When Should A Church Expand?

This question is frequently contemplated by church leaders across the country. The logical answer is… a church should relocate when it has outgrown its current facility. This means that the church can no longer grow in its current space. Maybe your church needs more seats or maybe you need more children’s space. The bottom line, though, is that a church must be conducting as many weekly services as reasonably possible and continuing to add new attendees (or at least, remaining the same).

The key word here is grow. A church that is seeing consistent growth should plan for a future relocation. We believe that a church that is not adding new attendees is not growing and is not ready to seek its own permanent facility. But ultimately, it’s up to God to implant the vision and the timing into His leaders for a different facility. God implants the vision and the timing into His leaders to take action.

Many churches believe that in order to grow their congregation, they need to have a permanent (perhaps “owned”) facility. Remember the movie Field of Dreams—build it and they will come. Sometimes this is true. This was certainly true for Mission Hills Church. They didn’t have sufficient parking to expand where they were at University & Orchard. Since opening their new facility in SouthPark, in 2009, they have seen incredible new growth.

While every facility situation is different and it’s tough to generalize, we have long observed some consistent trends. But first let me state that, we keep a database of 2,000 churches along the Front Range (from Colorado Springs to Ft. Collins) and we interact with church leaders at least 10 hours every week. What we hear and what we observe is that usually a church must be conducting at least 2-3 Sunday morning services before it is ready to expand. Just like businesses in office buildings that I have relocated (over the past 20+ years); a church’s current facility has to be “packed-out” before it makes sense to seek a larger space.

Finally, we observe churches meeting in substandard facilities that are growing and regularly adding new people. Why? They have the buzz—people are talking about the church. People are attracted to good preaching and to excellent worship, but people are most attracted to being a part of something that their friends or friends of friends are talking about. Churches expand by word-of-mouth.