Portable Church–Building and All!

Churches that meet in rented facilities often learn to make everything portable. After worship, everything from projection screens to children's cribs get stored in a closet or trailer and then rolled away. Entire industries like Portable Church (www.portablechurch.com) exist to serve such situations.

Interestingly, I found a church that owns several facilities and yet behaves as if everything is portable. 

"Where do you go to church?"

"The Yellow Box."

Seems like everyone in Naperville, IL, would understand that conversation. The Yellow Box is just that—a conspicuous, two story, distinctively yellow box-shaped facility bordered by homes on one side and a well-traveled, business-lined avenue on the other. 

The church's actual name is Community Christian. Scott Thumma and I recently completed stop #7 there for our field study of megachurches. See reports here for stops 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Community Christian today worships on 9 different campuses each weekend. Some are facilities it owns like the Yellow Box and a 40-year-old church building from a congregation they merged with. Others are rented like a public school and a community center.

Yet the church lives as if everything needs to be portable and replicable. The facilities are used for many things just like a community center -- church, sports leagues, recovery meetings, school for the arts, cyber cafe, etc., and so most everything is stackable and storable -- see photos.  

That multiplication value goes beyond the equipment. Everyone has an attitude that they need to be training someone to reproduce their ministry, whether it's at the same campus, such as by adding another service, or at a yet-to-be-launched new campus. "Anything we do here needs to be able to be replicated somewhere else," one person told me. Another lay leader explained, "I've almost always had an apprentice leader in everything I do." And yet another said, "God's not going to send us more people than we can care for, so we've got to be ready."    

One outcome is the church's continual growth every year since its 1989 founding (see table on left). It seems so simple: stay focused on the mission of helping people find their way back to God, and then make sure there's room to welcome them, taking the church to wherever people can be reached. That means developing Christ followers with a vision to replicate themselves through others. “We’re all about leader readiness; that's just who we are” says Pat Masek, executive assistant to Lead Pastor Dave Ferguson. 

Warren Bird, Ph.D., is Research Director at Leadership Network, and co-author of 19 books on various aspects of church health and innovation.