7 Lessons We’ve Learned Multiplying Churches Through Multi-Site 

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

2.TRAINING IS UNBELIEVABLY IMPORTANT

3. DISCIPLE-MAKING IS KEY

4. IDENTIFYING WHERE TO PLANT HAS INDICATORS

5. DECISIONS ARE BEST MADE IN COMMUNITY

6. RELINQUISH CONTROL OF THE RESULTS TO THE LORD

7. DON’T UNDERESTIMATE GOD

Access the original article from exponential.org to find out more