Portable Church or Permanent Church? Which Is Best for Your Ministry?

By Nathan Artt & Jeff Beachum 

One of the most important decisions in the life of a church is knowing when to move into a permanent space. Equally important (and maybe more so), you must decide how to move into permanent space.

For growing ministries, this isn’t a one-time event, either. 85% of the churches on the Outreach Top 100 lists are multisite, and over 40% of them are or have been portable. It is part of their ongoing growth strategy. The way churches go about moving, expanding, and re-allocating space matters throughout the lifecycle of a church.

In the past, we have seen so many fast-growing churches move into larger and larger facilities, only to see a shift in their culture from reaching people to paying bills. Inevitably, this almost always comes back to the multimillion-dollar decisions made over permanent space. 

Now, with the advent of the multisite option, churches are experimenting with things like spreading out overhead, adding new venues, and repurposing old ones. In this article, we are going to focus on this new mentality toward portable versus permanent churches. We’ll examine how portable setups can provide faster launch strategies and make it possible to establish more permanent roots in a community before shifting to a permanent setup — and how that change should eventually take place. 

The Benefits of Portable Space 

One of the key factors that must be understood to approach the portable/permanent church strategy is realizing that portable isn’t an inferior option. It is a powerful and effective approach to launching and building a ministry with some important benefits:

Culture 

We have to stop seeing portable church as a bad thing. Done right, a portable church can be an amazing prelude to a permanent facility. 

It is also a great thing when it comes to building the culture of your church. Every client we have helped move from portable to permanent space has had the same lament after the move: “We lost something about our identity.” When you work with a group like Portable Church Industries (PCI), you can intentionally capture the DNA, culture, and branding of your church from the get-go.

Being in a portable space is the absolute best time to engage people in the mission of the church. (It also goes without saying that, with lower administrative costs, there is more money that can go toward mission and services.) These opportunities that are more prolific in portable space provide more people with the chance to be a part of the story and not feel like a product of it. 

Flexibility 

The most valuable commodity in the life of a growing church is the ability to pivot. Flexibility is everything. Larry Osborne has said, “You have to have an exit plan that is as strong as your implementation plan.” 

When you’re in a portable space, you can pivot more easily with locations, staff hires, programs, and the like. As Jim Collins would say, this helps you shoot musket shots before you line up the cannons.

Portable space provides you with the opportunity to innovate and iterate, to see what is working and who is working. Once you get into permanent space, it gets harder to move walls and spaces. (What’s the old Churchill quote? "We shape our buildings, and thereafter, they shape us.")

Of course, these benefits come when portability is done right. That means you can’t launch DIY or dive in without enough funds. You want a strong core team, clear culture and branding, and a good street-to-seat design in place, which is where working with experienced support can help.

Why Move to Permanent Space?

In a word (or two): site control. A mentor who has been very successful as a real estate developer in Atlanta said that while location is the number one rule of real estate, site control is easily number two. The obvious problem with portable space is a lack of control over what happens and when.

If a law changes or a new principal comes into a school, they have the right to ask you to leave or take over space on certain Sundays, which is detrimental to a church that is looking to create a consistent experience and impact. This can also leave you with months or even weeks to find a new, comparable space in the area where your current congregation lives. 

The second reason to move into permanent space is growth. At Ministry Solutions Group (MSG), we’ve found that in certain markets (e.g., South Florida and the Northeast), some people have said that people don’t consider you a “real” church until you have your own space — even if that sentiment isn’t reflected by the larger Christian populations in those regions. 

But the biggest reason many point to is simply experience, specifically with young families. We live in a time when kids are bringing their parents to church, and one stereotype that haunts portable churches is the idea that they can’t facilitate high-quality junior church setups. (Even if, in reality, it’s perfectly possible and common to have quality children’s environments in a portable church.)

During the pandemic, as a collective Church, we taught and even rewarded people for sitting at home and watching our services online. Jeff remembers a consultation where a church leader lamented, “I spent tons of time and equity constructing and communicating a wonderful vision that seeded the growth of our church, only to find myself deconstructing the very same vision by my preferences and trying to create comfort.”

So, what is the number one reason that parents get off the couch and come to church to hear the same sermon in person they could listen to online at their convenience? When their kids are excited about going to church. 

We have consistently seen churches and campuses with 25% of their attendance in kids bump to 30% to 35% as soon as that church moves into a permanent space, which, of course, also creates an enormous amount of growth in adult attendance. Parents want a safe, dedicated, transparent, and fun space to put their kids while they are in service, and that is much more easily accomplished in a permanent space.

When Do You Know It’s the Right Time?

Eventually, every thriving church moves from a portable to a permanent setup. The question is, when do you know it’s time to make the leap?

There are both qualitative and quantitative answers to this question. When the team at MSG is working with churches, the starting point to answer this question is a reframing of the objective:

When it comes to church real estate, we are not funding buildings. We are funding ministry capacity. 

Our two rules for funding ministry capacity are:

1. We can afford this today even if we never add another person 
2. We are creating enough capacity where the capacity we are potentially creating pays for itself. 

If you have not maxed out your capacity in seats, parking spots, and kids within at least two services, we would recommend staying portable. However, if you are feeling cramped in your space and feel that you have completely maxed out your potential (or that you will within the next 12 to 18 months), then here are some things to think about. 

Funding Model 

MSG hosted an event with the CFO of Chick-fil-A, and I will never forget something he said: 

“Without margin, there is no mission” 

One of the keys to going permanent is being sure that finances are a servant to the ministry and not its master. We strive to help churches get to a point where their campus(es) create a self-funding model, where the church moves from an externally funded model (capital campaigns and debt) to an internally funded model (self-sustaining campuses). We do that by evaluating the financial model in three tiers: 

• Tier 1: Supported (a campus supported by a broadcast or L3 campus)
• Tier 2: Sustaining (a campus that pays its own bills and a share of central expenses) 
• Tier 3: Supporting (a campus with a surplus to support future L1s) 

The most important question in this model is whether or not you can move from portable to permanent and get to an L2 status in two services, whether you are evaluating a campus or your first permanent location. The third service and beyond are what create the surplus for future growth but should never be necessary for simply paying the bills. If that is not the case, then a permanent location becomes a short-term solution with long-term problems. 

Budgeting Factors

Another consideration is when you have enough margin in your budget to fund your future mortgage payments. One of the biggest — No, wait… the absolute biggest deterrent for churches being able to move into permanent space is that they are not budgeting for that permanent space now. 

You know you are ready to move into permanent space when you have already demonstrated the financial means necessary to do so. In short, if you are only creating $100,000 in margin and need a $200,000 annualized debt payment, you are not ready. 

The solution here? Simple. Begin budgeting for permanent space two to three years before you are ready for it. 

Space Issues

The Church is not in the real estate business. We are in the business of introducing people to a growing relationship with Jesus Christ. Real estate is simply a tool we use to accomplish that mission. 

One of the major benefits of filling up the portable space you are in before jumping into permanent space is that when you cast the vision for needing more room, no one is going to argue with you. In fact, trying not to turn people away helps a lot with fundraising. 

Our advice is to not consider moving into permanent space until you add a third service in portable space because you have to turn new people away. This could be due to seats in worship, children’s ministry, parking — it doesn’t matter. If you have not yet reached the point where space is an issue, sit tight, stay portable, and grow wherever you are.

Strategic Concerns

One of the biggest mistakes we see churches make is allowing for opportunities to define strategies. This leads to a short term solution that creates long term challenges. 

What does that mean, exactly? At MSG, we see a lot of churches see a space pop up and try to figure out how to make it work. This is very different from having a clear picture of affordability, funding, program, location, etc.

As an example, we’ve seen so many church mergers where a “free” building (which usually ends in millions of dollars of costs to renovate) puts them in a situation where they’ve borrowed a bunch of money for a building that doesn’t work for them. 

It’s extremely important to know the number of seats you need, which affects your children’s ministry, spacial requirements and parking, ceiling height, locations, flow, cost to return, debt, etc.

When you approach things this way, your strategy actively qualifies opportunities that arise. Otherwise, you will end up in a building that caps your growth. If you don’t know what you need or how you will pay for it, how do you know whether or not it’s a good opportunity? 

Discovering When to Go From Portable to Permanent

Jeff and the team at Portable Church Industries have made an excellent case for the fact that portable church works as long as you don’t dive in and figure things out by the seat of your pants. At Ministry Solutions Group, we’ve found that having a strategy in place when shifting from a portable to a permanent scenario further down the road is just as important.

Both of our organizations are striving to help churches gain the clarity they need to move forward at different points in the life of their ministries. At MSG, we do so within our Clear Path Forward process. If you and your team are interested in bringing clarity to your strategy of expansion and are considering moving into a permanent space, we would love to have a conversation! 

Feel free to click on the link below, and we will get back to you immediately.