New study results from Leadership Network reported by The Christian Post show that churches with multiple locations grow faster, reach more new believers and have more lay-person participation than single-site churches. The multisite church movement now includes more than 8,000 sites throughout the nation.
“More churches will continue to explore multisites, not as a tool for growth but as a means of taking the church to more people and taking a healthy church and reproducing it in other places,” said Warren Bird, Director of Research and Intellectual Capital Development for Leadership Network, during a web seminar Wednesday.
The minimum overall attendance recommended for going multisite usually begins around 850; however, on average, churches tend to expand to other locations when they have reached an attendance of 1,000 individuals, according to the report.
Bird said that almost half of the multisite churches they surveyed reported they would have opened additional campuses at a smaller size. Most of them began to expand when they had an attendance of 1,500.
He added, “We do know that with each passing year, more churches are moving sooner, thus smaller, to become multisite. Maybe in the future we’ll even see church plants regularly start with two sites.”
