With 34 physical locations and 90 weekly online services, Life.Church is leading the way in multisite church! We have partnered with them on this brand new resource to give insight into Life.Church’s portable model and what makes their unique campus strategy so successful.
We have worked with churches of every size, denomination, from almost every state in the country. And like people, each church has their own unique DNA, voice, identity, and personality. We love working alongside churches helping them be exactly the church God has called them to be in a portable space. And in working with such a great variety of churches, we’ve seen churches forge new paths or put their own spin on campusing. We have found some so unique we (and they) are excited to share how God has been growing them! We are creating a series of mini-whitepapers looking at these churches and their unique styles of campusing/multisiting to inspire your own multisite strategy. And to launch this series – we are so blessed to be able to share about Life.Church’s portable model.
Life.Church has grown to become one of the largest churches in America with 34 campuses currently and more in the works. Besides the awesome leadership and work of this church to further the Kingdom of Christ, one of the things we love most about Life.Church is their style of multiplication. In our new resource, we dive into the very specific way that Life.Church utilizes launching new campuses in portable environments.
Life.Church’s multiplication strategy begins with identifying a city, then launching a new campus in it portably for about a year while they are building a permanent building. Once the permanent facility in the new city is complete they will bring the portable system back in house and get it ready to launch the next campus. This approach helps build momentum in the new city and gets people excited about the permanent campus.
In terms of “how” they do portability, they use a semi-truck to transport all of their gear and PCI cases. This is not something we typically recommend, but it definitely works for Life.Church because it is a part of their portability culture and they have the right processes place. Typically for most churches, it slows down the unloading process to use a semi-truck, however, there are other times it might make sense, ie if you have a loading dock at your location (the downside being if you move to a different location that doesn’t have one). Other answers to “how” Life.Church does portability are discussed further in our new resource.
Over the years Life.Church has really honed their multisiting strategy and they continue to have great success with it. In recent years and months, they have purchased more from us and they currently have 5 portable systems total that they can send out at a time. Amazing!
Fun Side Story – When we first started partnering with Life.Church in 2005, they placed an order for 2 campuses they were launching at the same time and then we didn’t hear from them for a while, about 12 years. We thought they weren’t happy and found a different solution. Then after years of silence, Life.Church called wanting more PCI cases! We learned their original systems were still in use, still in good condition and had been used to launch multiple more campuses (yay!)! We were, of course, thrilled they have lasted for so many years, and through multiple campuses.
This example is the heart behind all of the systems we design at PCI. Multiplication, maintenance-free, ease of use, right gear up-front, lowest cost financially as well as the lowest cost of volunteer time, burn-out and need to recruit so you and your team are more engaged with ministry than with portability! That’s a big deal to you and it’s what drives us every day!
We don’t just talk about this stuff in theory, we know from personal experiences. People on our team have done portability the “DIY” way and the system way and can testify that there is so much value in having a specific solution for portability, so can Life.Church. This is why the work that we do is so important to all of us at PCI, and why Life.Church uses the same cases they bought from us 15 years ago and continue to purchase our cases.
As you read Life.Church’s story on their model for portability, we hope it encourages you in your ministry and that you take away some new creative ideas you can apply to your own multisite strategy.
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