Multiple meetings 4

To conclude this overview of our experience in establishing multiple meetings at King’s, here are a few implementation points

One of the questions we are regularly asked is ‘How do you know which meeting people are going to?’ – we found a simple questionnaire to be a reliable indicator of which meeting people will attend.

One of the greatest challenges you will face in going to a second or third meeting is the volunteer challenge – you need to release a lot more ministry to run the Sunday meetings. So, for us to launch an evening meeting requires us to recruit, train and release 100 more volunteers a month (25 per week). Obviously, where there is children’s ministry at both morning meetings, the volunteer challenge is higher. We have found running a ministry fair on a Sunday as part of our launch strategy to be an effective way of connecting people to ministry opportunities created by the extra meeting.

When we moved to two meetings we had to pastor the sense of loss that some of our congregation felt. We did this publicly on Sundays, identifying with people’s sense of loss (‘I don’t see my friends anymore’), and providing an exhortation to see the costs of the move as worthwhile as we reach many more people with the gospel.

We have found that as we have provided more options and more space, God has given us more people.