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When Should Your Church Start Another Worship Service?

Many times, it happens like this scenario:

The capacity of your church’s sanctuary (auditorium, worship room, multiministry room, whatever you call it in your congregation) is around 220 and your church attendance is picking up. Your average attendance passed 150 a month or so ago and you continue to see new faces. You look at the records for the last few decades and you find that three times the church has grown to between 170 and 180 and then retreated.

The congregation went down to about 100 before it started this last resurgence under the new young pastor who is a very good speaker and has lots of new ideas. The changes he has proposed seem to be paying off, and many Sundays the sanctuary feels full. Some of the folks are very excited about it, and most of the rest feel good about it.

There are, however, some who are getting nervous that the church is not the same.

You’re thinking that it’s good that it’s not the same, because people are finding the Lord and want to join the congregation, but you also see a problem.

Last week, when the children sang in worship, there weren’t enough seats, and the ushers had to scramble to add chairs down the center aisle and in the lobby. The pastor was almost ecstatic and you were just about as happy.

On the other hand, Mr. and Mr. Brewster, who have been in this church for over 50 years, arrived a little late and a new family was seated in the Brewsters’ usual place. For years, you had heard how much the Brewsters love the congregation and how they want to see it be strong and growing, but they looked very unhappy when they had to sit in the lobby.

Since the new pastor has been at your church, there has been talk about adding on. You talked to a friend of yours who owns a company that builds supermarkets and other large buildings. He gave you what he said was a very ballpark estimate of the costs to build a new room for worship and you know that those costs were well out of reach. You even discussed it with the pastor, and he estimated that the attendance would have to just about double before a major building project could be considered.

If the church continues to grow, the size of the sanctuary will very soon be a problem.

The growth has not been meteoric—just 7 or 8 percent per year—a pace that you hope continues. If it does, the church will begin to feel crowded and there will be no room for continued growth. At the board meeting, the pastor passed out an article that said if a worship facility is more than 75-80 percent full, growth is severely retarded. Your church is getting close to that mark, and your research shows that, in the past, the congregation had stopped growing every time it reached that level.

A few times, the pastor has mentioned starting a second service. Until now, you have not been excited about that. In fact, you are still not particularly excited about it, but you see it is probably the best solution to the problem that is looming just ahead for this church.

Now what? What’s the best way for a church to move to two worship services? How do you get the congregation to accept the idea?

1. Clearly make the case to the lay leaders using the statistics and vision.

2. Ask lay leaders who accept the idea to help get the rest of the church on board.

The major objection will likely be, “We have always been a family and we won’t know everybody any more.”

The truth is that if the church is larger than 50, they don’t all know each other anyway. Having one service preserves the illusion that they do and changing to two services kills that illusion. Adding a service will not make them know less people, and it may broaden their friendship circle.

The best way to counter this objection is for the members to be more uncomfortable than people the church could reach that are being left out. Perhaps ask, “Who do we want to tell to stay away?” Also, it is important to give the members time to process the idea of two services.