The First Campus Team You Recruit Before You Ever Sign a Lease

There is a moment in a growing church when the room feels full, the parking lot gets tight, and you start dreaming about the next thing. Maybe a second service. Maybe a campus down the road. Maybe a plant across town. And almost immediately, your mind runs to logistics: Where would we meet? What would it cost? When could we sign a lease?

Here is the gentle correction I want to offer, pastor to pastor. The first thing you recruit is never a building. It is a team. Multiplication is not fixed by a location. It is carried by people. And if you get the people right before you ever sign anything, you set your new work up to bear fruit for years.

Why people come before property

The research on new works is honestly exciting for smaller churches. A new work's first five years grow about 170% faster than its later years. People in churches under five years old are 31% more likely to invite others to faith and 52% more likely to share their faith than at any other point in a church's life. New works are also cheaper: a median of about $460 per first-year attender to start, compared to $1,667 per attender in ongoing annual cost at churches over five years old.

None of that comes from the lease. It comes from the people you send. That is why the first campus or launch team you assemble matters more than any square footage or signage. And it is why a hard truth applies here: multiplication will not turn around a sick church, but it can extend a healthy one. A team is only as healthy as the church that sends it.

Recruit the sending core first

Before you talk facilities, gather your launch core. For a new campus, the numbers give us a clear target: a minimum launch core of 75, with 100 or more being ideal. That core is your first recruit. These are the volunteers, worshippers, and inviters who will carry the culture of your church into the new space.

This is where smaller and newer works actually have an edge. Single-site churches drew 53% more regular volunteers than multisite campuses, because the smaller the group, the greater the percentage of people who get involved. So when you recruit your first team, you are not diluting your church. You are creating the exact conditions where people step up and serve.

Recruit and grow your leaders, not just your attenders

Here is the readiness gate most pastors miss. For a plant, readiness is measured by leader supply, not money. The question is whether you are training elders and co-pastors fast enough to keep up with your growth. There is no financial minimum on a church built to multiply. As the saying goes, the resources are in the harvest, so fund from fruit, not from a budget floor.

Build multiplication into your leadership culture early. Among new works, 74% carry a future-multiplication vision and 60% intentionally multiply their group leaders. Talk about multiplication early, openly, and often, long before you need a campus pastor. And when you do hire that campus pastor, do it 9 to 12 months before launch, not the month before.

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Staffing follows a simple rhythm: roughly one paid staff member per 100 attenders. So your first team is not only volunteers. It includes the leaders who will shepherd them.

Start with the cheapest move, not the biggest one

If you are under or around 100, a full campus is likely not your first step. The multisite thresholds (growing at least 5% per year, facility 80% full at optimal hours, a sending church well over 100) assume a much larger sending body. That does not mean you wait. It means you start smaller.

Nothing grows a church faster than starting something new: a new group, a new service, a new campus, or a new church. Sequence it cheapest-first. Start a new group. Then a new service. New groups reach new people that closed, aging groups simply cannot. Each of those is a team you recruit, on a smaller scale, and each one builds the muscle you will need for anything larger.

Know the phases you are building toward

When you do plant, design it to reproduce from the very beginning. The five plant phases move from Conception to Gestation to Birth to Maturity to Multiplication. Notice that multiplication is baked in as the goal, not tacked on at the end. And you do not have to do this alone. Joining or forming a network of pastors who each covenant to plant one church a year turns isolated effort into a movement.

The point in all of this: your first recruit is a sending core, your second recruit is your leaders, and your building is somewhere much further down the list.

What to do next

Stop planning the room and start naming the people. Before you research locations or costs, take an honest look at your health (that is the true gate) and then begin praying over and inviting the first members of your sending team. If you want to see where you stand on the 100+ milestone horizon, walk through the /assessment and explore the /milestones so you know whether your next move is a new group, a new service, or something larger.

Your challenge this week

Write down the names of five people who could form the seed of a future launch team, and this week, invite one of them to coffee to dream out loud about starting something new.