Pavilion in the Round

Joshua Hoegh from First Baptist Church in Elgin, IL brings us this awesome Christmas design in the COVID era.

From Joshua: As we approached the 2020 Christmas season, we were faced with a great deal of challenges. After enduring months of isolation and lockdowns, our community was still facing reduced capacity limits, mask mandates, and social mitigations that made the word “community” feel like a distant memory.

In an effort to meet the need of “community” that so many people were missing, we decided to reconfigure our worship space to function “in the round” for the Christmas season – we even created an entire series, “Gather Round”, to complement and augment the experience. We constructed a small, square stage structure in the center of the room and configured the seating into a 3/4 round arrangement. The stage was built at a 2-stair height (less than half the height of our main stage) and constructed a 1-stair height “bridge” extending out of our stage-front stairs. This allowed us to accommodate additional worship team members, as the stage itself could only fit about 3 of us.

The hope was that this arrangement would provide a more personal, intimate feel for our reduce-capacity gatherings, and create a deeper sense of connection for all of those in attendance – not only with each other, but with the worship & teaching as well.

The design came together even better than I’d hoped, and the response was overwhelming. People absolutely loved the reconfiguration – so much so that, despite our plans to deconstruct after Christmas, we kept it for an additional 6 months until we were once again able to facilitate full-capacity gatherings.

There were so many components to this worship space configuration that were incredibly meaningful to people – and when the time came to deconstruct our center stage and return to “normal”, we did our best to learn from our time “in the round” and consider ways to re-imagine a new normal to incorporate as much of what people loved about this configuration as possible.