We are a team of working professionals who are also longtime church and ministry supporters.
Our Expertise
Story: Strategy & Brand
Space: Design & Build
Sustain: Facilities Management
Bill
Architecture
Bill Chegwidden has been practicing Architecture for 45 years. He is a founding partner of CDH Partners, a nationally recognized architecture firm based in Atlanta, GA. Bill has instilled in his firm and his work a commitment to serve those who serve others. Over his career, he has designed schools, universities, health parks, hospitals, and has had the privilege of working on more than 450 church and non-profit projects. He is the author of The Next Step, How to Discover the Right Solutions to Plan, Design, & Build Your Church.
Bill has served as an elder and on the Board of Trustees at Mount Paran Church. While his children were young, he served in the nursery and taught youth education classes. Bill is actively involved in the lives of his four children and eight grandchildren. In 2022, his wife of nearly 53 years passed away after a long battle with MS just a few weeks before their wedding anniversary.
David
Construction | Facilities Management
Educated in architectural engineering, David Millican has worked for over 30 years in the construction industry. As the owner of a commercial general contractor business for the first 20 years of his career, he then joined Chick-fil-A in 2010 to lead the Facilities Management team. He is currently the VP of Restaurant Development Services Operations.
Married for more than two decades, David and Lori have three boys- Parker, Preston and Davis. David serves as an elder at Dogwood Church in Tyrone, GA. He and Lori have been members since the church started over 30 years ago. Throughout those years, David has worked closely with his fellow church leaders to strategically plan, design, build, and maintain a church campus that has grown from meeting at a school to a multi-building 100-acre campus including an orchard, community food pantry, and outdoor worship space. He is committed to helping churches and nonprofits ensure their facilities are working for the goals of their ministries. He serves on the board of Square Foot Ministry, Midwest Food Bank, and Kennesaw State University Construction Management Program.
Ruth
Branded Space & Experience
Professionally, Ruth Fowler is a strategist and designer. With an undergraduate degree in Industrial Design and an MBA with a focus in Marketing, she runs an agency just south of Atlanta called Sense Makery. Their team of designers and communication strategists partner with their clients to bring their goals and messages to life in physical spaces and products, brand identity systems, and communication materials.
Ruth serves her team as a strategic story crafter and creative director. She is responsible for ensuring that whatever they produce- whether a physical space, printed piece, or digital asset is right for its audience, well-designed, and effective.
Personally, Ruth, her husband Lee, and son Getch are committed to serving their local church. They helped plant the church in 2008 in a small urban community on the southwest border of Atlanta. Ruth served as the church administrator for the first 10 years of the church’s life and loves to see how the Lord works in the lives of his people and places.
MAPS Forward
I love maps; I have a collection of old city maps. They reveal an original design intention, sense of history, and record of accommodations made as the cities grew. They provide a path to places I hope to visit.
When I check the forecast on my phone, I always pull up the weather maps. I want to see the weather formations for myself, to see them move across a region. When I go hiking, I take physical maps, I like to check my location and review the terrain facing me on my journey.
Maps are most helpful when you know where you are and where you want to go. I am energized when look at a map and plan a journey, just as I am energized when I talk with a client about their dreams and their destination, about where they are and where they want to go.
A strategic master plan is a helpful tool that acts like a map to help prepare for a journey. It requires you to define where you are, what you have, and what you need to achieve your dream. It lays out the path to get there, ordering the activities and actions required to move you towards your destination. It also provides a framework to help make the inevitable course corrections necessitated by unforeseen events.
Planning is essential to a successful journey, but knowing where we are and where we want to go is not always an intuitive process, it takes dedication, determination and commitment. It takes fellow guides to help along the way.
— Bill Chegwidden