It’s our very first five minute Monday. So hello to the world of church planters and multi-site churches.
But hey, this is our first five minute Monday where we’re talking through stuff so we are going to be starting our five minute countdown in just a little bit. Really we’re going to be talking about the timeline for launching a multi-site campus or just how to plant a multi-site campus. It’s something that’s been really big as of late. We’re pretty excited about the tool and it’s been getting a lot of really good reviews. So Jeff is our Multiplication Specialist as I’ve mentioned and he lands somewhere between a coach and a guide to helping church multiply themselves. And he helps them do it faster, quicker, cheaper.
We’re going to be talking to you guys about this checklist Mapping Your Multisite Journey and just why it is relevant and important to you. Jeff actually wrote a blog post that launched on Thursday that I would encourage you guys to check it out because it kind of goes into a bit more detail on this.
Why did you come up with the idea for the checklist?
As I was traveling around the country, I was recognizing that there are a lot of churches out there. The church world is very exciting, those that are involved in multiplication and replicating themselves, multi-siting, planting, it’s an exciting world. I recognized that there were some churches that were doing it really well and some that were struggling. They wanted to do it. They felt like they had a good vision, but they didn’t feel like they were getting anywhere, they couldn’t get any traction. I put this little checklist together. It’s got a timeline to it, checklist, and some things that a church could be paying attention to. It’s a 30,000 foot perspective in order to make sure that they know where they’re going. You know, a map is really important. We created this resource to answer the question of how to do multiplication well.
What is the tool and how does it work?
The tool is, it really is a map. First of all, you have to determine where you are, where you are as a church and who you are as a church, and then with regard to the vision, you know where you want to go and where you want to be. And so the part in the middle is determining the plotting points of how you’re gonna take that journey and what it looks like, so you can be the most effective at growing the kingdom where you’re at. And so mapping your multi-site journey is a checklist, and it’s in four phases. The first phase is the planning stage, and that’s where it’s really internal. It’s getting the leadership team on board so that you all are singing the same song. You know where you’re going. You could actually write it down, and you would understand more about your church, at least your leadership team would.
The second phase is the preparation stage, and that is where you begin to expand out and include the network. That includes your congregation, maybe networks or new neighborhoods that you’re going into or you’d like to go into, perhaps other leadership around your community that might need to get involved. The last phase, or the third phase is the landing stage. So when you make a new expression of yourself, you’re gonna land in your portable environment, or maybe you’re gonna rent, lease a commercial property and build it out and have a great worship area there. Or maybe just even a green build.
And then the last phase is the best. The last phase is enjoying the fruit of your labor, and that is the thrive stage. The last phase is the phase that when you do it really well and you follow your map, your checklist, and you set yourself up for success, you want to do it over and over and over again, which is exactly what we’re trying to do as kingdom builders to simply multiply the kingdom. And this checklist is a big piece of that as far helping you launch strong. So we’ve talked about all those different phases. Today we’re focusing on the plan stage, phase one. So give us a quick little break down as to what that phase is. We’re gonna cover the next phases in other future videos, but tell us about phase one specifically.
The planning stage, it’s where the visionary of the church, usually it’s the senior pastor, or the leadership team, they want to communicate and draw in all of the leaders that are engaged at the church. And they want to get them to understand the vision. They want to understand the DNA, the culture, and the most effective ministries that you have for accomplishing the ministry that you want to accomplish. What kind of models you would want to use. The delivery methods and have those kinds of have those conversations. Hammer those things out. Write them down. Get very methodical about it, and then jump into identifying some communities around you that perhaps you’d want to investigate having a multi-site add.
We’ve got a new tool that’s coming out that will help churches identify great communities that they can launch into. Then there’s the trying to get an idea of what will it take for us as a leadership team to get the congregation engaged in this process because we want them to own the vision as well because they are a part of this. How will we get them to embrace the vision? How will they get skin in the game? What kind of resources will they give? And maybe the resource might be themselves. It’s not just financial. This piece is huge- getting an internal buy-in before you go anywhere else, having that big plan in place because all the other three steps that are beyond this, are completely irrelevant if you don’t have this initial thing set up and have it ready to go. So check it out. Make sure you have that checklist in hand. It gives you a good timeframe. Usually you multisite journey starts anywhere from 12 to 24 months. If you have less time than that, give this guy [Jeff] a call. If you have more time than that, this checklist is going to be a perfect example for you.
