I stayed at a Holiday Inn that had two oddities: an indoor swimming pool and a restaurant menu featuring ocean-caught fish.
The motel’s managers had realized they were open twelve months a year and weren’t just a stopover for summer vacationers on Interstate 94. What could they offer in the long Dakota winter? How about an affordable way to get warm (indoor pool) and a taste of the exotic (crab legs on the Prairie)?
In the same vein, winter ski resorts offer summer hiking and getaways, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway added a NASCAR race and a motorcycle race, burger joints added a breakfast menu.
In all cases, the logic is clear: if you’re paying the mortgage or franchise fee anyway, why not get maximum benefit? Keep a steady pace of business, avoid the pitfalls of semi-trained seasonal staff, make your assets more productive, keep your brand in front of people at all times.
The Multichannel Church grasps this logic. It seeks ministries and building uses that keep the church humming seven days a week, twelve or more hours a day.
Expanded usage pays off:
» Now the cost of maintaining relatively inefficient space makes sense.
» Staff can grow in quality and quantity.
» The congregation’s “brand” gets high recognition.
» Prospective constituents multiply.
» Some constituents, like teenagers who have no interest in Sunday church, can be engaged.
Those are enormous benefits that simply don’t occur when Sunday morning is the sole focus.
How do you get there? You need to think creatively.
To reach their year-round audience, Bismarck motel managers needed to think beyond summer vacationing. Vermont ski resorts needed to think beyond snow. McDonald’s needed to invent a breakfast menu and invest in technology to produce it.
In the same way, clergy need to imagine opportunities that go beyond their available hours and skills. Church leaders need to risk the expense and exposure that come with being heavily used. Church members need to rejoice in daily operation, even if it means stained carpeting and unusual people roaming the halls.
For a church, it’s about letting go, not just of facilities and tidiness, but of an identity grounded in Sunday morning worship.
What stands in the way? The usual obstacles, of course: fear of change, fear of strangers, risk aversion, me-first. Those obstacles can kill anything.
We serve an entire community, not just the handful we know. We need to believe that our community is open to us if we align ourselves with their needs. We need to think beyond our traditions of putting worship first and everything else second. (That isn’t at all what Jesus taught.)
