That building may bury your church

Be careful what you settle for.

I've seen it over and over. A church planter launches in a portable setting — a school gym, a movie theater, a rented space on Sunday mornings. And before they've really grown, they decide it's time to buy a building. So they buy what they can afford. Which is usually a building smaller than they need which will cap their growth. Something that seats forty to fifty people.

I know how that sounds. Like I'm anti-small. I'm not. I'm for small churches and big churches. Old churches and new churches. I'm for the church of Jesus Christ, whatever size He grows it to be. But church planting has a window, and what you do inside that window matters more than almost anything else you'll do as a leader. The first ten years are precarious. The first five are dangerous. And the first two — that's when the concrete is still wet. Decisions you make in that season don't just affect where you meet. They set a ceiling on what your church can become.

And when you buy a small building too early, that's exactly what you're doing. You're not just buying a room. You're buying a cap on your growth. If the building only holds fifty people, your church can't grow past fifty — not because God stopped moving, but because there's nowhere left to put anyone. This will also limit what your church can afford to do moving forward.

The Church Planter's Graveyard

Drive around your city. Mine, yours, every city I've been in — they're all littered with small church buildings for sale or lease. Less than fifty parking spaces. Seating for under a hundred. And here's why they're always available: this building is a church killer.

The pattern is almost always the same. A planter or church buys the building because it's cheap — or at least it looks cheap. It caps the church below a hundred people. Now there's debt attached to a building that can't grow. The planter is trying to draw a salary. Trying to grow a staff. Trying to reach the community. But the giving capacity of a congregation that fits in a room that size simply cannot keep up with the goals. The math didn’t work from the day they signed.

This is why so many church plants don't make it to their fifth birthday. They get stuck in no-man's-land — a building eating every dollar they have, and a building too small to ever generate the dollars they need.

Nobody's Running the Numbers

This is where I get frustrated with church planting organizations, coaches, and denominational leaders. I've talked to young guys who just assumed somebody had already checked the math. They assumed their denomination vetted it. They assumed the organization coaching them through the plant would flag a bad deal. They assumed if a bank was willing to lend on it, it must be a sound investment.

Nobody was checking. The building capped their growth, and now they're stuck — a space that doesn't fit their needs, and no path to grow past its walls.

Church planting organizations have to do better here. Before a planter signs anything, someone needs to be asking: can this building allow the growth necessary for this congregation to eventually support the building, the pastor, and the staff? If the answer is no, the plant is doomed before it starts. Encouraging a planter into a building that caps them isn't help. It's hanging a noose around their neck.

What we learned buying our first location

I say all this as a pastor who led their church to buy a building twelve months into planting. Thank God we bought one bigger than we could actually afford at the time — and the only reason we could swing it was because it came with commercial tenants paying rent that offset our cost. Over the years, as we grew, we ended those leases one by one and occupied the space ourselves. We added parking as we could. Thankfully the property had room to grow with us.

And even with all of that margin built in, our biggest problem today is space. We're in an 18,000-square-foot building, and our church needs about 30,000. We run two services and we're working to maximize every square foot before adding a third service. Even when you get the building decision mostly right, your building is still often the cap. Get it wrong on your first purchase, and it can be enough to sink the plant entirely.

A Rule of Thumb

Here's the guide I'd give any planter looking at a building. Take the average giving per capita in your congregation, and calculate it at 50 to 80 percent of the building's occupancy — not full capacity, not your best Easter Sunday. At that realistic level, will the numbers cover your mortgage and your current staff? And past that, will there be margin left to actually make a difference in your community, to do outreach, to add staff as you grow?

Or is this building the absolute most you can afford, with zero room to grow?

If it's the latter, walk away. A building that requires your best-case scenario just to break even isn't a foothold. It's a trap with a mortgage attached.

Cars Rule Everything

Here's a follow-up nobody talks about enough: parking. There are buildings all over your city that seat three hundred people and have forty-seven parking spaces. That math doesn't math. The average car brings two people to church, at best. I've got families in my church driving three vehicles each Sunday because they've got teenagers who each drive their own car. It is what it is — cars rule everything. You can have a beautiful building with five hundred seats, but if you've only got seventy-five parking spots, you will never fill that auditorium. The building was never the bottleneck. The parking lot was. I can tell you from experience it’s never been more difficult to add parking thanks to storm water run off regulations, zoning laws and regulations, etc. There’s a reason many new churches buy old K-marts. The pre-existing parking lot in an old shopping center can’t be built like that any more. Adding parking to your building may cost more than the building itself in some communities.

Why Scale Wins — Even Though It's Counterintuitive

I know as you read this you might think I'm just telling planters to go big. I'm not. I'm for small, if small leaves you margin to invest in outreach and do great ministry work in your community. But here's the economic reality: real estate costs the most per square foot on the small end. Go look up the cost per square foot on a small starter home versus a larger one — the bigger property is almost always the better value per foot. The same is true for commercial space. The smaller the building, the more you pay per square foot, and the more you pay in the long run, because you've also capped your future growth.

If you can't afford the bigger space yet, then wait. That's a real, legitimate answer. But don't buy the smaller space just because it's what fits your budget today, if it means capping tomorrow.

The Better Path: High Schools

If I were coaching a planter today, I'd point them toward high schools. High schools have some of the best auditoriums in your city, available for rent at some of the best rates, and — because teenagers drive to school — massive parking lots already built. It's the best value you'll find anywhere. Spend a few years portable in a high school, growing before you buy anything, and when you do move into your first building, you move in with the strength of a healthy, established congregation behind you — not the fragile hope of one that hasn't proven it can sustain itself yet. Far too many church plants are encouraged to assume debt before they've even proven the congregation has stability.

The Debt Problem

I'm not attaching a number to any of this. I don't care if you're planting a church of thirty or three thousand. The real issue is debt. There's a reason a paid-off church down the street can survive just fine with forty or fifty members — they don't have a mortgage hanging over them. As a church planter, you don't have that luxury. Unless someone hands you a building.

And that does happen. Build real relationships with existing churches in your city. Let people know you're looking for space. I know plenty of planters who were given a building outright, and that changes the entire equation. But if you're trying to plant a church that pays its bills, carries a mortgage, and supports one, two, or three staff members — and you're trying to squeeze all of that out of a congregation that fits into a room built for fifty to seventy-five people — the math will never work. No amount of faith changes the arithmetic.

Stop Selling the Dream Without the Wisdom

The sooner we're honest about this, the better off our church plants will be. We love to sell young planters a dream — God will do it, God will provide. And He will. But he's also given us wisdom, and wisdom says: look at the parking lot. Run the numbers. Ask what happens at 50 percent capacity, not 100.

There's a reason every city is littered with tiny church buildings for sale or lease. It's because the last person who bought or leased it didn't make it. That's not bad luck. That's a pattern — the same pattern, repeating in plain sight, in every city, right now. If we'll pay attention to it, we can stop sending the next generation of planters into the same graveyard.

Our most precious commodity isn’t space or money. It’s young leaders. If we keep sending young leaders into dead end ministry opportunities we will stifle their future and rob the kingdom of a generation of good men and women. I’m not writing this for the sake of saving money. I’m begging church planters and planting agencies to stop sending young couples into impossible scenarios and then wondering why things don’t work out.