Services, worship, venues, and the systems that scale.

Sundays as a picture of the Kingdom

When most people think of church they picture a Sunday gathering. It’s easy to slip into a religious ritual, ticking a box. But Sundays are designed as a place to encounter God. In the Bible the temple wasn’t just a building, it was the center of community life and the place where God’s presence dwelt. Today each of us is a temple the Spirit dwells in. So how much more beautiful when God’s people gather. It’s a picture of paradise. A glimpse into the Kingdom Jesus announced. Celebration, worship, the teaching of the word, transformation. That’s what we want our Sundays to be.

At the beginning or early stages of your plant, the Sunday gathering might be one of your first gatherings, or it might come later. Either way, it carries weight. How you set it up is key to how people engage with each other and with Jesus.

Timing

The timing of your service is a big part of the initial draw for people. Is it too early? Too late? If you’re starting with one service, and I would suggest starting with one and growing it to consistency before launching a second, how do you choose?

Think of the future first. Then pick a time that’s between the two services you eventually want to run. Say you’d love a 9am and 11am long term. Start with 10am. That gets people comfortable in the middle, and when you go to two services you’ve got a better chance of splitting cleanly. If you started with 11am and jumped to 9 and 11, the 11 stays full and the 9 starts from scratch. A 10am moving to 9 and 11 splits more evenly.

The timing of your service is also a key component of how you structure gatherings. Whatever your length is, keep it consistent. As your regulars grow, people like to know. If your service is dramatically different every week in length, you lose trust. Try to hold close to your goal, 1 hour, 90 minutes, whatever works in your context. This doesn’t mean rigidness. Leave room for the Spirit. But have a goal and a schedule.

Connection

Service starts with connection. We don’t see service as starting when the music starts. Service starts the moment someone walks into the venue. The connection time before service is as integral as the worship and the word. It could be the moment someone feels at home, decides to plant here, opens their heart to Jesus. The emphasis you put on this time could be the deciding moment for someone.

Appearance matters. Whether you’re in a rented school hall or your own building, there are small things that cultivate a space people want to walk into. Clutter and neglected spaces say something about the pride you have in the house.

A few keys for the connection time. Welcomers at every threshold, ready to greet with a smile, trained, with a heart for the one. Refreshments, coffee or tea free for guests, set near team members who can talk and connect, a great catching point for someone new who doesn’t know what to do before service. Clear signage. You don’t need a million signs, but the language and wayfinding should be clear and inviting. People should be able to see where to go for kids, bathrooms, service areas, without having to hunt or ask. Keep your branding consistent throughout, fonts, colors, design, so it feels like one whole.

Service

When you’re running your own services there are many elements that help. You’ve been a part of probably some of the best services of your life and some of the cringiest. Each had things that worked and didn’t, and your context will have its own unique things that work and don’t.

A lot of your service at the beginning depends on your resources and your team. The principle is: always stretch, always play within your game. Small incremental changes that you can pull off will grow and help you find your groove. Like golf, if you know you can’t hit the shot but your ego is getting the best of you, it isn’t the smart play. We have to be mindful as leaders, we’re overseeing volunteers, leading a community growing to love Jesus, leading a new person who’s never experienced God’s love. Run in your lane. Don’t let ego pick the shot.

Example, your worship team. You’d love to sing a specific song, it’s your favorite, it’d be great for the church, but the team is growing and it’s too complicated right now. Pick the song they can achieve. Let them lead a great moment in what they can do. Chew on mediocrity, but don’t get an appetite for it. If you’ve come from a big church with all the resources, and now you’re planting with a new team and none of those resources, you have to know where you’re going and also where you are. You’re wise about how hard you push.

The principle that matters most in the beginning is a culture of feedback. It’s not the fancy worship, the lights, the perfect speakers. It’s the feedback culture you build your team on. Celebrate the wins every Sunday. Make sure there’s security and safety for feedback. Be wise about when to say something and when not to. That’s how you shape an incredible service experience, through trust, confidence, and a growing team. They know you’re in it together, so they want to grow and get better. The gifting, resources, and people will come. The culture has to form first.

Worship

Worship and word are the two most prominent parts of a service after the fellowship time. Building a strong worship team isn’t just about gifting, it’s about heart. How your worship team carries the culture is how your church will experience God through worship.

Worship is unto God first. And in leading worship unto him, you’re also aware of serving the people in the room. Teach your leaders from the start that it isn’t their own solo God moment. They may have a powerful relationship with God personally, but leading worship is more than that, it’s serving people. A worship leader having an intimate moment that doesn’t connect to the room is serving themselves, not the church. That’s true for everyone on stage, preacher, worship team, all of it. An audience of One first, and then also for the one, the person that came in hungry, the person that showed up that Sunday in need of an encounter.

Be prayerful about empowering worship leaders. Don’t rush. Don’t be afraid to give space to grow. It’s easy to empower on skill alone. Skill grows. Heart for worship has to be foundational. We’ve made the mistake of empowering on gift and having to make hard leadership shifts later. Pick the people that build the heart around worship. Authenticity over performance. That’s a difficult balance on a stage, because performance sneaks in fast. Value authenticity, and the quality will come in a genuine way rather than a gift-focused one.

Worship leaders have to have a focus on their word and prayer life. Things happen, there’s grace, but you can’t compromise the values of your church for a gifted singer. Make hard decisions in the early days. That’s the foundation you’ll build the whole team on.

Venues

In the first ten years of our church we were in over thirty-eight venues across New York City. In the early days I had to learn the power of venue negotiation. Churches are often seen as not capable of being business-minded. Being business-minded doesn’t mean you’re not kingdom-minded. It means being aware of your budget, having a clear picture of what you can spend, and being wise in negotiation. You may love a venue and not be able to afford it. Be careful not to fall in love with a venue outside of good stewardship.

When we were launching our first weekly services, I found the perfect venue in Williamsburg. A music venue right in the center of the neighborhood. When I first reached out they wanted ten to fifteen thousand dollars a Sunday. Out of reach. But I didn’t stop at that first conversation. After negotiating we got it to five hundred a Sunday.

I could have walked away after the first number. Instead I proposed what we offered. I shared how we’d add value to the community. I was honest, this is what we can afford, is there any way you could consider it. Clear, confident, a clear reason why we were adding value. We promised they wouldn’t have to worry about a thing, we’d leave it better than we found it. That built a great relationship. We were there for our first two years as a church.

Some venues don’t work out. When we launched our second location I found a venue in a new neighborhood. At the first service we filled the space, and the owner told me after they didn’t want us back. They didn’t want a church in that space. We’d just launched a whole location, marketed it, told our church about it. At that moment I was frustrated. God said, why would you want to come back there. You already filled it, there’s no space to grow, I have a better place for you. Sure enough we found another venue and grew into it.

You have to know your limits and also know when you can stretch. My faith never wavered when we needed to find a venue because God always came through. Closed doors don’t mean no, sometimes they mean something better around the corner. And push as hard as you can. A business person selling a product isn’t going to have more conviction than you selling the gospel in a city. Don’t lose your conviction because someone says no.

All of this works best when it’s birthed in prayer. Even the smartest venue negotiator is only as strong as the prayers behind it. At one point our eyes were on an iconic music venue nearby. Friends told us no church had ever met there, there was no way they’d let us in. We decided to persist. We reached out, negotiated, talked to not just the building manager but the owner over multiple venues across the city. The first answer was no, but we continued. Georgie walked the neighborhood with our son and laid hands on the outside of the venue, praying that it would be a house of God. A place that hosted major artists and thousands of people, known for being a place of worship.

Through those prayers the no’s got lighter. The conversation continued. We showed professionalism, excellence, timeliness, respect of the space. You’re a client, but a different kind of client, the Kingdom comes through in how you carry yourself, not always explicitly but in kindness and strength. The no turned to a yes. We signed a contract and became the center of that neighborhood. We still meet there today. That’s what relationships build. Not just inside your church, but outside of it, in your city.

Portable church

Your launch may not be a portable model, but there are elements here that apply anywhere. Whether you own your building or set up and take down every week, a portable church culture has a lot of strength.

First, it’s all about the team. A great team is make-or-break for set-up and take-down culture. Not owning a venue actually has real perks for a plant. It creates more leadership roles and more room for people to grow. The church isn’t built on a pastor and a handful of leaders running everything, it’s built on a leadership team with an army of volunteers. Ownership grows because people see their presence matters. If they weren’t there, something would be missing. That’s valuable in a way that just attending a service isn’t.

A key part of portable church is timing. Two pitfalls. Not enough time creates an anxious environment where people feel rushed and excellence falls through. Too much time creates a relaxed culture where excellence also falls through, and burnout or apathy creeps in because people aren’t sure their time is being spent well. Find the sweet spot. The amount of time that gets everything done with room to breathe. Enough for everyone to have something meaningful to do. People serve because they want to bring their gifts, if they see they’re not needed they either shrink back or stop coming altogether. The specific amount of time will be different for every church, but the point is it matters.

The key principle is organization beforehand. If all the right conversations happen before Sunday, the team comes prepared, everything runs smoothly, and you as a leader can spend your focus caring for people rather than filling gaps. Especially when the team is small, you set the culture from day one. Everyone is talked to before Sunday, everyone knows their role, their responsibility, who to go to with questions.

Communication after is just as important. As you pack down, make sure there’s encouragement and celebration. Personal encouragement, a feedback culture that notices the big things and the little things together so the team can grow for next week. Care for your team well through hospitality. Food. Even as you’re small and growing, let some of the budget go to the team. When they’re hauling bins and setting up equipment, food lifts them physically and sets them up spiritually for the day.

Equipment and systems

From the start, no matter if you have one box or a hundred, the organization of your equipment is critical for caring for your items and for caring for your team. How you organize affects the culture. A disorganized system tells volunteers two things: you don’t value the church’s finances, because every bin and machine is someone’s giving, and you don’t care about the ease of their serving, because they have to figure it out every week.

Labels and color coding matter. Create a system that isn’t just in one leader’s head. Print it. Share it. Put it on the equipment room wall, the truck, the storage area. That lets people jump in and serve without needing onboarding every week. It also creates scalability. Sometimes a team gets stuck because the system lives in one person’s head, and when they’re not there, everything breaks. Plants get stuck here more than people realize. Have scalable systems from the start. Labeled, organized, printable, accessible, teachable. Always have new people learning them, never dependent on the one person who knows where all the cords go.