What You Must Know as Your Church Moves from Portable to Permanent (part three)
We’re continuing a series on taking a congregation from a portable location to a permanent one. Don’t jump in mid-stream: get started here.
Every portable location has its rhythms: drive to the storage unit. Hitch up the trailer. Head over to the facility. Roll off the road cases. Unpack the road cases. Do church. Throw it all in reverse.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Portable may very well be exhausting: setup mornings start well before the sun comes up, and the last trailer gets put away well after our friends have polished off their second helping of hashbrown casserole at Cracker Barrel. For our staff and our volunteers, the week in and week out of the weekend is quite literally a heavy lift.
But we can agree it’s a familiar lift. If you have a good portable system, trailers and road cases and bins and supplies are carefully labeled, meticulously organized, and pretty replicable even with the addition of new volunteers. We get in our rhythms and routines, we settle into familiar lanes, and we can lather-rinse-repeat those lanes in record time.
That’s why moving to permanent involves a second major mind-shift, and that is
2. New systems = new muscle memory
I’ve talked about muscle memory in this space before. In that context, it was applied to our overall ministry standards. So while this context is slightly different, the overarching principle remains. There is a standard when it comes to portable campuses. And unless you’re highly unusual, there will be a different standard when you trade in early-morning trailer unloads for a turnkey worship space that is Sunday-ready.
Here are four areas where you’ll see new systems, and therefore must develop new muscle memory:
Volunteers’ roles will change.
I can’t overemphasize how many leaders and volunteers I’ve seen who are caught off guard by this one. Portable worship spaces naturally form unique serving opportunities and relationships. People who don’t feel like they can serve in “traditional” ways (kids ministry, guest services, worship) are all too happy to drive a truck or throw some muscle behind a road case. And the nature of portable means there is a shorthand, an insider culture, a band of brothers and sisters that builds among the volunteers in those trenches.
So when you go permanent, you dare not leave those volunteers behind. You have to specifically plan for their ongoing serving opportunities and relationships. For some, they will have grown enough in their non-traditional serving roles that they’ll be comfortable stepping into more traditional areas. And even for those who aren’t ready for that, remember that permanent spaces aren’t completely free of portable needs. Every week you’ll need a team to set up and tear down a-frames, feather banners, traffic cones, First-Time Guest tents, and the like.
Don’t be so quick to celebrate the end of portable needs that you forget your portable volunteers.
Resource management will change.
As I think of our five campuses that have made the portable-to-permanent jump, I can’t help but think of those familiar artifacts which went from necessary to optional. Portable campuses required certain snacks for our Volunteer Headquarters, because those snacks had to survive the heat and cold of a trailer sitting on a lot all week. Portable staff members had to tote radios and iPads back and forth each week, so they could get a full charge in the church office. Portable kids’ spaces required all sorts of “extras” – floor mats, dividing walls, and temporary signage – that were only required because the rental facility wasn’t naturally set up for it.
But a permanent facility means that some of those necessities are no longer required: radios and iPads can be walked a few steps to a secured resource closet. Kids’ rooms come with carpet and signage built in. Granola bars can be traded out for grits bars (don’t knock it ‘til you’ve loved it).
As mentioned in the last post, permanent gives the opportunity for a different kind of stewardship: that which is sustainable, scalable, and not beholden to what can fit in the trailer or in the trunk of our Corolla.
Weekday maintenance will change.
And speaking of what can fit in a trailer: the care and feeding of your road cases and storage trailers is a hard thing, because those are fickle things. If you accidentally set your clipboard on top of Road Case #1 as you’re rolling it into Trailer #3, and you don’t realize you didn’t grab it until Trailer #3 is already padlocked and backed up to the wall at the storage yard, well my friend, you ain’t gonna see that clipboard until the following Sunday (not that this has ever happened to me, multiple times).
Taking care of our road cases – organization, inventory, repair, purging – is typically an only-on-Sunday scenario. So it makes sense that we should be excited about the opportunity to do those things during the week.
But what I’ve found is that a permanent, easily-accessible storage closet can become just as forgotten as that clipboard in the front nose of a trailer. There has to be careful intention behind how you care for your stuff. There’s a new layer of leadership discipline you must add. You have to block off time to organize, inventory, repair, and purge, or your closet can become white noise that will eventually be a cluttered mess.
Leadership challenges will change.
Finally, a specific word to the leaders: those of you reading this who are in paid or volunteer role where you have others under your care. If there’s a fourth shift that has to take place with your muscle memory, it’s in exactly how you lead. Again, trading portable for permanent means you’re trading one kind of volunteer team for another. You’re stewarding resources in a different way. You’re spending your daily focus time on different things.
It can be easy to look ahead to just how easy a permanent facility will be, but trust me when I tell you that – at best – you’re simply swapping in one set of headaches for another.
We’ll get to some of those headaches in the next post, but for now, know that your leadership has to change to match the challenges. You’re moving out of chaos and into complexity. There will be additional volunteers to invite into service, additional teams to build, and above all, additional systems to define and refine.
You don’t have to be scared of any of these new areas of muscle memory, you just have to be aware of them and be prepared for them. You won’t drift into the new systems; you have to build them. Muscle memory doesn’t just form accidentally; it comes as a result of intentional repeatable systems.
