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Welcome to an Office Hours episode of the unSeminary podcast. In our Office Hours episodes I’m happy to answer your questions that you can submit via an audio file through our website.

Mark Strickland is the lead pastor at Milton Bible Church in Milton, Ontario, Canada. His mid-sized church has about 300 attending on Sunday mornings, has a relational family vibe, and also ministries that connect with the community. They don’t want to stay comfortable with just filling two services and cruising along. They want to fulfill the Great Commission and expand, whether with church planting or multi-site.

Mark asks: When is the right time to church plant or go multi-site? What are the best practices when considering expansion as a mid-size church? And lastly, are there any permanently mid-sized, healthy churches that are models to look at?

• When is the right time to multiply? // Healthy things multiply. In the ECFA New Faces of Church Planting study, one of the indicators for church multiplication is conversion growth. Take a look at the people who are coming to your church. If 51% or more of them are new people coming to know the Lord, that’s a good indicator that you should be thinking about multiplying.
• Start casting vision now. // What is your current vision for multiplying? You may not be ready to start a new campus or plant now, but how can you start casting that vision, even if it is a couple years down the road? Start casting vision with your elders and your team around what God’s calling you to do in the future. Don’t look just at a growth spurt but a pattern of growth over time. Ask yourself if you are seeing sustained growth from people coming to know Jesus.
• Are members ready to launch? // Post-COVID, the average church plant core team size is 18 and the average multi-site core team size is 45. The size and health of the launch team is critically important. Are there a healthy 45 people you could send to a community on the other side of town to launch something new?
• Prepare for the financial side. // Another aspect to think about is the financial side of expansion. It’s financially taxing to launch a new site or plant a church. Often church planters rely heavily on fundraising the first few years. How could you start building financial resources to gift to a church planter to help them launch strong in a couple years?
• Questions to ask yourself. // Not every church needs to be big, but every church needs to have a big vision for what God is calling them to do. What is the big vision that God could call your community to? What is it that He’s calling your church to that ultimately looks like the transformation of your community for the message of Jesus?

If you’ve got a question that you’d love to get answered, drop by the Office Hours link to upload an audio file.

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Risepointe

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Rich Birch here. Super excited for today’s Office Hours episode. What is an Office Hours episode, Rich, you might be asking? Hey, great question. I’d be happy to answer. I’m already starting off the top talking to myself.

Rich Birch — Man, this is going to be a fun episode. So Office Hours are where you go over to our website, unseminary.com, and you’ll see at the top, there’s a place where you can drop an audio file, and I would be happy to answer your question. So why don’t you do that after today’s episode.

Rich Birch — Super excited to hear from Mark Strickland. Let’s listen to his question, and then I’ll come back and try to offer whatever insight I can. Let’s listen in: Pastor Mark Strickland.

Mark Strickland — Hey Rich, Mark Strickland here, hope you’re keeping well. I’m currently serving as a lead pastor at Milton Bible Church in Milton, Ontario. We are a Fellowship Baptist church, word and spirit church, kind of a Bapto-costal flavor, if you will.

Mark Strickland — And we are a mid-sized church. We’re about 300 butts in the seat on Sunday mornings, and over two services, we believe we could be around 400 or 500 potentially, and we probably have about 500 people who call our church home.

Mark Strickland — And so the question our elders are really wrestling with right now is this: We believe that being a mid-sized church is our sweet spot. We have a great kind of tension between having kind of a relational family vibe, but also providing a lot of great ministries and programming to both our church and our community. So that’s great.

Mark Strickland — But we don’t want to get comfortable filling two services and then just kind of cruising. We want to fulfill the Great Commission. We want to see churches planted in our region. And so we’re aspiring towards that end. We’re planning towards that end.

Mark Strickland — And I guess some questions we’re wrestling through is like, when is the right time to church plant or go multi-site? I’d say for us as a church, we’re at 300 right now, but we could grow still probably comfortably to be 400 or 500 on a Sunday morning.

Mark Strickland — And then on top of that, coming from a larger church setting of say 1,500 people, when we went multi-site, it was a bit easier to say to 50 to 100 people, hey, would you consider going to plant this new site? You didn’t really lose that many people from your congregation. Whereas being a mid-sized church, if you send 50 to 100 people to go do a church plant, then you are sending away maybe 25, 30 percent of your congregation. And that can absolutely impact many things in your current context.

Mark Strickland — So yeah, we’re wrestling through, when’s the right time to church plant or go multi-site? What are best practices when considering church planting or multi-site as a mid-sized church?

Mark Strickland — And then we’re also wondering, are there any permanently mid-sized 300, 600 person churches that are exemplars or models to look at of churches that have done this well that are functioning healthily, mid-sized, but also fulfilling the Great Commission in doing church planting or multi-site or something like that? So yeah, those are just questions we’re wrestling through and would love to see if you have any thoughts on that. Thank you so much. Bye now.

Rich Birch — All right. Great questions from Pastor Mark. Thanks so much for leaning in and for asking this question.

Rich Birch — First of all, I need to declare my conflicts of interest right up front. So Mark doesn’t know this. I don’t think Mark knows this, but I actually lived in Milton, the town that he is currently ministering in when I was a kid. That’s part of why this question caught my attention. I lived there for a couple of years when I was in grade school. And so that’s probably good and bad for this question.

Rich Birch — So really Mark is asking three questions. When is the right time for a church to multiply? Then there’s really this whole question around best practices of launching out of a church of 300. And then finally, are there really any exemplars of permanently mid-size churches?

Rich Birch — Well, let’s take each one of those in order. First of all, when is the right time to multiply? So Mark, if I was sitting across the table from you, I would say, listen, healthy things multiply. At the end of the day, healthy plants, healthy people, healthy organizations multiply. Healthy churches multiply.

Rich Birch — I was doing a little bit of research getting ready to answer your question, and I’ll link to these in the show notes. But the ECFA study on the New Faces of Church Planting might be interesting for you to go through your team with. And often one of the indicators for multiplication is actually conversion growth.

Rich Birch — So I would look at the people that are coming to your church, the kind of new folks that are coming in. And because the reason what happens there is, as a church is seeing people come, if it’s brand new people, that would ultimately say, man, you are unlocking something in your culture that’s making a difference. In fact, specifically, churches with a conversion growth rate of 51% or more. So that’s half or more of your people are coming from people coming to know the Lord. Man, that’s a good indicator that you should be thinking about multiplying.

Rich Birch — I think there’s a vision gap here. I think there’s an opportunity for you. When I think about this whole idea of when is the right time to multiply, I would be asking the question around, could you be casting vision to this? I’m going to talk into both sides of my mouth. I’m kind of tipping my hand where I’m going, Mark.

Rich Birch — But being permanently midsize, that’s fine. But I would say, man, the mission is still to reach more people in Milton and beyond. And so what is your current vision for multiplying? Maybe there’s an opportunity for you to reach out and say, hey, we anticipate church planting down the road. We’re not sure what that looks like. We’re not sure what that looks like or when that looks, but we believe that God’s calling to us. So how could you start casting vision even now, even if it’s a couple of years out?

Rich Birch — Maybe you take your leadership team to the Exponential Conference. Now, I know the Global Conference is sold out, but the Regional Conference in Chicago this fall. Or maybe you go to California for one of those regionals. You start to try to cast vision with your elders and with your team around maybe God’s calling you to plant a church down the road. Maybe there’s an opportunity for you there.

Rich Birch — So interesting, one of the patterns that we’ve seen for churches that multiply, that either church plant or do multi-site, it’s not just a growth spurt, but it really is a pattern of growth over time. So multi-site churches that launched in the pandemic still have a median launch size of 60 people, and they grew to 95 within a year.

Rich Birch — So think about that. Could you send out 60 people, which I know in a church of 300 is like a real number, 20%. That would be hard to do, could be hard to do.

Rich Birch — But in order to sustain that, really what you want to discern is, is our church having sustained growth over multiple years, or have we just experienced a growth spurt? Because if you’ve been able to show sustained growth, then your ability to launch either multi-site or church plants long-term will be easier. Does that make sense? Do you understand what I’m saying there?

Rich Birch — So when is the right time for a church to multiply? I really think healthy things multiply. I think you should be thinking about it now. I think you should be casting vision towards it. Even if it’s up over the horizon, the diagnostic tool I would ask you to think about is, are you seeing a kind of sustained growth?

Rich Birch — Or is it the kind of thing where it’s not just that we had an extra 50 people show up, and there are 50 people from because our community grew, and there are people from out of town who moved into our town, but we’re actually seeing people who’ve come to know Jesus. All of those things would lead me to the place that would say, man, we should be thinking about. So does that make sense?

Rich Birch — All right. So best practice number two. Best practice for launching out of a church of 300 or so. So this one is close to my heart, and I think you expressed the actual problem or concern of multiplying out of a church of 300, and I’m just going to declare my bias right now.

Rich Birch — So I’ve talked about in other locations, in other… I talk about it all the time. It’s literally every week in my email. I say, I’m on a mission now to help 100 churches grow by 1,000 people. I do think that churches should grow larger, and there’s all kinds of reasons for that. And a part of the reason is to help with this multiplication issue.

Rich Birch — So I think you have rightly diagnosed that sending 100 people could be really difficult. Now, that isn’t actually the normal size. So if you look at the actual statistics of people that were sent out, it’s actually quite smaller than that post COVID. The average church plant core team size was 18. Multisite, it was 45 on the core team. But this is my issue for you.

Rich Birch — What I do know on both church plants and multisite campuses is the size and health of the core team is critically important. And oftentimes, we just think about the size of that team. But the question I would ask you is the health.

Rich Birch — Could you send out a healthy 45? Is there a healthy 45 people that you could send to a community to launch something new? What could that look like? Could you find a planter and go to an outlying community or to the other side of town? Is there an opportunity for you to do that? Because I think you have rightly diagnosed the issue.

Rich Birch — Another piece to think about is really the financial piece. And when I think about multiplying, whether it’s multisite or church plants, one of the things we just know is that it is expensive. It’s financially taxing to either be a church planter or to launch a multisite campus. You’ve lived in that world, but it’s difficult to pull all the cash together to make it happen.

Rich Birch — And I wonder if there’s an opportunity for you now to even begin to build a war chest for your 300 people to start building financial resources to gift to a church planter, to give them, instead of giving them $25,000, which is apparently the number that church planters are using, according to this study, post-COVID. What if you tried to build a war chest of $100,000 or $200,000 to give to them in a couple years to launch them strong?

Rich Birch — Because one of the things I do know about church planters is one of the things they joke about is, man, the first couple of years, they become really good at fundraising because that’s what they have to do all day long. Financial is a real issue, often. So 73% of church plants become financially self-sustaining at the end of year three.

Rich Birch — So if you’re thinking about planting, multiplying, you’re going to think about how do we give them enough resources to keep them sustained over those years? I would start wondering about that now. Could we start setting those resources aside and try to accelerate the financial sustainability, basically give them more cash up front and shorten that runways to the point where they could be on their own?

Rich Birch — Does that make sense? Okay, then number three, are there any exemplars of permanently mid-sized churches?

Rich Birch — Okay, this is the part. First two answers, you’re probably going to like me, Mark. Third answer, you’re not going to like me. So I would challenge you on this. I’m not sure that staying small is a great vision. I’m just not sure. So this is where the fact that you’re in Milton is going to be a disadvantage for this question. It’s not just a random town.

Rich Birch — So I know that Milton has exploded. I was looking up some statistics between 1991 and at 2021, Milton has grown by 350%. And it continues to grow at a rapid rate. And so my question for you is if all the churches in town just stayed the same size, the influence of Jesus is a third of what it was in 1991. And if we all stand around and say, man, we believe that God’s called us to be a church of 300, 300 and no more, then we’re limiting the message of Jesus in our community.

Rich Birch — God has clearly given you something. You know that. God has helped you and your leadership team to figure out how to reach your community. Why would you put a cap on that? I would love for you to cast vision.

Rich Birch — Listen, I don’t think it’s about, I don’t think all churches need to be big churches. I don’t think everything needs to be a giant church. I totally understand that. But maybe you, I do think you need to have a giant vision, even if your church is not giant. So could it be that God’s calling you to plant 30 churches of 300 in the next 10 years?

Rich Birch — Before Jesus, before the 2000 anniversary of the birth of the church, before 2033. Maybe there’s some big vision there. So I understand that why you don’t want to be seen as like, hey, we want our church to be a big church. But my question for you is if Milton stays on the trajectory where it is now, and your church stays at 300, and it triples again in size over, you know, the next 15 years, 20 years, man, the voice of Jesus will continue to be extinguished in your community.

Rich Birch — So I would challenge you to think about what is a big vision that God could call your community to? And what is it that he’s calling your church to that ultimately looks like the transformation of your community for the message of Jesus?

Rich Birch — Well, Mark, man, love you so much. Thanks so much for stepping in and leading. I love what you’re doing at Milton Bible there and excited to see the future.

Rich Birch — If you’ve got a question, if you’re listening in and you’d love to get a question answered, I would love to do that for you. So just drop by unseminary.com. See at the top, you’ll see a link there. Click on it for Office Hours.

Rich Birch — Thanks so much, friends. Have a great day. Take care.