Piling On People

In 1998 I started a church in Virginia Beach. We grew really fast. After starting with 4 people, we added about 80 in one day, then another 150 in a day, and grew by 100-200 every year for a few years. It was exciting, but we weren’t really set up for that kind of growth. That’s (at least) part of the reason the growth slowed.

I love the quote from Ben Lerer, CEO of Thrillist on the best lesson he learned in 2012. He says, “We grew like crazy in 2012, but we had a lot of growing pains. Make sure your structure is efficient before piling more people on top of it.”

One of the toughest tasks of church planting is building infrastructure. It’s not fun, and it’s often not the natural strength of church planters. But we’ve been working on it pretty hard the last year at Verve and I think we’re more ready for growth than we’ve ever been. Excited to see what God’s going to do in 2013.