If your church wants to expand to more locations, you must first know the questions to ask:  What does "going multisite" mean? And a "church plant" . . . is that the same thing? How do other churches make a decision to expand? How might it affect the leadership and operations within my church? In Episode 1 of the Alignment Conference Podcast, Brooke Hempell, senior VP of research at Barna Group, shares what she learned when asking church leaders around the country these same questions—all compiled in the More Than Multisite research study. And if you're not a numbers person, don't worry. In this conversation, Brooke helps make sense of the data in applying it to your vision of church expansion.

As an observer of the multisite movement over the past 20 years, I get excited to see that the movement is growing in rural areas. Whether you label the areas as exurban, fringe, or rural, it is pleasing to note that these places are becoming fertile ground for the multisite model.

When it comes to multisite church ministry, we find that there are so many approaches, ideas, challenges—and questions! Here are a few of the top questions we hear and tips on how to meet communication challenges.

Where do you get leaders? It’s a question I’m asked all the time and one you’ve probably wondered about. Do they just walk in off the street? Does God deliver them to our doorstep? Am I looking for them? Do I need to be looking for them in a certain way?

“The idea of multisite churches began as a bandaid solution for megachurches that found themselves out of room,” says Jim Tomberlin, founder of MultiSite Solutions.  

Whatever the churches in your neighborhood look like, stop for a moment, and consider the church that isn’t there. At least, that isn’t there yet. What will it look like? Who will attend? What will its relationship be with the people who live, work, and play in your zip code? How will it be built to reflect the values of those pastoring and attending the community?

If you want to ignite a culture of strategic expansion, you have to build for one–literally. But buildings require time and capital. For some churches, especially those that are focused on reaching more people for Christ as quickly as possible, the thought of building new campuses or investing in permanent space seems at odds with a nimble, frugal approach to launching multiple congregations.

New churches help new people find a way back to God. So starting new churches and new sites is a good thing. But if you want to plant more churches and sites, you need to be thinking about leadership development.

Pastors who are contemplating moving their church beyond a single campus face a variety of daunting questions: Should we plant or go multisite?

The multisite church may have been an innovative idea among large, cutting-edge congregations when they first started to appear in the 1980s. Now, though, multisite has become the mainstream model for expansion among healthy, growing churches of all sizes.