Cleaning Services: Getting the Church Clean Again

A church-cleaning service is a contractor from outside the church community that offers cleaning services custom-fitted to the needs of a singular church building, its members, and the institution's specific schedule (many churches offer community-building services and education outside of Sunday services).

Church-cleaning services can do the work that rotating volunteer members, or hired attendees might do otherwise on their own time, or on the church's bill.

A church-cleaning service can perform the tasks you need for your house of worship based on your particular situation and environment. You can talk to the cleaning service contractor about the church's schedule and budget, and decide what services, tailor-fitted to the religious institution, would best fit the circumstances, and, of course, the church's budget.

The cleaning service can come in occasionally to perform various cleaning tasks. It can arrive daily, too, depending on the agreement you have with the contractor.

Services could be performed on a rotating schedule:

Monday could be the day the sanctuary is cleaned; on Tuesday the contractor could clean the chapel; on Wednesday, the staircases; Thursday, the entryway and other foyers; Friday could be the day that bathrooms and kitchens are thoroughly cleaned.

With the church-cleaning service provider, you can develop a schedule based on the flow of member traffic. Maybe Sundays and Wednesdays are not good days for cleaning to be going on because it would disrupt services, education, or entertainment. But other days of the week, when less congregants travel through the church, could be a good time for the cleaning service to come by. This could be an on-going cycle, fitted to the church's timetable.

Many contractors can work with you to come up with price bids based on the hours it will take to properly clean the church spaces, instead of based on the square footage of the church. Churches tend to be large structures capable of holding scores or even thousands of people. That's why many church-cleaning services bill by the hour instead of by square footage.

Some services are only needed for big events, like weddings, funerals, and concerts.

And while some congregations feel the need to hire a cleaning service to go through the whole building, every angle, niche, nook, and corner, other cleaning services could be hired for some of the smaller things. These may be smaller issues, but they're important when it comes to a handsome-looking, functioning religious space. Things like trash cleanup between services; fingerprints on doors, walls, and glass windows; things like dirty carpets.

Here's a partial list of some other specific services a church-cleaning contractor can provide: washing and disinfecting toilets, sinks, and bathroom floors; washing and disinfecting kitchen sinks, counter tops, microwaves, and cabinets.

Who should hire a church-cleaning services provider?

Churches that, for whatever reasons, can't rely on their members for cleaning will want to look into hiring a church-cleaning service. The large, beautiful, and lofty spaces deserve the best treatment money can buy. It shouldn't be surprising that congregants are not necessarily able to care for their houses of worship, so a church-cleaning service can prepare the many spaces in a church that need to look clean and inviting for worshipers.

What are the benefits and drawbacks to hiring one of these cleaning services?

It's true that there may be something unsettling about hiring outsiders to care for your religious building. You may be thinking, Well, why don't the members of this congregation care for their own church. It's their community, their space, their place of worship. They come here to express themselves spiritually, so can't they keep clean the central place of their own religion?

But hiring a church-cleaning service absolves the community of the often heavy burden of handling the cleaning of a space as large and extensive as a church.

Churches are built to hold crowds of people, and they contain many fragile ornaments. These spaces take a large, concentrated team of people to care for, and those fragile ornaments need special care, from people (such as professionals) who have experience caring for them. Leaving the upkeep and preservation of a church to professionals could certainly benefit the congregation and take much stress off of its shoulders.

The bottom line with hiring a church-cleaning service:

Hiring a church-cleaning service lets professionals, who have professional cleaning equipment, care for your church. You can create a cleaning schedule that fits the church's routine.