Has the church you’re part of recently considered starting a new campus? In 2018, our church (Mercy Road Church) was considering this. We had been planting churches by partnering financially with church planters and even inviting people from our congregation to join those planters. But we were still out of room in our landlocked facility. The leadership of the church was considering starting a second campus 20 miles east of our location. We hired a development specialist to determine how much money we could raise to start this campus and we learned we could raise as much as $3,000,000. For a seven-year-old church, this seemed like a lot. We began to pray and felt convicted that if we could raise that much money, why not just plant multiple churches instead of the traditional campus? Too often our multiplication strategy as churches is just a growth by addition solution. We add services and eventually campuses to continue to reach new people and grow. But what if we truly multiplied? Multiplication for us only occurs when we believe God can use someone else as much as he can use us. The idea of starting new Mercy Road churches and not just campuses began to form. What if we could start them as campuses (we called them locations) and they became self-sufficient churches within 3-5 years? We had no idea what we were doing. But the Mercy Road Family of Churches was birthed through these questions.
7 Important Lessons We’ve Learned Along the Way
1. Pray
I know this isn’t the practical step we want to read, but we all know it’s the most important. You will save yourself so much pain by praying more. I’ve experienced the positive and the negative of this. We prayed and our leadership felt strongly to start four new Mercy Road Church locations in four different directions. We never would’ve come to this conclusion without prayer. In fact, the last location we would have planned to go to ended up leading to the most new believers. This is the great positive of listening to God’s voice and leading. I have also experienced the negative of simply implementing strategies without praying, so don’t make light of the first and most important lesson to PRAY!
Each of the buildings the Mercy Road Churches meet in have prayer rooms. We have plans for prayer and fasting throughout the year and even do prayer and fasting campaigns every year together. I truly believe if our churches pray more and work less, we’ll see greater Kingdom multiplication!
2. Training is Unbelievably Important
We knew starting campuses in hopes of multiplying churches was going to require a clear plan. We spent many months creating our 26-page church planting playbook. This was developed by a team of over 30 key leaders and staff members. We knew who we were, what we were doing, and how we were going to start campuses that became autonomous churches. We intentionally selected lead pastors who fit the personality profiles of a lead pastor or church planter and not campus pastors. We chose passionate leaders ready to expand God’s Kingdom. We raised $3,000,000 just like we planned and ended up buying three church properties and launching one campus to plant portably.
What we didn’t do was have a plan for ongoing training. We know the importance of training the future staff and congregations to understand the DNA of the church we were planting. We assumed the location pastor would pass on the DNA of the church. This led to varying results. We over emphasized the autonomy in the early years, which led to those early churches having course corrections (which are never fun!).
As we grew in knowledge, we began to train the later plants to run the church the way the original location did for the first year or two and then begin to innovate. (This is how Jesus did discipleship by the way. He demonstrated how to live out faith before releasing them to teach others.) This approach enabled them to grow autonomous much faster. I would encourage being firm with the vision and practical implementation up front, but hold tightly to each campus becoming an autonomous church once there is Kingdom growth and the church is sustainable.
3. Disciple-making Is Key
You can read whole books on this lesson, but we were only able to start locations that became autonomous churches because we took the role of life-on-life disciple-making seriously. We must be learning the ways of Jesus in our own lives and passing those ways of Jesus onto another. This means teaching people how to read Scripture and hear the voice of God on their own. This spiritual growth and maturity are what enables the leadership capabilities of the church to expand. If you simply grow a large church and then send out immature Christians to start new churches, you will get very messy churches that lack the spiritual leadership to handle the mess created.
Part of this disciple-making process is doing the work of church in teams. From day one, we always had multiple worship leaders and preachers. So it became easy to send out teams to new worship gatherings because we had a backlog of leaders. We also had developed people who had been discipled and were making disciples, so we could send disciple-makers to plant these churches. In every facet, disciple-making is a key ingredient to church multiplication!
A disciple will naturally make more disciples. It only makes sense that if we’re expecting to plant churches that will plant other churches, we must first make disciples who make other disciples. Make this a foundation of the church long before you start new churches.
4. Identifying Where to Plant Has Indicators
One of the difficult things to determine is where to start a new campus or church. We found these five indicators all play a role:
- The leader – Finding the right leader and person called sometimes took time (see Lesson #1 – PRAY). We knew we wanted to hire lead pastors and not campus pastors. The person called to lead the church often plays a crucial role in when and where a church is started. When finding a lead pastor within a campus to plant, we learned being coachable is key. You’re implementing an already established vision and model. The best leaders want to learn before innovating and then to innovate in community. This humble approach to leading a church community is always important, but especially in a campus to plant model.
- Need – Where is there great need for a new church? Where are there unreached people groups or underserved demographics? We need more churches and pastors going to these communities. Two of the locations we started were largely because we saw a great need to go there.
- People – Where do we already have people who could be sent out to plant a church? We started one church where hundreds of people were committed and we found a facility to meet in on Sundays. But we had no lead pastor two months away from launching. This church grew rapidly and baptized many people! God eventually provided a great lead pastor.
- Facility – It goes without saying, but where everyone gathers for worship on the weekend plays a significant role in the community you’re reaching and targeting. We learned to get going on this right away. One church found a facility and there were great opportunities in that location, but we had no people or pastor! Eventually God provided the right lead pastor that was called to the community and more than 300 people were baptized in their first 14 months of existence!
- Opportunities – Where is God providing opportunities? Whether it’s partnerships, finances, key leaders available, or social capital – where is God opening doors to advance his Kingdom?
We rarely had all five of these present before committing to planting a church, but we almost always had at least two or three of the indicators. As you’re praying about where to start a church, pray through this list and see what God reveals to you. Like us, you may find yourself called to an area that wasn’t originally in your plan.
5. Decisions Are Best Made in Community
We also learned when you’re reproducing churches that share a name, vision, and values it’s important to process decisions in community between the churches. One of our churches led the way in restarting quarterly gathers of all the staff members of each Mercy Road Church for training and sharing best practices. Similarly, we’re making training and communication more readily available for the lead pastors and core leaders.
Leaders who want to work with a team and in diverse community thrive in this environment. It’s one of the more attractive areas of the campus to plant model of multiplication. At the same time, for those who prefer the faster process of siloed decision-making usually struggle. For me, this isn’t good or bad. It’s an important reality for anyone to be aware of. We have planted many churches that were not Mercy Road churches. These are much cleaner because there is clear separation of vision and values, but there is a natural comradery formed within the Mercy Road churches and it is beneficial to easily learn what’s working and not for each church. This larger family makes it generally an attractive environment for long-term staff.
6. Relinquish Control of the Results to the Lord
As followers of Jesus, we don’t get to control the results of our missional efforts. In the four Mercy Road Churches that we started, two had explosive growth baptizing hundreds of new believers, one made great missional impact (but is currently going through a leadership change), and one no longer exists (largely due to launching weeks before Covid in the area of the city that would become most shut down). We don’t get to decide how God works or even how he uses our efforts. But we do get to determine our faithfulness.
It can be difficult to dream big again if you’ve had the results not go the way you’d hoped. I know it can be for me. I try to stay focused on the big picture. I have seen God RADICALLY change lives over the last 14 years. Today thousands of people have found a spiritual home in a Mercy Road Church who wouldn’t have had we focused on just growing by addition. Those churches will eventually plant MORE churches. We’re genuinely seeing a move of God in our lifetime! Exponential Kingdom growth is fully enabled when we relinquish control of the results to the Lord!
By focusing on faithfulness now, it releases you from the burden of the results. I’ve seen too many people and pastors weighed down by the pressure of growth in the church. That’s not your job! Your job is faithfulness. How can you be faithful to expand God’s Kingdom by utilizing those five indicators (above) and relinquishing control of the results to the Lord? Find hope and dream again of how God could use your multi-site efforts to lead to true multiplication and not just growth by addition.
7. Don’t Underestimate God
I can’t emphasize this enough. I never dreamed I would get to be a part of what I’ve experienced in these multiplication efforts. In our last Mercy Road church plant, we sent only a dozen people to start the church. They baptized more than 300 people in their first 14 months! I was told a story recently of first-time guests at their gathering who gave their lives to Jesus and were baptized on the spot! If I’m honest, I did not initially have the faith for this – to believe God would multiply his Kingdom like this. Yet, Jesus told us, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field,” (Matthew 9:37b-38 NIV). We need to pray to the Lord of the harvest and not underestimate what he’s capable of!
If you like the idea of this sort of Kingdom multiplication, but you don’t currently have the faith to act, remember Joshua didn’t see the sun stand still until chapter 10. The Lord used decades of life developing his faith to the point he experienced such a miraculous moment. If you can’t imagine letting go of control of a campus and letting it become a church, don’t underestimate what God can do over time!
In my own life, I would never have thought I’d be doing what I am. We’ve now developed the vision for the Mercy Road Family of Churches. I’m stepping down from leading a local church to lead the association of churches. We believe the Kingdom multiplication has just begun and have a vision to plant Mercy Road churches anywhere in the world one day! I share that not because the world needs another brand to buy into (we often say, there’s no Mercy Road section of Heaven!), but because we’re all nobodies who know somebody who can change anybody! I fully believe you could do so much more for the Kingdom than we have. Imagine if our churches started campuses that became autonomous churches that multiplied that same process again. Let’s PRAY BIG and DREAM BIG – that God could radically multiply his Kingdom in our lifetime!
