Whitepaper #2 on unique Multisite Strategies.

(See the first whitepaper featuring Life.Church here).

Manna Church based in NC was featured in Outreach Magazines Top 100 list on all three of their categories, Fastest Growing, Largest and Top Reproducing Churches. This is their incredible story discussing their multiplication strategies. 

We sat down with Senior Pastor Michael Fletcher and downloaded his wisdom. We ended with this resource jam packed full of insight on how Manna Church through trial and error finally landed on a multisite strategy that works for their church and their unique calling.With a vision to see a church at every large military base, Manna has fine tuned their strategy to create 15 successful campuses across the US in addition to a number of home churches and more in the works. The ‘why and how’ they capture this vision is incredible.

Here are some of the main takeaways from this resource (to name a few). 

In this whitepaper Micheal speaks to the challenge of ministering to members of the military due to frequent redeployment. All churches deal with turn over, but due to Manna’s high percentage of military congregants they experience much greater than average losses of people. Manna flipped the script and changed the high turnover rate instead into an average growth rate of 18%.

Another key lesson from the whitepaper is how they internally identify, train up and send new leaders to launch and run new campuses. They use a very unique approach that they have found great success with (you’ll have to download the whitepaper to see what it is :)). Pastor Michael also dives into the why and how launching ‘portable campuses’ is a key strategy of their growth and sustainability (and why they choose Portable Church®!)

Again, there is even more to the resource than what we’ve listed, but we hope this intrigues you enough to read this short, 6 page resource about one of the leading multisite churches in the United States. 

*When our team sat down with Pastor Michael, we were so blessed and amazed by his perspective. And guess what… we recorded our conversation so you can listen and be blessed too! We weren’t expecting as much as we were getting so we started the recording a little late, but we strongly encourage you to check out this story and the recording. Let it inspire you to move into the unique calling God has placed on your church.  

If your church is considering multiplying or adding another campus check out the video here and make sure you download the resource for the full story! 

Complete this quick form for instant access to the Manna Church story:

 

Superman’s only real threat, as it turns out, was Kryptonite!

by Portable Church Industries: When a growing church has a clear and relentless vision of reaching a given community or region with a multisite strategy, it will face challenges, or kryptonite, if you will.

“How do we keep adding new campuses in new communities?” Somehow, church leaders “miraculously” discover/create ways to beat the barriers and to thrive even more! Typical place and space challenges faced by multisite churches are illustrated here through the experience of LibertyLive.Church in Hampton, Virginia. The extraordinary expense and timing issues associated with providing facilities for multisite campuses can easily threaten momentum.

A real threat to derail multistie momentum

A growing number of churches are fully executing multisite as a part of their multiplication strategy for reaching new people in new communities. After nearly four decades, there appears to be no right or wrong models for multisiting – but there ARE ways to do it well and ways to do it poorly.

Sustaining momentum of launching additional campuses, especially after the initial 2-3 sites, proves to be significantly more difficult because of growing complexities.  The necessity for new facilities in new communities presents new issues that could be crippling to essential momentum. The speed of raising resources, developing sites, perceived inefficiencies, and perceived ineffectiveness becomes a threat to the rhythm of growth established since initially embracing a multisite strategy.

Threats to LibertyLive.Church’s vision became real – A case study

LibertyLive.Church has been significantly blessed. In 2008, it expanded seating capacity by delivering the sermon via video to members seated in the church gym. This experience taught LibertyLive that what could be done across the hall, could also be done in communities throughout Hampton Roads.

A year later, the 100+ year multigenerational and multiethnic church, led by a new visionary pastor, began exploring what it would look like “to reach the entirety of Hampton Roads.” Soon LibertyLive began to grow with this vision in mind.

LibertyLive expanded capacity again with the construction of a 3,000-seat worship center. In the middle of all this activity, the leadership team became students of multisiting—a growing method of reaching more people in a region. They were keenly aware not everyone in Hampton Roads would drive to the Hampton Campus location. LibertyLive desired to launch campuses in communities where its members and guests live in order to welcome even more neighbors. Practically speaking, this meant LibertyLive’s vision was ten campuses by 2026.

LibertyLive.Church leased commercial property in the Harborview/Suffolk area and outfitted it to accommodate 550 seats for the gospel. After sending 250-300 members/attenders, the campus quickly grew to a regular weekend attendance of 700-750 at the new location.

LibertyLive.Church was compelled to lease a new flex space and built it out to include 825 seats. Having commissioned and sent another 172 members/attenders to worship at the new space, it grew to an average of 600-700 people after its first year. Regular attendance is now 1100+ each weekend.

LibertyLive.Church was blessed with an opportunity to merge with another church in the York River area. A building was gifted to them as part of the two congregations coming together. An investment was made to renovate, and the subsequent build-out provided an additional 300 seats. The new location launched with 230+ people between the existing members from the seed congregation and those from Liberty. Less than two years later, the York River Campus proudly welcomes 525+ each week.

Even with four campuses comprising almost 4,700 seats and average weekend attendance of 6,400+, more needed to be done to open new seats to the Hampton Roads region for hearers of The Gospel.

Growing comfortable with a culture of organizational adjustments, the Liberty leadership team came face-to-face with the challenges of their vision. Three new threats (two real and one perceived) to LibertyLive’s well-established rhythms and processes became factors that increasingly hindered growth.

The first two speedbumps were finances and time. Knowing what it took to establish four permanent 24/7 campuses, forecasting six more was easy. Considering the outcome LibertyLive wanted and the current pace at which it was expanding, there wasn’t going to be enough of either resource to reach the goal of ten campuses by 2026.

Unfortunately, the church’s method of buying and maintaining facilities was cost-prohibitive. Raising funds, developing a new venue and launching a campus was a slow process.

Additionally, LibertyLive had an expectation of doing all things with excellence, thus creating the third speedbump. As insufficient resources threatened the vision, would the church have to accept a hit to its high standards?

The conclusion: The LibertyLive way of launching campuses would have to slow down significantly, or change.

As it turned out, the kryptonite was not enough to deter LibertyLive from such a clear and compelling vision. However, the situation forced the church to innovate and trust God to provide a new solution so it could continue building physical capacity for the gospel, forever impacting the Hampton Roads region.

The church has a history of innovating

Churches adopt a multisite strategy for a variety of reasons. Oftentimes, multisites are established to serve as a space or reach solution. A methodology replacing the large regional church and the burdensome expenses associated with it is adding seats in surrounding neighborhoods.

Churches that end up as a multisite typically start with one prime time service becoming overcrowded. The next step in the progression to multisiting is adding services in order to experiment with new times, or even different days. Next, churches typically create additional venues on its main site, typically taking advantage of fellowship halls, gymnasiums and other common areas within the facility.

Once a church runs out of usable space and effective alternative service times, leadership must decide to go forward using one of the following options:

1. consider doing nothing new, essentially capping growth
2. expand current facility; incur the expense of remodeling maintenance and increased resources going forward
3. sell the current facility, buy and start over (this time bigger) rinse and repeat
4. start a program of planting new, independent churches; send a significant number of members “on mission” to nearby communities
5. multisite! Become one church in multiple locations

The rest of the story…

The Kryptonite of Multisite Momentum is a new FREE RESOURCE designed for church leaders blessed with a white-hot vision for kingdom growth.  Check out the rest of Liberty.Live’s story and how they continue to thrive today.

Complete this quick form for instant download:

Sustain Multisite Momentum

by Portable Church Industries: In our last blog post, we talked about different ways to launch new multisite campuses and how we advocate for a healthy balance of these 5 different ways. Portability is an incredible and underused tool, however, we know that portability isn’t always the best solution to a new campus need. There are churches who are only launching permanent facilities and are having great success. There are also churches who are only launching in portable environments are also having great success. But we are finding more and more churches getting stuck due to money and time.

The reason we think a mix is so important for the church is that an imbalanced church can experience speed bumps in launching new campuses including hindered growth momentum. Every new campus has to land in someplace and space and in that process every church walks the balance of creating an effective, cost-efficient, and time-efficient campus. With that, every church has a pain point of debt and lethargy they are willing to live with. And if both of those are things you strongly want to avoid, developing sites for new campuses can be much too expensive and too slow.

When a church wants to multisite they have to decide where and what community they want to land in. It’s going to be one of the 5. Every church has to go through and process each of the different ways and an imbalance of those types will slow momentum. For example, if a church only does permanent facilities they know they are going to launch at a much slower rate.

Enter portability! Because all 4 of the other ways to launch new campuses are more expensive and more time consuming, portability is an option that more and more multisite churches are stepping into. Portability allows multisite churches to keep investing in new communities while maintaining the other types of facilities they already have.

Portability can address these 3 issues for multisite churches

1. Money

Let’s acknowledge that most leaders painfully understand the expenses involved in developing new sites for new campuses:  Land cost, building costs, equipment costs, cost of raising money, cost of debt service, and then ongoing maintenance. One of the key reasons we advocate for a balanced portfolio of property types is because of the burden debt and raising money places on ministry.  There are less expensive ways ministry can be done and done well – The most economically-minded way (almost always) to launch in a new community is through a portable campus.  And it can be leveraged in a way to launch and grow into whatever the next type of facility could potentially be.

The difference is a low 6 figures for portability and mid 7 figures for permanent. The Facility Cost Comparison Matrix talks about these financial pieces and breaks down each of the different campus types and we recommend every church executive team to go through this exercise.

2. Time

Raising money, designing & developing out any kind of facilities for the purpose of ministry takes significant time.  Here are the main ways portability is faster than any of the other options:

• From the time you decide to launch to the day you have your first service could happen in a matter of months.
• You also have faster entry into your community and can start engaging with its people before your launch even happens.

*Some churches have the misconception that it will take all day to set-up and have a service in a rented facility. This can be a real concern but it does not need to be the case. Every multisite church utilizing a Portable Church system is done with set-up in 20-90 minutes. The Meeting House in Canada with 18 locations finishes in just 20 minutes, while numerous other of our ‘6 trailer churches’ set up in 90 minutes or less.

3. Excellence

There is an unspoken fear that a multisite church campus in a portable space can’t be done with the type of excellence that the church is used to. However, we know that excellence is subjective and every multisite church has its own standards for their worship experience. We also realize that portability can certainly be done poorly, but at Portable Church we discover what each church’s standard is through the consultation process. We spend time talking with the directors and vision castors to figure out what each specific church requires. And we strive to make portability as efficient as it can possibly be.

This blog post comes from our new resource The Kryptonite of Multisite Momentum. Download it for a deeper discussion of this topic as well as other important themes for multisitie churches.