Starting Additional Services at Your Church

Many things should be considered before starting additional/multiple worship services at your church. Here are some things pastors have learned in so doing:

• Never add a service to an existing schedule. Change the entire schedule or people won’t adopt the new schedule like you need them to do.
• Get people to commit in writing to making the move to the most likely least attended service. Be creative, challenging, but not pushy.
• Bring the heat (lots of intensity) in your first service. Don’t allow crowd size to diminish your intensity or the intensity of your service. Don’t make people miss the service they just left.
• NEVER refer to a service as “the early service.” Refer to them by their time slot. Don’t create a stigma for that service that may not exist.
• Do identical services if at all possible.
• Meet with your critical players to work out bugs in between services. Correct on the fly.
  Ask your people to serve in one service and attend another.
• Leave sufficient transition times. If parking is limited, consider that in your planning.
• If you are at 70% capacity, you need to be launching a 2nd service. The only people that like big crowds are preachers.
• If you are at 80% capacity, you are losing people. At 80%, people cannot sit together OR they are forced to sit in places they don’t want to sit.
• When you launch a 2nd or 3rd service, you can manage the crowd size with pipe and drape. If at all possible, never let your crowd fall under 40% capacity. Pipe and Drape or the creative arrangement of chairs can keep you in that sweet spot of critical mass.
• Strategically reward your key, high-output volunteers (gift cards, hand-written notes, sincere pats on the back).
• Never ask, “What is the least number of people we need to pull this off?” View additional services as a recruitment opportunity. God fills vacuums. So, don’t limit what He wants to do.
• On low days (Labor Day weekend, Memorial Day weekend), combine services and roll with a packed crowd to build and maintain momentum and to rest your key leaders.

[From Missional Church of God by travjohnson]