Elevation Church is a church with several locations. In fact we will be adding a 3rd in the fall and I’m hopeful to add a 4th by Easter 09.

But having multiple locations (especially if they are portable) is not glamorous. Here are a few questions that I would think through before adding campuses:

Are we at capacity at our current location?

1. Would adding another location open seats up at our current location? (Would it cannibalize our current site?)
2. Is God leading our church toward a strategy of having multiple locations?
3. Will we use video or live preaching?
4. Not all Pastors are right for video, is ours?
5. What is the density of our current campus related to where we want to add another campus?
6. Can we add another service where we are and get the same effect?
7. Do we have the leadership to pull off another campus?
8. Will another site be a step of faith or foolishness?
9. What would you define as success for another campus? Define this by using metrics for attendance, salvations, giving, etc.
10. Will another site make us more effective at reaching people for Christ?

Those are just a few. Multiple locations is very effective but also trendy. Asking the right questions beforehand may keep you from making a mistake or confirm the direction God is leading his church.

Chunks Corbett, Executive Pastor

Filed under: Being Portable, Growth | Comments Off

The title is, of course, a subtle reference to an 80’s sitcom that I can sing the theme song to on cue. But it’s also a description of our last 2 weeks at Elevation.

June 1st was a thing of beauty (you take the good). It was a day that makes you think the church can remain portable forever. Everything from set up to tear down went perfect. The stage looked great, Pastor preached the house down, 146 people gave their lives to Christ. It was just an all around great day.

We had 4 separate groups of church planters in on our Backstage Elevation tours on the 1st and we made it look easy. Sometimes you can give the wrong impression of a portable church when everything goes right.

Then June 8th happened (you take the bad). It wasn’t a disaster by any means, but it was a day that we got some crisis management practice. It started with the air conditioner being broken at one of our campuses (a high school) on the hottest day of the year. We made the adjustment and got 800 bottles of ice cold water for people along with a big fan and nobody passed out.

We also had a guest Worship Leader that came in unprepared. No big deal, fortunately we had our Worship Pastor available to fill his shoes.

Well, then 10 minutes before our first service (8:30 at the other H.S. campus with AC working), our $35,000 switcher decided to reset. That meant that all inputs to the device had to be reset. The net effect was we started late, lost our center screen and TV’s onstage for the first service and had to cut out a song to get the service out on time.

We thought we were through the worst of it all and then our generator that powers our production trailer shut off for no reason 1 minute before Pastor finished his sermon at 8:30. This caused us to loose power to all video equipment. This happened during the service that we have to get right because we play that sermon back at our second campus. Since it only cut off 1 minute of the sermon we were able to have a live person take over when the tape cut off when played back and it seemed to work well.

The generator shut off again during the 10 O’clock service which forced us to use the same sermon that was cut off 1 minute short for all the video sermons of the day.

Finally, we had a normal 11:30 service. This was after the generator cut off during 2 services and the other 2 services down the street with no AC had a video sermon that was cut 1 minute short. We thought we would coast through the rest of the day. Only the 1 PM service to go and Pastor was live.

That is as long as the camera operators have eaten and not given blood. Just minutes before Pastor was going to close the last sermon of the day, our camera operator who was fasting and had blood taken that morning passed out (the camera was live) and came crashing to the floor in the back of the auditorium. The audience watched the screens and saw it all through the camera which ended up on the floor facing the ceiling. The EMS came and took her to the hospital where, fortunately, all tests were negative.

So she was OK and in the end so was the Sunday and the church. But it was definitely not the way we planned it out in our production meetings. And it was certainly a little different than the week before.

Chunks Corbett, Executive Pastor  Â

Filed under: Being Portable, Church Planting, Leadership | Comments Off

Church planting is no secret practice nor is it an exclusive club. In a city like Charlotte, it’s hard to find a school that doesn’t have a church plant meeting there on Sunday’s. Areas that have less church friendly school systems do portable church in the theaters.Â

And for those that have defied the odds and not disbanded after a few years, what is the timeline for getting their own building?

When does the “church plant� meeting in a portable location make the jump to a permanent facility? Is there a certain attendance or financial goal that you have to reach before you “get your own place�?

I’m no expert but we’ve tried to learn from other churches that have made the transition both successfully and unsuccessfully. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any secret formula for transitioning to a permanent facility. But I can tell you the top priorities that drive Elevation Church’s decisions on facilities (in order of importance) and some important questions to ask yourself:

1. Vision- How big is your vision? It all starts here. It sounds basic but this drives the rest of the factors for us.
2. Goals- How big are your goals? Numeric goals, for us, drive the direction we look for facilities.
3. Density- How dense is the area you are looking at? How many current attendees are in that area?
4. Capacity- Pastor teaches this all the time. God is an unlimited God whose blessing never runs out. Our capacity to receive that blessing is the limiting factor. We love full rooms at Elevation but the goal is to have (some) empty seats. Empty seats means we have more capacity to reach people. Our facility decisions on adding capacity.
5. Access- You can only reach as many people on Sundays that can access your building at a given time. This requires some forward thinking. This is also a lot of the reason why a lot of churches do multi-site.
6. Money- Probably number one on a lot of church’s lists.  Â

In the end, if money is the number one factor driving our facility decisions then I’ve just cut myself out of finding anything with good access in a dense location near our current attendees with more capacity to meet the goals that the vision drives. And I’ve also limited God from being able to do what only he can do.

Making the shift to a “permanent� location is a complicated process. Multiple campus strategies make it even more confusing. But I love it, I love thinking about it, and I love researching what’s out there. And if we don’t continue to factor in the above priorities and make facility changes, then we will stop growing which is not an option.

Chunks Corbett, Executive PastorÂ

Filed under: Being Portable | Comments Off

In just a short 21 month period, Elevation Church has experienced tremendous numerical growth. I think a lot of people think that growth has been easy and that we have not had to deal with the issues that most “portable churches� deal with. That would be a big, fat NO.

We currently meet in two high school auditoriums. We don’t have to deal with the summer blockbusters like my friends in the movie theater but we do have fall and spring high school productions. Take this weekend for example. I received an email on Friday telling me there was a set on the stage for a play and we couldn’t move it. So we did what we had to do for church to happen. We lost 2 screens and built the stage out over the seats and had Elevation-in-your-face.

Last spring we battled Beauty and the Beast for 5 weeks. This included a Sunday afternoon show that required us to be out early. We elected to just shorten our 3 services rather than cancel the last one. That was Elevation-Express day.

When you are limited by your facility on Sunday’s, you have several options. Do we try to hide the fact that our set is different so people don’t know? Do we just announce what’s going on and apologize? Or, do just change our set and act like we planned it? All are valid and we have tried them all.

I guess my only real takeaway from this is that whatever you do, try to change it up. People will get tired of having to deal with the same problems at the school or movies. Change it up when faced with adversity. Stay creative and excited and leverage those times to do something different. Don’t just settle and accept a mediocre Sunday. Never let the circumstances around you take away the passion for why you do what you do. And lastly, know that nobody is immune from portable woes.

Chunks Corbett, Executive Pastor
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Filed under: Being Portable | Comments Off