushes a church off scattered spreadsheets and into one shared system for people and records applies to building use: the goal is not more paperwork, it is a record that survives staff and volunteer turnover.
Track who is actually using the building
Once you have more than one outside group with a standing key or code, the quiet risk is not a bad actor — it is drift. Nobody decided to hand out five keys; it happened one reasonable request at a time, and now nobody can say with confidence who can get into the building on a Tuesday night. A simple running list — group, contact person, access granted, date reviewed — is enough. Review it once or twice a year, and treat a departing group's key the same way you would treat a departing volunteer's access: revoked, not just forgotten about.
SundayBridge will not manage a facility booking calendar or a keyholder database — that is honestly outside what it does. But the same care that goes into keeping a directory your team actually trusts is the right instinct to bring to a building-use policy: write it down once, keep it current, and make it something a second person could pick up without asking you first.
When a group becomes a partner, not a renter
Some outside groups stay outside groups forever, and that is fine — a civic association that meets once a quarter does not need a deeper relationship with your church. But some groups, especially recovery groups and support groups, quietly become a pipeline: someone attends a Tuesday meeting for a year, then shows up on a Sunday. When that happens, it is worth treating it the way you would treat any other guest who found your church through an unexpected door — the same attention you would give a first-time guest finding their way toward membership applies just as much to the person who met you through a scout troop or a Thursday-night meeting as to the person who walked in on Easter.
Decide the schedule question up front
The most common building-use conflict is not values or money — it is the calendar. An outside group books a Tuesday night, and three months later a new small group wants that same room on that same night, and now someone has to have an awkward conversation. Whoever owns the church calendar needs a clear rule: outside bookings get priority for their standing slot, or church ministries always take precedence, or first-come-first-served within a defined window. Pick one and say so in the policy, so the conflict gets resolved by a rule instead of by whoever complains loudest.
A short list to leave the conversation with
If your church has never written any of this down, you do not need a committee and a bylaw amendment to start. You need one meeting and one page: which groups, which rooms, what fee, who approves, who tracks keys. Write it, share it with whoever answers the phone when someone asks, and revisit it once a year. The building will keep getting requests either way. The only choice is whether you answer them from a policy or from whatever mood the office happens to be in that day.