Though my background is inventory, procurement, etc. I’ve not even thought to adapt those principals to church metrics like this too.

Great idea to adapt common business metrics like inventory turnover and just in time capacity planning to improve our stewardship. This has me thinking for sure.

Great question. I wish I had a simple formula to answer, but I don’t.

Here are some factors we consider:

1) How old is the campus? (The newer it is the faster we’ll typically add.
2) What time of year is it? (We usually grow most in January and August and less in May/June.) It would be rare that we’d add an experience before a typical valley time.
3) What is the spiritual climate? Is God doing something that you can simply “feel” or sense or see? If so, we’d be more aggressive.
4) Where can you move people? For example, if we have a Sunday 10 a.m. that is full by an 8:30 that is half empty, I’d move people to 8:30 before adding a 1:00 p.m. or Saturday night.
5) Once we’ve moved people and are hitting about 80% capacity, we tend to add.

We are not as worried about having a half full (or much less) experience.

Ultimately, we consider these factors, but the decision is born out of time with God. Sometimes, I’ll ignore all the indications and go with what I believe God is saying.

Great questions. Our philosophy is quite a bit different from yours (although I totally respect what you are doing).

We never open a campus without at least two experiences. We rely more on the midweek Life Groups to drive the intimacy than the weekend experiences.

We have found that for the most part, people do come to the same weekend experiences. The biggest reason they might change experiences for the weekend is when they have a conflict of schedules. The good thing is, they can still go to worship with other believers just on a different day or time.

Our fear is that going to multiple services in a given location will inhibit the relational cohesiveness of a given congregation/family. No numbers to back this up - just our thought at this point. Craig, what has been your experience when it comes to offering multiple services in the same location - especially on the same day? Do you find that people “waffle” between the services or are they able to connect and grow effectively?

In thinking about seat turnover, I wonder what the relationship is to worker turnover from a business perspective? What is the realtionship of retention to turnover? Just thinking out loud. I’d love to hear your thoughts. I appreciate your heart and your outside-the-box thinking.

Moreover, Willow Creek recently revealed that apparently attendance doesn’t produce disciple-makers.

Here in Indy, we’re considering what really MIGHT drive godly success and accomplish the Great Commission in our city…

http://cityreaching.pbwiki.com/Indy%20Scorecard

Our church bought the land, no loan, for a much larger building. But then I saw our new building schedule and we won’t move in until 2020.

I get this feeling that somewhere along the way (or from the word go) wanted to be better stewards of the resources we had.

We opened up another campus. Our attendance increased.

This weekend, our seat turn will be about 16+. On average, conservatively, I am thinking 9+.

We started paying band members once we had four experiences (on two days). We paid them because we wanted to honor their time.

We chose to use the same band for the whole weekend. I know many churches who use multiple bands on multiple days and do it well.

Why?

Among other reasons - to leverage band practice time.

When the band (all volunteers except me) practices music for the week it becomes difficult to motivate them to really strive for excellence when you are only playing one service. I have AMAZING volunteers, that’s just the reality. The more services you play means you get to leverage the time you spent practicing those songs that week. Essentially, how hard would you work on a song when you knew you were only going to play it once vs. when you know you will have an opportunity to play that song multiple times?

With that said, I am also curious about Matt King’s question and how you addresses the issues of volunteers and multiple services:

When relying on volunteers how many services can you do before you are burning them out? Is you whole worship team paid staff? Do you use multiple volunteer teams on the same weekend?

I would love to get peoples thoughts and maybe include some of this info in my next part if nobody minds and link back where needed.
Here is the link:
Church Intelligence

Keith

Even if your assumptions were true, it is still a measure of missional effectiveness. What our campus pastor has us do, for example, for big events like Easter, is tell the regular attenders to come at a different time to make room for the people who are more likely to be guests. Even if you only sat 100 people in a place, if you had your regular attenders at other times, and filled those 100 seats with new guests, I’d say that would be pretty effective!

But I’ll also agree with Craig and say that those times are not the only effective times for outreach, although it may be the most effective time for someone just wandering by.

The challenge for architects and consultants (my day job) is going to be to find creative ways to maximize what churches already own–and as you mentioned–to be able to adaptively reuse spaces such as shopping centers, etc. We are also seeing a lot of cool projects on the design table that are shared between churches and the communities in which they serve.

By the way, if you are into metrics there are some cool free tools in the resources section of Strategic Dimensions website at http://www.strategicdimensions.com/worship_resources.htm