Mega Meeting Venues

Stadiums and arenas are hosting an increasing number of religious events. Here’s a look at some issues and trends facing these venues.

By Regina McGee

“We try to provide a variety of programming for our community, and religious events are a wonderful addition to sports and concerts,” says Christy Ricketts, marketing director for the American Airlines Center, Dallas, Texas. The center’s 20,000-seat arena has hosted Women of Faith, Christian singer Bill Gaither, and Lakewood Church pastor Joel Osteen, among many others. The American Airlines Center isn’t the only such facility to tap religious events as an important part of its business mix. In destinations large and small, arenas and stadiums are seeing a boom in business from religious events of all kinds.

In the last decade, Promise Keepers, for example, has held 22 stadium gatherings around the country, drawing hundreds of thousands of men each year to these venues. Other high-profile groups using these types of facilities: The International Church of the Nazarene, whose quadrennial meeting brought tens of thousands attendees to Indianapolis Dome in 2005; the Church of God, with a biennial international meeting expected to bring 25,000 attendees to San Antonio in 2008; and the United Methodist Church, whose Youth 2007 will draw an estimated 10,000 people this summer to the coliseum and convention center in Greensboro, North Carolina.

And thanks to the skyrocketing growth of mega-churches, stadiums and arenas have become actual homes to some churches. One of them is Faithful Central Bible Church, which owns the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California, formerly the home of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Building Boom, Too

The Tucson city council recently approved plans to build a new $130 million stadium in a vote that was historic for its expediency: the council debated and approved the stadium in one session. The tortoise-shell-inspired arena will have seating for more than 12,300 people. Other new facilities in the works: Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis (see page 30 for details); the BOK Arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to open next September; and a hockey arena in Pittsburgh, with construction starting this fall, to name just a few that are in the pipeline.

Facilities that have come on line in recent years have greatly enhanced visitor amenities, air circulation, and audiovisual capabilities. There have also been efforts to upgrade and diversify food offered in concessions, to vastly improve access for those with disabilities, as well as to add or expand recycling efforts. Some facilities are bringing a new level of high design to stadiums and arenas.

In the District of Columbia, for example, the stadium under construction for the Washington Nationals reflects some of the modern design of the city’s stunning convention center, with massive glass panels giving the stadium’s concourse a translucence that opens it up to surrounding neighborhoods. Heavy use of concrete, which will be painted to look like limestone, is intended to repeat design aspects found in the convention center, federal monuments, and the Verizon Center to the north. It’s a far cry from the red-brick ballparks of yesteryear.

While the boom in construction of stadiums and arenas has been going on for several years, so has the debate over whether these facilities really provide the economic development that would justify funding them with tax dollars. It’s been a bitter controversy in many cities. When the U.S. Cellular Coliseum in Bloomington, Illinois, reported a nearly $2 million operating loss after just 10 months of operation, several city aldermen said they were disgusted, according to a report in the local newspaper. But like convention centers, stadiums and arenas are often loss-leaders for their communities, at least for the first several years of operation. One of the groups to use the U.S. Cellular facility was the Jehovah Witness convention, which brought an economic impact of $435,000, according to Bloomington convention bureau reports.

Issues that planners face when considering stadiums and arenas sometimes stem from the high labor costs for using these facilities. Some older facilities have poor lighting and inadequate access for people with disabilities. Safety and security needs are sometimes greater at stadiums and facilities, if for no other reason than their relatively massive size. This is one area where a great deal of improvement has been made by facility operators since the events of September 11, 2001.

Following 9/11, the International Association of Assembly Managers, a Texas-based society for managers of public assembly halls, formed a task force to develop “Best Practices for Safety and Security for Public Assembly Facilities.” The document has been widely adopted by public event facilities throughout the nation.

And in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, IAAM also created “Mega Shelter Best Practice Guidelines” to help public event facilities deal with emergency disaster management.

“IAAM has made tremendous progress over the past five years in raising the level of preparedness and professionalism throughout the industry,” says IAAM president Larry B. Perkins. “We are going to continue to raise that bar in the future.”