For every nook and cranny of your church to be clean, you can either clean it yourself or work with professional cleaners. There are several reasons why the latter is the better option, but having a complete understanding of everything involved can help you make an informed decision on which way to go.
People visit churches for various reasons: worship, peace of mind, serving others, events, meetings, socializing, listening to inspiring messages, and more. That means most churches, especially large ones or those with many parishioners, are almost always in use for one reason or another. A lack of cleanliness in any area may distract from the purpose of the visit. This presents the first challenge of cleaning the church yourself: how can you ensure the church remains pristine throughout the year while it’s in use almost every day?
Cleaning a church is different and more complicated than cleaning a regular house – a church’s size and its many features, for instance, add complexities that a normal individual serving as a cleaner may not be skilled in handling.
Churches typically contain a variety of special use areas, rooms, and items, like a large number of chairs, pulpit, altar, tabernacle, baptismal water, communion table, lecterns, etc., in addition to the “commercial” size spaces like restrooms, offices, and classrooms. And because the church spaces are used differently, all components accumulate dirt at different times and to different degrees.
Ensuring all these items and spaces are clean year round is complicated even to the most experienced church cleaners; that is, if they go at it haphazardly. To clean effectively, you must methodically address each of the challenges of cleaning a church.
Challenges of Cleaning a Church
Understanding the challenges of cleaning a church will help you ensure every inch is clean, no matter the size of the church and the frequency and extent of its use. Some of the challenges you’ll need to consider include:
Constant Use
Ensuring your church is always clean can be challenging if all weekends are busy with services and weekdays are booked with office staff activities, outreach programs, meetings, etc.
To deal with this challenge, break down cleaning tasks into six-time spans: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, and annually. Daily cleaning should involve light cleaning that needs to be done very frequently; weekly includes tasks that can wait a little longer and are deeper than daily, and so forth. Breaking it down allows you to wait until you have time for a deeper clean while still maintaining the necessary elements.
It’s Big and Has Many Features
Unless you have been trained, it is easy to miss a spot (or several) when cleaning the church yourself. It may be hard to remember all areas, especially as it gets repetitive and monotonous or as new events happen that change your routine.
To clean effectively, you need a church cleaning checklist, which this guide will help you create. A church cleaning checklist outlines all the areas in the church that need cleaning and when. It also organizes the cleaning tasks and allows you to delegate to others with the certainty that they will cover all areas.
Address Challenges With a Church Cleaning Checklist
Each church has unique cleaning needs—the size, components, users, and usage cannot be the exact same for two churches. So, each church needs to create its own checklist instead of copying from another.
If you choose to do all the cleaning yourself, it’s best to have a master checklist in order to stay on top of all the tasks. If you choose to hire a professional cleaning company, expect them to consult with you about your needs and develop an efficient and comprehensive checklist customized for your premises.
Let’s take a look at a basic but detailed checklist to get yours started. Make as many tweaks as needed to make it yours, customizing for your church and the cleaning needs of every nook and cranny in the building. As mentioned, the checklist is categorized into cleaning intervals with different cleaning requirements.
Once you deal with the challenges of church cleaning, you’ll be able to clean more effectively and better understand what you may want to employ professional cleaners for, – and as a result, you and your visitors will enjoy the benefits of cleanliness.
Daily Church Cleaning Checklist
If your church is used daily, you must clean it daily; if it’s used a few times per week, you’ll want to clean it after every use. Because the users are different or use it differently every time, a build-up of dirt in unforeseen places could occur, eventually making it noticeable, distracting, and even uninviting.
Daily cleaning prevents the build-up of dirt in between deeper cleans. This involves light cleaning like dusting, wiping surfaces, disinfecting the door knobs, etc. Things that take a few minutes to an hour at most, so you can quickly address them in-between uses.
Consider including the following in your checklist.
- Dust and clean the door and door knobs, furniture, and floor
- Clean and clear the kitchen, if any
- Check and refill the paper, towel, and soap dispensers
- Water any garden, yard space, or flower beds
- Check or remove trash from kitchens and nurseries or any high-use locations
You don’t have to clean your church every day if it is used only on the weekends for worship. If that is the case, you could use this daily church cleaning checklist for the weekly cleanups.
Related: How to Disinfect a Church Building
Weekly Church Cleaning Checklist
The weekly church cleaning checklist is for cleaning areas that take a few hours, as it is deeper than daily cleaning. You can wait until the busiest time of the week and clean it at the end of the day or the next day. For most churches, the busiest day is Sunday.
Your weekly church cleaning checklist could contain:
- Tidy up all the literature, hymnals, and Bible
- Mop the floors and stage area
- Disinfect the toilet bowls thoroughly
- Wipe all visible surfaces, sinks, and chrome fixtures and faucets
- Vacuum clean the carpets, and sweep the lobby, nursery, and sanctuary
- Change sheets and disinfect the toys in the nursery
- Empty all trash cans and change liners
If there are things mentioned in the daily church cleaning checklist, they apply to the weekly checklist as well.
Monthly Church Cleaning Checklist
Monthly church cleaning is more comprehensive than weekly and daily. This is often an ideal place to bring in professional help if you’re maintaining the more frequent tasks yourself. While one person or a few people can do weekly and daily cleaning, a monthly checklist may require additional help if the church is bigger.
Like weekly cleaning, monthly church cleaning should be done either slightly before or after a monthly event. The monthly church cleaning checklist will contain larger tasks, such as:
- Clean and scrub kitchen countertops and sinks
- Clean the faucets
- Wash windows
- Mop the floors
- Clear the cobwebs
- Trim the yard and weed flower beds, inspect outdoor spaces
- Change curtains
- Sweep and clean entryways, porches, and parking lots
- Clean light switches, check lighting to see if any need replacement
A monthly cleaning and checkup checklist ensures the church stays in good overall condition, not just minimally clean.
Related: Planning Annual Project Work for Church and School Cleaning
Quarterly Church Cleaning Checklist
Like monthly church cleaning, quarterly cleaning is not just about ensuring the church is clean; it is also about ensuring every component is in good condition. So this cleaning checklist involves checking how various components work and whether to replace them.
Quarterly cleaning may involve not just the cleaning crew but also professionals to fix or replace anything if the need arises.
The quarterly church cleaning checklist might contain:
- Clearing cabinets and drawers, cleaning, then refilling them
- Washing the walls, windows, door, and door frames
- Cleaning lights and fixtures, then checking if they are in good working condition
- Wiping the ceiling fans
- Cleaning the dishwasher, kitchen cabinets, switch plates, oven, and stovetops
- Checking furnace and AC filters and replacing them if needed
If possible, leave the furnace and AC filters, and any other appliance-related cleaning or maintenance, to professionals.
Bi-Annual and Annual Church Cleaning Checklist
Some church cleaning tasks are quite a big undertaking. They either require professionals, are costly, or lead to a disruption of daily church activities. These cleaning jobs make it to the bi-annual and annual church cleaning checklist.
Some of these cleaning jobs include:
- Deep-steam carpet cleaning
- Furniture upholstery cleaning
- Hardwood waxing, buffing, and sealing
- Property-wide air duct cleaning
- Exterior pressure washing
These and other large cleaning projects should be left to professionals. Handling them yourself could result in a poor result or, worse, destruction of the object or part you want to clean. You could also take too much time to clean, or they take too much time to dry, resulting in further disruption of church activities.
Professional cleaners can handle these deep cleanings in the context of your church and work within your timeframe for the desired outcome.
Apart from the above, you can also include the cleaning jobs below in the bi-annual or annual cleaning checklist.
- Clean and clear the gutters
- Clean out and seed any garden areas
- Repaint the doors and roof if needed
- Repaint walls if needed
- Wipe and clean all doors and door frames
- Have furnace and AC serviced
Why You Should Consider Professional Church Cleaning Services
The above checklist provides a great starting place for cleaning every nook and cranny of your church facilities and putting such a plan in place is the first step. It’s important to consider your resources as you plan and determine whether and where you may need some help.
Volunteers can be few and far between and likely don’t have the experience necessary to correctly clean (and, in today’s public spaces, disinfect) all the spaces in a church. Hiring staff to perform these tasks can be costly, including major elements like background checks, payroll, training, insurance, ongoing training regarding new cleaning requirements and methods, management, etc.
Hiring a company to customize a plan, visit your premises to complete the work professionally, and leave until the next time is often a cost-effective and time-saving way to keep your church spotless. Some reasons you might want to work with a professional team include:
They Have All the Supplies and Equipment
You need the right cleaning equipment and supplies for the best outcome. Some of these things are too expensive and beyond the reach of many churches. And those who can afford them find it hard to justify such a costly purchase. Professional cleaning services, on the other hand, already have this equipment and are well-versed in that equipment’s efficient operation. They have all the cleaning equipment and supplies that help them clean every nook and cranny.
They Are Experienced
Experienced professional cleaning services have cleaned many churches, so they know what to do and how to do it to clean everything quickly, efficiently, and correctly. This experience is invaluable, for example, when cleaning antique or stained glass. Inexperienced cleaners can easily break or ruin something irreplaceable, while professionals know how to handle it.
They Can Save You Time
Though it may not seem so, thoroughly cleaning a church takes time. If you try to handle it yourself, you might find yourself cleaning some areas hastily to be over and done with it so you can move on to something else, or some things may get neglected because they take longer for inexperienced workers to complete and time doesn’t permit everything to be accomplished. Professional cleaners can save you this time and deliver a higher-quality result.
You Can Take Advantage of Add-On Services
Many professional cleaners offer convenient add-on services you can take advantage of, like event setup and planning, room resets, more in-depth cleaning like advanced floor care, window cleaning and pressure washing, and other customized special projects.
Get Peace of Mind Knowing Your Church is Clean, Well Maintained, and Always Ready for Visitors
A clean church may serve as an example to parishioners and visitors of how their minds and hearts should be – always clean and devoid of the impure. A comprehensive church-cleaning checklist can help you achieve that goal.
The above checklist is meant to inspire you. Once you plan out the process, you need cleaning equipment and products to clean effectively and in a short period. If you want to avoid the extensive list of equipment, products, experience, and staffing required to clean well, look to professional cleaners.DTK Facility Services can help you clean and disinfect your church. For over 25 years, we have been offering routine cleaning and sanitizing services on demand, as well as many advanced services. Our trained staff has enough experience to ensure every nook and cranny is spotless. Contact us today for a custom quote.