With low budgets, it’s hard to justify expensive purchases. And with important community and missionary work to do, spending tens of thousand dollars just to upgrade the aesthetics of the space seems unnecessary.
But modular church partitions are built for multi-functional use, meaning you can use them in main halls, prayer rooms, Sunday schools, stage designs and more. And at a much lower price than temporary walls or designer stages, commercial room dividers are the ideal solution to a number of visual and acoustic issues in worship spaces.
There are hundreds of ways to use room dividers to improve the look and feel for your congregation. And because we want to leave the creativity up to you, here are just nine ways to transform your church with partitions.
- Create beautiful stage designs.
Stages are the main attraction at every church, so you want them to stand out. Create elegant, multi-color designs that serve as the perfect backdrop for the lessons and teachings of the church. This is especially true for commercial churches, where visual appeal is a large part of your congregation’s attendance.
And you’re not limited to just one design. Treat your guests to rotating stage designs, showing off a little more creativity around holidays like Christmas, Easter, and All Saints Day. And if your parish has a parochial school, beautiful stage designs are a must for musical performances and religious celebrations.
- Reduce echo and improve sound quality of the church choir, organ, or band.
Churches of all sizes struggle with reverberation as sound waves bounce off hard surfaces. These echoes greatly reduce the quality of music produced by the choir, organ piano, or band. But you can structure acoustic partitions in a way that reduces unwanted echoes to greatly improve the acoustic quality in your church.
- Build a makeshift cry room to prevent disturbances.
Cry rooms allow parents and caregivers to sit and worship while tending to crying babies and small children without disturbing others. But as precious space is often reserved for other needs, cry rooms are the first spaces to be sacrificed.
This is unfortunate because it’s impossible to ask young children to remain still and silent during the service. And it falls on parents and caregivers to temporarily step away or remove themselves from the service entirely. They also serve to accommodate breastfeeding mothers who wish to do so in private.
Fortunately, you can still offer a cry room to your visitors. Arrange portable soundproofing dividers into a small, four-sided room to prevent noise from crying children from leaking into the main hall.
- Transform an extra room into a Sunday school, VBS, or daycare area.
If your church hosts Sunday School, VBS, or another children’s ministry service, room dividers are a great way to partition classroom space for different activities. The group will have their own space to learn, play games, and converse with each other without disturbing other areas of the building. And if your church offers daycare, room dividers reduce unwanted noise, encourage learning, and help the place run smoothly.
- Divide prayer rooms and confessionals for increased visual and acoustic privacy.
It’s common for churches to have just one or two prayer rooms, often due to a lack of space. But room dividers can be used to break down existing space into smaller prayer rooms. Turn open spaces into confessionals with dividers that protect private conversations and provide visual privacy between the person seeking forgiveness and spiritual leader.
- Section off a banquet hall and make it stand out with an architectural centerpiece.
Many large churches host weddings, funerals, and other celebrations in their banquet hall – these events are great financial benefactors. But with limited space and available dates, churches often find themselves reserving the entire space for a small group simply because they can’t prevent multiple groups from disturbing each other.
Acoustic room dividers solve this problem. Create a partition that’s at least 2-3 feet taller than eye level to create total visual separation and the sound-absorbing materials will take care of the noise level issue. This will enable you to host multiple groups in a single space.
- Manage large crowds on popular holidays and at church events.
Christmas and Easter are the most crowded days of the year for most churches. For other religions, celebrations like Shabbat and Ramadan are popular, attracting larger than normal attendances. To prevent churchgoers from blocking the entrance or crowding another important space, slide portable partitions into place to create temporary hallways to manage the fluctuating traffic levels.
And if you’re expecting hundreds or even thousands of people for a local event at the parochial school or church gym, room dividers can be installed to direct traffic and help the event run smoothly.
- Hide seasonal decorations and extra clutter with pop-up storage rooms.
Many religious decorations are seasonal, meaning you need to find a place to store them for the months they aren’t in use. And if your storage closet is just a little too small or overly cluttered, building a pop-up storage room is your best option.
Designate a corner of the church for storage and hide it from the public with movable room dividers. When you need to change the décor or grab something else from storage, just slide the dividers out of the way and back into place once you’re done.
- Take your religious proceedings to local communities.
If you take your religious services on the road to community centers or local events, it helps to have a backdrop that offers a bit of beauty and structure. It will command the attention of the audience so that they can listen intently to the teachings as if they were in the church.
Benefits of Church Partitions and Commercial Room Dividers
Because they have so many features and applications, commercial room dividers can transform your church in more ways than one. Here are a few benefits:
Sturdier than drapes and curtains
Many churches first try to divide space with drapes and curtains. They quickly learn that the supporting pipes are flimsy and unreliable. Room dividers are freestanding, meaning they won’t fall over if someone bumps into them when walking past.
Total sound control
In addition to being unstable, curtains and drapes do little to absorb sound. On the other hand, dividers offer greater acoustic control with improved sound quality, reduced echo, and localized soundproofing.
Easy to move
A common complaint about room dividers is that they’re bulky and difficult to move. But with modular and portable partitions available, it only takes a few minutes to move, rotate, or redesign your partition layout. And they’re light enough (and durable enough) that even the kids at Sunday school can slide them around with ease. This flexibility allows them to be used in different areas of the church facility.
Quick and effortless installation
Most partitions don’t require any tools or special skills to set up. You can build beautiful stage designs, a functional storage space, and a church daycare in just minutes. And even better, the modules collapse to a flat, packable size that can be stored anywhere.
Low-cost investment
Renovations are costly and will disrupt the religious and day-to-day operations of the church. Not only that, but renovations only improve one part of the space. On the other hand, partitions are a low-cost investment that can serve multiple purposes across the entire church.
Room dividers can completely transform the day-to-day operations and large celebrations of the church, allowing you to focus on what’s most important.
This information is courtesy of MIO, which designs everyday solutions for creative, sustainable and meaningful work and living places, www.mioculture.com.
