The tale of two churches becoming better together in Raleigh, NC Southbridge Fellowship has been a growing church in search of a permanent facility for eleven years. Covenant Church has been a declining church for ten years and was considering selling the current location to relocate to a smaller and less expensive facility. When Southbridge inquired about the possibility of purchasing the Covenant Church campus on 10.7 acres, the Covenant Board responded with a bold idea—joining together! Two months later 93% of the joining church membership affirmed the merger to became better together as one. Here’s their story. . . “When another local church in town ask if they could join with our church, our leadership was very excited…. More
Courtesy of ChurchLeaders.com By J.D. Greear, Pastor of Summit Church in Raleigh, NC One of the benefits of being connected to other churches around the country is that we get to learn from each other. Sometimes that “learning” is a little more one-sided, where (for instance) I glean all of Tim Keller’s wisdom and he occasionally peeks over at what I’m up to. Most of the time, though, the Summit ends up being enriched by our friendships with other churches. When our church adopted a multi-site strategy a few years ago, even then the strategy was old enough for us to see how different people were doing it. Asking our friends and looking into the ways that others have… More
By Jim Tomberlin Courtesy of the Aspen Group In our consulting work at MultiSite Solutions, we get weekly calls from churches asking two questions: So, why should a church merge? Should we do this or not? When I meet with the two involved parties, usually two senior pastors or a senior pastor and a board member, we talk about the following questions they should also be exploring: Should my church merge? Would my individual congregation be better by joining with another church? Would we be stronger together? Could we accomplish more together than we could separately? Would we find more ministry synergy, created by the two churches joining with common vision and purpose? Would our community be better served by us working… More
Tim & Alicia Gilligan founded Meadowbrook Church in Ocala, Florida in 1989 with a vision “to move people from where they are to where God wants them to be”. Twenty-five years later with 4,000+ people worshipping across 3 services, Meadowbrook is launching its first multisite campus in the fall of 2018. Here’s how the Meadowbrook team explained the multisite strategy to their church. Check out more multisite church videos on the MultiSite Solutions YouTube Channel.