Should your growing church go multisite?
Should your declining church consider merger?
Leading multisite expert Jim Tomberlin talks about how the multisite movement is changing and how more and more churches are pursuing mergers and acquisitions.
Welcome to Episode 43 of the Podcast.
Guest Links: Jim Tomberlin
E-mail: jim@multisitesolutions.com
Jim on Twitter: @MultiSiteGuy and @MergerGuru
125 Tips for MultiSite Churches
Better Together: Making Church Mergers Work (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series)
Links Mentioned in this Episode
3 Things You Can Do Right Away
You don’t have to be a meg achurch to develop a multi-site ministry. But if you have the right mindset, the right plan and the right leadership, you can successfully multiply your mission across new campuses. Jim Tomberlin provides insight to leaders who want to expand.
- Realize you don’t have to be mega to be multi. Mega churches once used multi-site campuses as a Band-Aid strategy for growth. They either became too big for their space, or they were restricted by zoning laws to expand. Currently, there are more than 5,000 multi-site churches, and it’s out-pacing the mega church movement as a revitalization strategy for healthy churches whose growth has become stagnant.
- Evaluate the health of your church. Healthy churches generally grow at a rate of 5% a year, but there are a few questions you can ask your leadership team to find out if your church would be a good multi-site contender.
Does your church have clarity about their mission and vision?
Is your church leadership unified, and do they support the church’s mission and vision?
Does your church have good systems and processes in place to help people through their spiritual journey?
Are you using your current space well?
Healthy churches can go multi-site to re-leverage their strengths in other communities. But keep in mind that if you’re not healthy, build a strategy to become healthy first. Going multi-site is a growth vehicle, not a growth engine.
3. Have the mindset of an Apostolic Leader The apostle Paul said, “I bear daily the burden of my churches.”(Notice that “churches” is plural.) A senior leader with an apolistic mindset is more than someone who’s just a great leader; they want to grow and reproduce. They have a desire to create a movement of churches and their congregations. They’re birthing campuses that birth campuses, and they’re involved with churches that plant churches. They’re not satisfied with 1 or 2 campuses because they want to create a movement with the church. Apolistic leaders bake in reproduction at every level across their church because they know living things are meant to reproduce!
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Next Episode: Jeanne Stevens
The life of a church planter has so many ups and downs. Jeanne Stevens and her husband Jarrett learned that the hard way, when after over a decade on the staff of some well-known mega-churches, they found the courage to leave the comfort of what they knew to plant a church in downtown Chicago. Jeanne tells the story.
Subscribe for free now, and you won’t miss Episode 44.
