Leadership lessons from this year - Multi-site church

While visiting Seattle I saw a multi-site church at work. This is very important for us in S E London. Historically our approach has been - build your church, grow it, then plant another church. Multi-site church provides an opportunity for growth for a large church in an urban context where the constraints of property prices for larger facilities are considerable.

At King’s Church we are now running 3 identical Sunday meetings. As far as further growth is concerned, the limiting factor is our facilities. We have always seen King’s as serving not only the locality of Catford, but the communities of S E London, so to go to a multi-site strategy seems a logical step. As we were considering this earlier in the summer we were made aware of a building that had become available for sale – on a site that would enable us to build a 1000 seater auditorium, with 4 times the size of our existing building’s square footage. This would require a £5million building project.

In London we have city-wide churches – to reach such a city we need an integrated strategy that also involves regional and estate churches, large churches, church plants and a new component – the multi-site church.

It is not inconceivable that ten years from now, a church like King’s could be operating on anything between 5 and 10 sites.