Reproducibility! This is a big deal and likely the most important principle to know…
There may be many reasons you are going to be a portable church. You might be a new church plant, a new campus, selling your building because you outgrew it or maybe due to COVID-19 you’re in-between buildings. Or maybe you’ve read that portability is one of the most affordable ways to launch or how it provides effective environments for growth and outreach. Regardless of your reasons for portability, it is still wise to make decisions about your system that make it easy to reproduce in the future. If you are a multiplication/movement minded leader (if you are planting or campusing this is likely you) it especially makes sense to have systems that can be easily re-done week after week, and also understood and passed on as you plant more churches and campuses. We encourage systems that people will want to do again (and again, and again, and….)!
For the purpose of this blog, let’s say you are a church that has outgrown its building and you are going portable so as to get more space. In the best case scenario, your church continues growth spurts while you are portable. In fact, you have so many people that, even when you move into your new building, you’ll want to keep a portion of your congregation portable (Multi Site, per se). If you make decisions now that take the first three principals into account (weight, cubic volume, and ease of use), you are well on your way to a sustainable, reproducible model of church.
Let’s delve into this concept a little bit more. At Portable Church® Industries, we once worked with a client that placed a very high value on the aesthetics of children’s environments. They had found these children’s tables that were “amazing”. The only problem was, in order to fit these tables inside of their trailer, they had to take the legs off every week. One of our Project Managers gently encouraged them to get one table and then practice, for six weeks in a row, taking the legs on & off and to time their progression. Only two weeks in they found that (a) they rarely had the right tools available for the project (b) the screws used on the legs stripped after the first week (c) it took almost ½ hour to both put the legs on & take the legs off. After only two weeks, the church, said “Thank goodness, we only bought one of these – we definitely don’t want them!” When they put the tables into rotation, they realized that the tables were no longer amazing, that they didn’t make sense for their environment and that it wouldn’t have been a decision they would have reproduced in the future or have been happy about in the future.
If you harness your efficiency properly, you will reduce venue rental costs, increase volunteer happiness, reduce equipment damage, reduce storage space costs, reduce set up & tear down times and reduce number of volunteers needed. All of these benefits tie in directly to reproducibility, and you won’t find yourself like the pastors in our last post saying “we won’t do that again”. When you are able to see a return on investment of time and money, you can anticipate a growth plan that includes future campuses or an aggressive churches-planting churches mission without feeling the dread that may come along with inefficiency. That’s what we LOVE about portability!
A Portable Church system does exactly all these things. The entire system is designed around incredible environments that people enjoy setting up week after week. And once you decide to launch another plant or campus, people are excited to be sent and join the launch! Our systems are designed to allow highly engaging environments that are reproducible, and with fewer volunteers, long into the future.
If this series is striking a cord with you, give us a shout! Engage one of our launch coaches and talk through your plans! We are here to guide you in the right direction.
*This summary is taken from our e-book 6 Principles of Portability. Download the e-book here for more detail and the other 5 principles.