To become a multiplying church, you must plant churches. While most church planters dream of opening permanent facilities, the high cost, long lead times, and inflexibility can make this launch strategy impractical and unwise. Thus, churches wanting to multiply frequently start in rented spaces, such as schools, movie theaters and community centers, that give them the freedom to expand.

This is exactly what is happening through the Assemblies of God Church Multiplication Network (CMN). According to Chris Railey, senior director of leadership and church development ministries for the AG, more than 80 percent of all new churches are launching in rented spaces.

How can you do this cost-effectively and well without losing your mind? How have other churches and networks overcome the challenges of rented spaces — and thrived? It all starts with a team of volunteers.

Equip Volunteers

Church leaders often share that their biggest fear with portability is finding enough volunteers and keeping them engaged.

Launching strong in a portable site — defined as one that people must set up and tear down each week — requires more volunteers than churches in permanent facilities need. However, this can present an incredible opportunity for engagement and discipleship that doesn’t exist on a permanent campus.

Understanding what volunteers desire can help you bring them on board and keep them involved.

Church leaders often share that their biggest fear with portability is finding enough volunteers and keeping them engaged.

Volunteers want you to know them. Intentional discipleship of volunteers is critical for their growth and continued service at church. When it comes to setup and teardown teams, this is no different.

Churches that begin with a strategy of discipleship in the selection and care of their setup team leaders are more successful. This requires team leaders who see the setup/teardown experience not just as tasks to complete each week, but as opportunities to pour into people as they convert the venue into a sacred space.

Volunteers want you to need them. Some attendees, especially men, feel intimidated by the idea of serving as children’s workers, prayer team members or greeters. However, they will come early to drive trucks, move cases and set up the audio equipment.

Setup and teardown teams give these individuals an opportunity to feel needed. It provides a new on-ramp for interacting with others in your church. As they engage more, they will attend more and grow more — if you care for them in the process.

Volunteers want you to care for them. Over my 30+ adult years in church, I have served as a volunteer in many capacities. I have received the annual thank-you gifts of flowers, gift cards and meals. But over all those years of service, I felt most cared for and appreciated when the church invested in leadership development and the systems to maximize my impact as a volunteer.

I wanted to arrive at church knowing exactly what my role was, feeling equipped to do that role, and encouraged by my leader. As a setup and teardown volunteer for many years, I felt cared for when my church invested in a system that allowed regular volunteers without much experience to participate easily, set up effectively, create a welcoming environment, and then tear down quickly.

Seek Expertise

I recently crossed the Mackinac Bridge that connects Michigan’s lower peninsula to its upper peninsula. Completed in 1957, it remains the longest suspension bridge with two towers between anchorages in the Western Hemisphere. Construction took 3.5 years and, tragically, claimed the lives of five workers. As I was in the middle, 200 feet above the icy straits connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, I felt grateful for the expertise and skill of the engineers who designed it. I got straight A’s in math and science in high school and college, but that doesn’t mean I can design a bridge.

It turns out that designing outstanding volunteer-centric portable systems that deliver an excellent worship, children’s and visitor’s experience is an engineering specialty as well.

I learned this the hard way while serving as executive pastor of a Los Angeles church that didn’t have a volunteer-centric solution. Our staff tried designing its own portable systems for our two rented venues, with help from a company that normally served permanent church facilities. In short order, we wore out the volunteers and had to move to paid setup and teardown teams each week.

Now, as CEO of a company specializing in portable spaces, I have witnessed hundreds of churches utilizing our portability engineers to launch small and large churches with complex state-of-the-art audio, video and lighting experiences — using volunteers who can completely convert a school, theater or community center into a house of worship in an hour. The volunteers don’t even break a sweat and are available to serve in other areas on Sundays.

The right equipment and expertise are part of the equation for helping your volunteers succeed. And their success is crucial to building a thriving community and effective ministry that can launch even more churches.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2018 edition of Influence magazine.