Brain Bombs Archive

The following is an interview taped October 16, 2000, with Dr. Ron Martoia, senior pastor of Westwinds Community Church. Carol Childress, Leadership Network’s Information Broker, conducted the interview.

One year ago, Westwinds moved into their new building that is being recognized for its creativity in design and reflection of the church’s mission, "We exist to lead everyone to full life development in Christ." 

CC Tell me a little bit about the history of the church…how did it begin and then we’ll move to the design of the building. 

RM When my wife and I came back to Jackson, I was finishing my masters at Trinity in Deerfield and had no intention of being a pastor. I was on my way, I thought, into academics. Five families that were part of a Bible study I had started in high school said, "We really want to see a church started. Let’s ask Ron if he wants to do it." To be honest with you, I didn’t even pray about it or think about it. I just outright said no. I didn’t have an idea at all about pastoral ministry and certainly knew nothing about church planting. So basically as Westwinds launched, we did only what I knew to do, and that was what we did in the early 1980s. We had some praise choruses with a couple of guitars, I taught for 35 or 40 minutes, and that was a Sunday morning church service. This went on for almost seven years. We were meeting in a small grade school and grew to about 130-140. I came to the conclusion that if 125-130 people and 11 converts were what Westwinds was about, I was going to move on because there had to be more to the Kingdom than that. I didn’t understand what to do or how to do it, but I needed to figure it out. So we began a journey toward a major philosophy of ministry change.

We moved what was going on Sunday morning to a once a month Sunday night service where we had more expressive praise and worship and much more in-depth Bible teaching. On Sunday morning, I preached much more "felt need" messages. It was a 12- to 18-month process that we completed about six years ago. The transition was a huge grow-up experience for me. So, while the church is 14 years old, realistically it’s more like seven or eight years old.

CC Describe the context of your community.

RM Jackson is a community of 40,000 proper in the city, about 80 to 90,000 in the county. It has an older, declining population base and is a community that has a lot of small mom-pop manufacturing firms that supply the Big Three automotive companies. It’s becoming more of a suburb community for Ann Arbor or Lansing. Our church is quite different than the demographics of Jackson. We have about 80 percent college educated and the average age of our congregation is 38. Since we’ve moved in our building, the single fastest growing segments of our church are 20-somethings and 60 and older. I can’t point to any single factor for the 20-somethings but the growth of the 60 and up is due, I think, to the fact that we finally moved into a permanent facility.

CC And what are you running now in attendance?

RM We’re running somewhere between 750 and 850. 

CC The new building is about a year old. How did you frame its design? 

RM Our architect of record is Godwin and Associates, of Springfield, Mo. but a member of our congregation, Dave Driscoll, was a major player in the process. An award winning architect, he literally moved into our office cluster for six months, and I got a short class in architecture. Knowing our philosophy of ministry and desire to use the arts, he said, "I’ve always tried to think through the question, ‘What would a 21^st century cathedral be like?’ What he really meant by that wasn’t so much the grandeur of open space in a cathedral as it was ‘What would the embedded symbolism in a contemporary space look like?’ So, from bubble diagrams all the way to finish elements, our design team, made up of laypersons, Dave and I, spent six months dreaming and thinking and planning and reconfiguring. Dave did lots of 3D modeling for us so that we could really see the space before we moved into it. He helped us think through all the questions that emerged from the main question. For us, that question was "How can we take our mission, ‘to lead everyone toward full life development in Christ,’ and allow the journey of life development be reflected in the building?" 

CC Who comprised the design team?

RM We had thirteen laypersons on the building design team and they all had a sense of creativity, a sense of vision, and a sense that we were really going to build our mission. We knew it would cost us more than if we just put up a barn, but we were convinced that God wanted us to do something like that. Dave and I probably met three times a week for six or eight months and then the design team took what we were working on and was really kind of the court of appeal. Our Board had financial oversight to it.

CC What is the size of the facility and how much did it cost to build?

RM The building has 22,000 square feet and cost $2.45 million.

CC How did you translate your mission into the design?

RM The first part is the ascent beginning at the south end of the facility and coming up the steps. The first doors enter into the designer studios or basically the staff offices. The idea of a designer studio is built around the fact that we are co-designers with God, co-laborers with Christ. We wanted to start down at the end where those who help design and interact with God on the process of life development are located. This is the fountainhead of where vision happens, where prayer happens, and where the process of life development is thought through and implemented.

When you leave the design studios and come through the doors into the main space, you find yourself in "cathedralesque" axial corridor that leads to the auditorium where you will meet God. It is 175 ft. long, 28 ft. tall, and 18 ft. wide so there’s a lot of volume to it. Along the way are life development studios for the kids, where age appropriate experiences with God take place. It’s an opportunity for parents to get offline on their journey and interact with the teachers that facilitate learning for their children.

We wanted the hallway to be interactive space. One feature is that the minute you walk into our building, you see this very earthy, chunky, fantastic slate tile that came from India. It wraps around from my office into the hallway of the designer studios, then into the main axial corridor and terminates in a large steel mosaic, which then goes into our auditorium. The slate is deeply meaningful for us because our church is involved in mission work in India, working with orphanages there, doing pastoral training and church planting. In the children’s studio area, they painted the tiles that are in the hallway. The tiles terminate outside the auditorium in a big mosaic designed by a member of our church, Steve Sells, who is an industrial designer. He did a lot of our steel structure work, steel sculpture and painting. Our information tables in the lobby and tape ministry table, for example, are all steel.

The interior is very dramatic. Our office complex or designer studios are done in terra cotta colored walls with black and gray circular patterns. We picked up on the eternality circular theme from Len Sweet. We have a big plate in the designer studio entrance that has quotes from Len Sweet and Steve Sells on it.

There are a few interior details we still want to finish. There’s a big interactive touch screen that we are getting for the entrance so people can walk up to a kiosk and explore the things they want to about Westwinds.

CC What about the use of fabric and materials? You’ve talked about the glazing, the tiles, and the steel. What else?

RM Color is very dramatic here. The exterior is in a couple of shades of taupe and then trimmed and accented in deep burgundy that migrates inside. The main areas are a kind of a taupe with dramatic black, gray, and burgundy glazing. We have kept fabric wall covering and wallpaper out of the facility in a permanent way because we wanted the flexibility to constantly change. When we use fabric, it’s because a set or a design goal calls for it.

CC What kind of visual connections do you have? Do you use video?

RM We’ll use video clips every month…man-in-the-street interviews, whether those are used from another archive or we’ve created them. But more often, we use large visual tactile props or art pieces that we project for meditation, and reflection. We try to create an aesthetic experience that is overall not just a media piece, but is a combination of a number of things. For instance, our Sunday evening service once a month is called Encounter. Last Sunday, we had probably 100 candles on stage and rosemary oil being burned in the space, so it had a very definite fresh scent to it. Neither one was usual but the service happened to be very reflective and pensive. We had an art montage created out of PhotoShop and we played on a double image of "I want to focus on you, God," and "the eye is the entrance of the body" from Matthew 6.

We have a prop team that does nothing but create artistic large tactile visuals. We just finished a series called "Mending the War Within" where we were doing an overview of Ecclesiastes. Our prop team built an eight-foot heart that had what looked like stitches in it, and big safety pins trying to hold it together. It conveyed what are the things that we try to do to fill the gaping hole in our heart? It’s a huge piece that has been hung on our wall and spotlighted through the entire series the past five weeks.

CC Who is on this prop team?

RM Oh, they are all volunteers. Our creative design team is composed of eight people and one of the point leaders on that team is a guy who can translate our ideas into get-it-done visuals. He’s got a team of about 30 and they are unbelievable.

CC What about educational space?

RM We have education space, but not nearly enough. We don’t have any space for junior and senior high. They meet on different evenings or different time locations. There is a brand new charter school next door and we are going to contract with them. We had anticipated when we moved in that in a year we would be able to go to two services. The day we moved in, we had to start two services and next Saturday night, we will launch our first Saturday evening service. So then we will have three services.

CC Is there any difference in the services?

RM Not at this time, but we have tremendous flexibility on that front. We might change the configuration of the auditorium a bit. We built a three-tiered floor that can take twelve roundtables so if we want to do dinner theatre, for example, we can. Each one of those tiers is wired in eight locations with computer hookup so if we wanted to do rounds with computer interactive terminals, we can. 

CC How far out do you have to plan your services?

RM Months, but we deviate if necessary from the plan. When Peter Jennings did the series on the search for Jesus, for example, we stopped at midstream in our planned program and launched a four-week response.

CC Let’s go back to the building. What has been the response of the people?

RM Let me give you the response of the people inside and outside. Initially, the inside response was one of skepticism. "Do you really think we can do something like this?" There was a tremendous sense of "I don’t know if we can pull it off." But as the building began to go up and people started to get a vision for what the building design team had seen, they started to get excited about it. Now that our people are in it, the feeling is "Wow, this is a place where people can encounter God in ways that you just couldn’t in a plain old building." The space really does help define the experience. 

CC Please elaborate on the phrase, "the space helps to define the experience."

RM The programming edict that our creative design team has is really quite simple. At a Leadership Network forum, one of the speakers was Donald Miller, who had just written his book on new paradigm churches. He said that out of his research had emerged a sense that growing churches, even beyond the three main groups he had explored in the book, were mediating or facilitating – I don’t remember his exact words – deeply moving experiences with God. I thought a lot about what he said. Is that really what we do? Are we really facilitating and mediating deeply moving experiences with God? And I had to walk away and say, "I don’t think that’s really our primary goal at Westwinds." In the three years since that meeting, that’s one of the things that we have spent a tremendous amount of time working through. 

We’ve augmented the phrase a little bit. We want to mediate deeply moving experiences with God that foster health because we obviously want them Christ-centered. We want people to move towards wholeness. The upshot of it all is that the facility helps to define the experience. Whether we’re using aromatherapy oil or candles; whether it’s media this week, or a reflective time of journaling; whether it’s a fifth century healing service where people are washing feet in basins and then being anointed with oil and dried off with a white towel by an elder or whatever it happens to be, the space really helps to define the experience. Our auditorium is the only place where dramatic painting and glazing is not used so that every time people walk into the auditorium it can be configured differently. 

CC You are very creative and intentional in your use of art. How have people responded to that?

RM On one hand the introduction of art into worship is obviously a very ancient thing. There’s nothing particularly contemporary about it. Yet, in contemporary nondenominational and mainline churches, the reintroduction of art seems to be fresh and new and somehow vibrant and different. We have been very intentional about it. It has allowed people to explore their faith in the context of ambiguity. For instance, the PhotoShop created art that we did last month for Encounter allowed people to have a little bit more expansiveness, a little bit more bandwidth and then be able to encounter God and say, "OK, I haven’t been pushed into a kind of prescribed rut here. I’m having to engage God in the midst of taking a look at this visual or watching this slideshow that maybe evokes in me something quite different." Art provides an ambiguity that verbal communication does not. So we’ve been very careful to try to create some of those types of experiences. It really boils down to us saying that our worship services are "moment collections." It is up to us to steward those moments because it might be in a transition that somebody hears God’s voice. It might be smack dab in the middle of art, media, or music. It might be upon entrance. It might be upon exit. Regardless of when it is, we have to steward those moments.

CC What is the next step beyond this facility?

RM The auditorium was designed and laid on our property in such a way that the north wall can be moved and we can double the auditorium to 1,200. When we do that and add education space to keep the ratio right and parking, we max out this property. 

So we’re in the process of trying to say one of two things. We either need to start thinking through what a relocation would look like or we need to start thinking about a multi-campus where maybe we do something more down in the city. If we undergo relocation, does this become a youth wing or maybe a training center? All of those things literally are on the map right now. We had a board meeting last week where we’re just sorting through the question, "What next, God?"

CC With the benefit of hindsight, what would you have done differently?

RM Obviously, we would have built bigger. At the time, our team thought we were OK. I don’t think we paid nearly enough attention to the fact that we’re having increasing amounts of single parents in our culture coming back to church and probably looking for help and support. As a result, our children to adult space ratios are off now, so I wish we’d thought through that a little better. Also, we probably needed to think through having a lot more large spaces that we could subdivide. We’ve got a number of children’s classrooms that are good size but still far too small for us to do large group programming. More of our model of ministry is moving to where we’ll have a large group of kids for a production and then break them down into age, grade, and small groups.

CC What were the key takeaways for you in the process?

RM I am really thankful that we said we are going to build something that’s artistic, that will bespeak our model of ministry, and be in harmony and consonance with that. Having someone who deeply understood our model of ministry was an absolute key. I am convinced that we could not have gotten what we wanted any other way. I learned a lot about teams. As a church, we have never voted on anything--a budget, an elder nomination, building design decision, any of that. We have always had consensus, and I think if there was ever a time that we could have gotten to a place where we had to vote and wrangle out differences, it could have been in this building program. We committed at the very beginning to do what we’ve always done here, and eventually come to consensus.