At the moment, parking is the bane of my church’s existence. We are bursting at the seams and our lack of parking is killing us! We’re building a new space, but until that happens, we are limited on growth because our parking is overcapacity.
We’ve put out parking guards and police to help manage the traffic. But we’ve also kicked around some other ideas to help ease the pressure. Here are some ideas.
- Hire a valet company. Give a gift to your early arrivers by giving them free valet parking. Post signs that say it’s completely free (so there’s no pressure to tip). And be sure to hire a company so they can deal with the liability of potential car dings. The costs are fairly minimal. And if you’re going valet out of necessity (instead of frivolity) it adds a cool dynamic to your parking lot.
- Give incentives for parking far away. Though our lots are full, businesses around us have given us permission to use their lots on Sundays. Create a “frequent parkers” punch card for those willing to park in those distant lots. For every four punches you could give them some cool swag.
- Move non-service calendar items to another time. If you have a Sunday school or small group meeting during your peak parking times, consider moving them to another day or time. This may seem like anathema to some. But if it you’re turning people away from your church because you’re out of parking, it’s worth it.
So those are the ideas. What are some ideas your church has kicked around or implemented?
We had the same problem at our church, but we had the space to enlarge our parking lot.
How about a bus or two to bring people to church and take them home, you might also pick up some new members on the same routes, many being children who might remain unchurched if it wasn’t for the bus service.
How do you do that with multiple services? Do you choose one service to bring them to or do all three (insert your number of services).
For the churches running multiple services, they pick up one service or the other, most picking up for the later service and/or Sunday School classes. I guess a survey with the members who would be riding might help decide what service/Sunday School would be best. Might also look at Saturday evening services also, I know of a few big churches that do that.
I hope this gets some good responses. Our church is tapped out of parking. We offered a second service to accommodate more people but it isn’t filling up. I’d love to hear some more creative ideas on how to get more parking out of your lot.
What time are your services? We adjusted our times first…that helped a bunch.
Maybe see if people would be willing to carpool with other members that live close or are on the way to church.
Ive seen bigger churches that use busses create a pick up drop off point at 2 community points and the have a bus that gets to the church 30 mins before the services start and 5 mins before the services start. as a drop off they leave 10 mins after the service finishes and 30 mins after.
I have noticed with 2 services people from the first want to hang around and have coffee and see people so they usually don’t leave early enough for the people needing parks for the second service.
The other things is to get leaders and volunteers that get to the church early to park away from the building so they aren’t taking up the parking spaces. eg drop your equipment then go park away from the building. this also shows that the leaders are leading by example
During special services, we have a golf cart team that goes to our north campus and shuttles people over, and sometimes we will run 2 of our 15 passenger vans as a shuttle as well.
Awesome!