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The Church Is Not the Building

By John Muzyka

Before you commit to lease or purchase a facility, it is imperative that you get CLARITY on who you are and what your ministry is called to do. Doing the groundwork to define your mission, vision, and values is an important first step before pursuing real estate. The next step is to understand your CAPACITY. Capacity is not only your financial capacity but also the market capacity. Market capacity defines what it costs to rent, lease, or purchase a facility in your target area. Learning to optimize the temporary facility and operate in a way that will allow you to set aside funds for a future space will position the church to secure a facility…if a facility is a part of your strategy.

When people join a church that meets in a temporary facility, they often look forward to the day their church will have a permanent building to call home. They see the set up and tear down “phase” as simply a phase and are often anxiously awaiting a building. This is not just limited to the people; the planter often feels that getting a facility shows that the church has arrived. As a “Church Real Estate Agent” I had this view to some extent. Everything I did drove the church to a facility or a building. However, I now have a new approach—coaching the planter to challenge what facility they think they need as it relates to their CLARITY and their CAPACITY. Below are stories of three churches and how they are reaching their target area without owning a facility.

Church in the Center (CITC) in Houston, Texas

This church is located in the medical district around MD Anderson. CITC has three different meetings in different spaces and have not had an exclusive space for anytime in their seven years of ministry. The spaces available in their area are limited and expensive. During the week they utilize free or rented spaces for Sunday Worship, Bible Studies, and other gatherings. CITC reaches doctors and medical students that live and work in the medical district. They also have a revolving door as many students are only in Houston for a season and then move on. This has resulted in a consistent, but not expansive budget. Moving out of the medical district to secure a building would take them out of the place they have been called. CITC is exploring the options and counting the cost of each part of their ministry to determine if they should stay mobile or if they should secure a seven day a week lease space.

City Church in Plano, Texas

This church is meeting in the Angelika Theater in Legacy Town Center. Legacy Town Center is a mixed use development at the center of one of the hottest real estate markets in Texas. Companies like Toyota and Liberty Mutual are joining Frito Lay and JC Penny as they call this area home to their corporate offices. City Church is five years old and has always been in a mobile location. In order to find a building or lease space, City Church would need to relocate to a different area. Pastor Ray Harmon shared with me that they have been called to the Legacy Town Center Area and he understands that relocating out of Legacy Town Center would not be in line with who they are called to reach. City Church is looking to see how they can leverage the theater space and other spaces around them to be the best stewards they can, so that they can be a generous church. Like CITC, City Church is in a high rent district and the spaces that they use look different than what they had pictured two or three years ago. By leveraging the Theater, engaging in Apartment Life ministry, and ministering to the people who live and work in and around Legacy Town Center, City Church can show the love of Christ to many people without buying or leasing a building of their own.

Chase Oaks Church in Plano, Texas

This church planted a Hispanic Campus on the east side of Plano. Chase Oaks is a multisite church but their Hispanic Campus basically functions as a church plant. The church meets in a local elementary school while doing seven-day-a-week ministry in the Chase Oaks Family Center just down the street. This ministry center allows Chase Oaks to offer ESL classes, bible studies, and other ministry programming during the week. We have seen the ministry center concept work in Texas, California, and Seattle in a multisite context. The community center can be a good option to provide church planters with a midweek space to offer youth programs for their families.

These examples show how the church can use spaces for their ministry without buying a church or building a church facility. If your church is considering a space outside your target area I would encourage you to strongly consider how that move will affect your ministry. I have seen a five-mile move contribute to a church plant losing core members and having to shut down. Exploring every temporary option available can help you leverage your existing space at an affordable cost to keep the focus on the ministry in front of you. In the meantime, saving cash to secure a space in the target area will prepare you to lease or purchase a space. In the examples above, real estate prices are expensive and opportunities are limited.

Prior to making a real estate decision, challenge your leadership to answer the following questions:

1. Why do we need a building?
2. Have we maxed out the space we currently have?
3. Can we afford a facility in our target area?
4. Are we ready to increase the amount we spend on a facility?
5. How can our church best utilize space in our target area?

If you do not know the answers to the above questions, then I would recommend you pause before signing a lease or purchasing a building. Count the cost, get clarity, and develop an understanding of your capacity. A building or lease space is a tool that can add value to your ministry, but a facility that does not align with your CLARITY or CAPACITY can cripple your ministry. A space that does not fit your budget or moves you away from your target area can cause you to miss opportunities to maximize your ministry. As you process your facility options, make sure your team understands why each option is the right space or the wrong space. Push your team to ensure you do not occupy a space for the wrong reasons. Remember the church is not a building; a building is a tool to be used by the church.

Home > Blog > Top Ten Factors to Consider When Looking for a Leased Facility

Top Ten Factors to Consider When Looking for a Leased Facility

By John Muzyka

We often get calls from churches asking for lease space. Most of the time, churches don’t know how much space they need or how much spaces cost in the marketplace. There is also a great deal of information regarding building codes, finish-out costs, and securing permits that is unknown to those who call. Before you shop for space or start calling on signs, we advise the church to get an understanding of your space needs and your budget. The following are the top 10 things that a church planter must know before signing a lease.

Most church plants start in a one-day a week space or a leased facility. The list below outlines key factors to consider as you look for a space.

1. Understand how your ministry will use your space
   • Get clarity around your mission, vision, and values prior to locking up a space.
   • Minimum requirements: To seat 150-175, have three to four classrooms and a foyer. You will need at least 4,000 square feet.
   • Ideal Space: To seat 250+ and have several classrooms and offices, you will need at least 6,000 – 10,000 square feet.
   • If you have young families, you will need to have clean/safe classrooms. For example, the floor should be carpet and not tile; otherwise, you can bring in an area rug.

2. Know you can get a Certificate of Occupancy
   • A church falls under Assembly use. The building inspector will require specific improvements for a space to go from office to Assembly.
   • Assembly use will have specific requirements for doors, fire safety, restrooms etc.
   • Will you have access to enough parking? Do you need a parking agreement?

3. Fire Sprinklers
   
   • Do not overlook this.
   • Does the space have fire sprinklers?
   • If not will it be required? If the space is over 5,000 square feet, it will most likely be required. If the space is already a church it MIGHT be grandfathered in.
   • What will it cost? Does the property have a large enough water line coming to the building to have the right amount of pressure? If not this expense will be significant.

4. Create some margin in your budget

1. • Church plants need to save money for future facilities. Whether preparing to buy or leasing additional space, you must save cash.
   • Between facility rentals, staffing, and programming, make sure that you are saving cash for future facilities.
   • Consistently pay a special account over and above your current facilities payment. This will show that you can afford more payments then you have, and it creates a fund for future facilities.
   • If you have a “deal,” do not get used to having a small facility payment. This can hurt you down the road when a lender looks at your history.

5. A seven-day-a-week building may not be the answer
   • Define your target area and know the market. If the market is too expensive then stay mobile and live lean. A building may not be the right answer
6. Keep good financial records
   • Preparing for the future means keeping good financial records from the start.
   • Mag Bookkeeping is a good option. Other options include a CPA that understands churches or a volunteer member who has a solid financial background.
   • If you use a volunteer, make sure you have controls in place to protect the church. We’ve all heard stories where the church member that was in charge of the finances takes money from the church.
7. Pastor does NOT co-sign or guarantee a lease
   • Some landlords will require a personal guaranty for the lease. I have a rule that says; under no circumstances will a pastor co-sign or guaranty the lease. Why? If the church is in default, then the landlord will expect the Pastor to pay.
   • Solutions include re-paid rent or having a sending church guaranty a portion of the lease.

8. Know whether the lease rate is a monthly number or annual number
   • Most lease rates are quoted as an annual number.
   • If the agent quotes the space as a $12 per square foot lease, that translates to a 4,000 square feet space that will cost $48,000 per year or $4,000 per month. Under that scenario the space could be quoted at $1 per square feet as a monthly number.

9. What type of lease are you signing?
   • NNN – This is an additional dollar amount that covers Property Insurance, Taxes, and Common Area Maintenance
   • Gross – The lease rate covers the additional expenses in the quoted rate
   • Industrial Gross – The additional expenses are included in the rate but will have a base year and the tenant will be responsible for increases.
10. The agent you call on the sign represents the Landlord.
    • He will be friendly but he is not working for you. Get a real estate professional on your team.
    • A lease is a legally binding document and a real estate agent is NOT an attorney. When signing a lease or any legally binding contract, seek the counsel of a real estate attorney.

Many of the items on this list have stories that go along with them. We have seen the fire sprinkler issue cause a church to lose their security deposit, and they were never able to occupy. Not keeping good financial records and not having cash set aside caused a church to miss the opportunity they had been waiting for. If you need help preparing for future facilities, email 4phases@churchrealty.com for a free consultation.

by Rich Birch: Is your church considering going multisite? It would seem like every church leader I talk with is wrestling with this approach on reaching new communities. Studies have shown that basically every growing church is either already multisite or actively looking into it.

I’ve been a practitioner of this approach to church since the early 2000s. I can still remember having conversations with Greg Ligon from the Leadership Network many years ago and him telling me about nearly a dozen other churches that were doing something like what we were doing at The Meeting House – launching this dispersed approach to church. At that time, it seemed crazy to me that there were that many other churches trying out this approach; little did I know that in just over a decade, the multisite revolution would jump to 1,000 churches and impact the lives of millions of people.

As an unabashed fan of this approach to reaching more people, I do have a confession to make. There are aspects of being a multisite church that aren’t as great on the inside as they look on the outside. There are some dirty secrets within this movement that I want you to be fully aware of if you are considering launching a new campus. Or maybe you already have a few campuses and something just doesn’t feel right.

85% of Multisite Churches Aren’t Launching More Than 2 Locations.

Leadership Network has been at the heart of fueling this movement. They’ve done a number of great studies and books that have been cornerstone to this movement’s development. In fact, in a lot of ways, they deserve the credit for helping codify how this movement understands and talks about itself … a critical aspect of disseminating ideas. They’ve done a number of landmark studies into the dynamics of this movement that you should check out. In their most recent study, it was found that 85% of multisite churches don’t get 2 locations beyond their original location. The vast majority of multisite churches simply aren’t moving beyond 3 locations in totality.

Why?

It could be that the movement is still too young and this number is likely to rise over time. It could be that there is something built into the complexity of 4+ locations that is slowing down the churches’ abilities to go there.

Having talked with dozens and dozens of multisite church leaders over the years, I’m convinced about the problem: most multisite churches launch campuses as opposed to launching a system for launching campuses. They think about how they extend themselves into a location or two, but don’t put enough creative thought into building a culture and approach that gets the church into the rhythm of launching regularly.

I had the honor of being a part of The Meeting House as this fantastic church launched its first 6 locations. After launching out the first location we set the audacious goal of launching one campus every year for 5 years! We had no idea what we were doing when we set that target, but it did impel us to think about building a system for sustainable launches rather than a single location. All these years later, this church has 19 locations and is actively looking to launch more in the future.

Finding Campus Pastors is really (really!) hard.

Over the years, I’ve had a number of whispered conversations with multisite church leaders at many conferences about this secret. Every once and while I talk with a senior leader on the phone who admits they are really struggling with this fact.

Finding, training, releasing, rewarding and ultimately, retaining campus pastors is an incredibly difficult task.

We’ve suffered over the years with cute sayings about this role in an attempt to define it. Among the things we led ourselves to believe about what these leaders need to be includes …

• Face with the place …
• A big dawg leader!
• Bleed the vision out one arm and the community with another …

When I think back about the most personally painful aspects of leading within the multisite movement, a lot of it has to do with managing campus pastor relationships. Sometimes we didn’t clearly articulate what we were looking for because we didn’t know what we needed. Sometimes, the campus pastors convinced themselves about fitting into the scheme of things even as they realized deep down that they really wanted to do something else. The eclectic mix of expectations, ambitions, vision and communication seems to conspire against us to make it really difficult.

Churches often find themselves with the location, the people and the financial resources to make new campuses work, but they can’t find the right leader to lead it!

87% of campus pastors come from within the church. [ref]

I wish I had let this fact sink in deeply years ago. All the time, effort, energy and money that we spent on attempting to attract campus pastors from outside should have been spent on identifying, training and releasing people from within our church to lead campuses. Your next campus pastor is already attending your church. The question is: What is the system you’re employing to identify them and raise them up to do justice to that role?

I’ve seen it first hand; campus pastors who are from “within” have a better “stick” rate than those from elsewhere. It makes sense because they have already bought into the vision of the church. Their notions of what it means to lead within the church have been shaped by the church.

Older Location’s Ability to Reach People Slows Over Time

Nothing reaches new people like new campuses. The other side of that coin is that older campuses aren’t as effective at reaching people as newer ones. This isn’t just my personal opinion; it was backed up by Warren Bird in his study on the dynamics at play within new multisite campuses. [ref]

We often like to celebrate the fact that new campuses reach more people, but until you’ve lived within the dynamics of an “old” campus and understand its subtle contours incisively, the conversation takes on a slightly different tenor. (Studies show that “old” campuses are anything over 5 years.)

Some of the impacts of this on a church culture can be:

• “Shiny New Car” Syndrome // Where the church leadership gets fixated on launching new locations, much to the detriment of the older locations.
• Deflated Leaders // People leading in “older” campuses can easily get down on themselves because they aren’t seeing the same results over time.
• It’s a push // Older campuses have to push more to reach people. Stop using the same “yardstick” to measure the effectiveness of all campuses.

Leaders who are effective during the early days of the launch of a campus are different than those who are effective after a few years.

Churches need to find a way to build growth strategies that take into account the needs of an older campus.

Leaders in older campuses shouldn’t shy away from reaching new people. Instead, they should see the natural “slow down” as a challenge to meet and overcome.

The most effective days of new campuses are when they first launch, so your strategy needs to push hard in those early days, months and years to reach as many people as possible. The growth trajectory of the campus is set early on!

The Size and Health of Your Launch Team is THE Key Success Factor

I’ve been in the middle of the launch of 14 campuses directly and seen a bunch more from the fence as coach. I’ve seen all kinds of factors that impact the effectiveness of a campus. (Campus pastor, location, time of year, etc.) By far, the most important factor in the launch of a new campus is the size and health of the core volunteer launch team. Across all the launches I’ve seen, this one factor is the best predictor of how the campus will fare over time.

The benefits of a large and healthy team are pervasive …

• More people to invite friends to the church.
• More people to share the volunteer load, which in turn increases the appeal to serve.
• More financial resources to help sustain the campus.

When you are thinking about the target size of the community of volunteers that are needed to launch a new location, try going beyond your comfort zone. What factors would have to be in place to send 10% of your church to go launch the new location? What would it take to get 150+ volunteers to make the new location their home?

This dirty secret pushes towards you taking longer in your launch cycle. You need to take longer to work with “late adopters” who aren’t initially interested to be involved in the launch. You can convince a small team of “innovators” to jump to the new location quickly, but you need to slow down to woo less innovative people to be a part of the launch. The advantage of this approach is that “late adopters” are more likely to stick with the campus in the long haul than “early adopters” any ways.

You don’t just need people to attend the new location. You need people who are willing to serve at the new campus. Your launch process needs to revolve around building up a strong and healthy volunteer core team, and not finding people who will sit on the seats at the new campus. Build a big enough volunteer team and you won’t need to worry about what your attendance will be, because all those volunteers will invite their communities to be a part of your church!

Multisite Will Scale Up Your Problems

Multiplication is at the core of the multisite church movement. It’s a way for your church to spread the good things that are happening at your church to new locations. It’s a path to see your church implement the lessons you’ve learned in a new community.

The downside is that your problems will scale up as well.

If your kid’s ministry is struggling in one location, it will struggle even more in three locations. Taking a music ministry that is having a hard time developing artists in one location and spreading that problem to multiple locations may not be a great idea. If you have problems aligning your vision with your leaders in one location, the discord will just grow wider as you add new locations. Your financial predicaments in one location won’t be solved just by adding new locations.

As the multisite movement enters this next phase, its pervasiveness means that lots of churches that might not be ready to multiply are now beginning to consider it. Even worse, some leaders are seeing this approach as a tool to help kickstart a stuck church. Please don’t.

Nail it before you scale it.

Your church needs a modicum of excellence within its ranks before you look to replicate the model. There needs to be signs of health weaving through the ministry across multiple levels. With humility, can your church say that you are doing aspects of your ministry differently from what other churches are doing in the communities you are looking at moving into?

Conditions Will Never Be “Perfect” For Launch

Talk with any of those rare churches that have launched more than 8 locations and they will tell you they never really felt ready to launch new locations. It was always an internal drive to reaching people, something that the church isn’t able to do today. It was choosing the future while living with a real reality that the present still needs a lot of work.

Over the years, as we’d come up to the launch of a new campus, leaders within our church would start to hold back our plans on the launch. These caring and intelligent leaders would list internal factors that simply weren’t in the spot that they should have been. People could find reasons why this was the year we did not need to launch. They were right but we launched anyway. In fact, the resistance to launch ended up becoming the first step in our launch process. It was like that moment when you stand on the end of the diving board and think twice about jumping. You have to go through the second thought as a human before you can jump.

The fact remains that if your church is growing, you need to launch a new campus. 94% of churches are losing ground against the population growth within their communities. [ref] If your church is growing faster than the community you’re currently in, we need your church to multiply what is happening there. The kingdom needs your church to launch its next campus.

You’ll end up facing the fact that things won’t be perfect, but you’ll need to launch anyway. There will be things that you’ll need to work on even as you multiply. It will feel like building the plane while trying to fly it. It will require a lot from you and your leaders … but it’s worth it. Seeing new people connect with the eternal message of Christ in a new campus is exciting and invigorating in equal measure.

Let’s talk about your next campus (or two!)

Yes, I’m biased. Even with all of these “dirty secrets,” I think that the multisite church approach is the most effective way to reach more people in today’s generation. Is it perfect? Definitely not, but the results are breathtaking to see and be a part of. From just a handful of churches all those years ago to millions of people attending a multisite campus today, it has been an honor to be a part of this amazing transformational journey.