Church Hub [4 Feb 2024] - Response
At the last church hub we addressed some questions live and committed to follow up with responses to all other questions raised over the next few weeks. Below, I’ve listed out all questions asked (excluding humorous comments regarding Ian’s glasses and the like!), gathered similar ones together, and provided a response from the elders.
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Q1a: Is hope city still planning to church plant? If so, does it make sense to stay just now in the bigger church?
Q1b: New building, lots of great reasons to get excited! You mentioned growing as a church in a much bigger building, how does this tie in with the vision to plant?
Q1c: Is church plant still on track.
We’re committed to being a church that seeks to multiply disciples and multiply churches – we think that’s the only right response to Jesus’ Great Commission. Even if we were able to secure a larger building, that won’t change. We began a church planting process with Pat in September 2022 which has been slower and more challenging than we’d anticipated. It currently seems we will not be able to plant fast enough or plant out enough people to address our space challenges in the near term.
At the beginning of 2023, the elders presented a paper exploring the options for how we should respond to the growth we are seeing (see “Responding to Growth” on App homepage) which concluded a larger space was our preferred path forward, and identified four “doors” which God would need to open for that to be possible. We remain in a middle ground where no doors have been closed and some are decisively open. We are trying hard to keep this process moving forwards.
We believe that a larger space enabling continued growth for Hope City in the next few years will ultimately help us plant more and better. Leaders are broadly acknowledged as the key constraint on church planting – and are a particular challenge when planting with a bivocational team of leaders (as we aim to). We have struggled to effectively multiply leaders at our present size and believe a larger scale will give us more capacity to focus staff on this key enabler for church planting.
Q2: Is it in the future plans of the church, with this 4 story building, using some of the space for ministry training?
We’ll have space for all manner of things and we’d love to use that to pursue the goal of being a leader multiplying church. That said, we don’t believe space is the key constraint on this – plenty of space free in our current building during the week. We’d be delighted to see the space used as a resource for the wider church but we anticipate there will be some constraints on what we can do arising from planning restrictions and other complex matters related to building regulations.
We currently believe our best viable option is to designate under half of the floor space as “place of worship” with the remaining space remaining in use as “office”, and that we will need to be the only formal occupier of the building to maintain rates exemption and to avoid triggering regulations which would require far-reaching upgrades of the building to current standards.
We believe this means we could not sublet space to a separate organisation as a full-time occupier – but will continue to be able to allow other organisations to use our space on an hourly basis.
Q3: Is there strong evidence to suggest that if we have more space, that we will grow?
On the one hand, there are plenty of large and largely empty church buildings in our city. Simply having a larger building clearly does not mean you will grow to fill it. On the other hand, there is good research showing as churches become fuller, growth slows. This matches our observed growth trajectory and gives us reason to believe we may grow faster, and further, in a larger space. As they say, “the proof is in the pudding,” though.
One of the reasons we are particularly keen on the building we have been pursuing is that it gives us the opportunity with relatively low risk to explore for some time whether a larger space really does benefit us before making a large commitment. Because of the way our lease on the current space works, we have no opportunity to exit until May 2025 (giving notice in Jan 2025). Lord willing, we will have some months in a new space to see if it helps with growth or has no impact where we have an easy opportunity to “retreat” back into our current space.
Q4: How much do we have in reserve?
At the end of January, we had £42,973 of unrestricted funds in reserves. Our “regular costs” (costs we are committed to for ordinary running of the church vs. special projects or optional spending we choose) for the last 12 months are £218k meaning reserves equate to ~2.4 months of regular costs, under the 3mo we target.
Q5: How do I know if my financial support was going into the right account of Hope City Church?
Please email finance@hopecityedinburgh.org to confirm your financial support has arrived with Hope City, and has been allocated to general funds or a specific fund you designate. In general, please provide as much guidance as you can to our team in the memo field of your transaction – the team are doing their very best.
Q6: When was the last time one of the elders taught or helped at HC Kids? How aware of the issues at HCKids the elders are? (lack of helpers, kids poor behaviour)?
There are elders serving in HCCreche but not presently in HCKids – however a number of our wives do serve there. Jo Rose, our ministry leader for Next Generation (0-18s at Hope City) oversees Mary Cameron, our team leader for HCKids. Both Mary and Jo teach regularly in HCKids, and Jo meets with Matt regularly to review this ministry area. We feel we are reasonably well aware of issues.
It’s a challenging yet rewarding ministry and we’re very thankful for a committed, gifted and hard-working team serving our children week after week with a heart for them to know and love Jesus.
Recruiting the appropriate number of team members to teach and help in HCKids and HCCreche is an ongoing challenge as it is for most churches with a significant number of families. You will probably have seen periodic notifications of opportunities to serve and the needs in different areas as a part of this. In addition, the team identify and approach directly people we think may be suitable. Please do consider whether this is somewhere you’d be willing to serve and let us know if so through https://hopecityedinburgh.org/serve
Different families and cultures have different expressions and expectations for social interaction so there will always be some degree of tension in a diverse church family like ours and this is compounded by the current space pressure that the team is working under. We’re thankful for experienced educators who serve within HCKids and have expertise in behaviour management and the challenges of integrating diverse classes with different learning styles and a mix of additional needs.
Our heart is to see every child at Hope City grow up knowing and loving Jesus and our conviction is that the primary responsibility for this lies with their parents, HCKids supplementing this. In Scripture, God commands children to obey their parents, and we are taught that discipline is a fruitful expression of love. We do believe we could be investing more in creating opportunities for parents to learn and grow in support of this and we hope to begin to make progress here this year.
***********************************
In case you would like to catch up, here's a recording of the Hub:
*********************
Q1a: Is hope city still planning to church plant? If so, does it make sense to stay just now in the bigger church?
Q1b: New building, lots of great reasons to get excited! You mentioned growing as a church in a much bigger building, how does this tie in with the vision to plant?
Q1c: Is church plant still on track.
We’re committed to being a church that seeks to multiply disciples and multiply churches – we think that’s the only right response to Jesus’ Great Commission. Even if we were able to secure a larger building, that won’t change. We began a church planting process with Pat in September 2022 which has been slower and more challenging than we’d anticipated. It currently seems we will not be able to plant fast enough or plant out enough people to address our space challenges in the near term.
At the beginning of 2023, the elders presented a paper exploring the options for how we should respond to the growth we are seeing (see “Responding to Growth” on App homepage) which concluded a larger space was our preferred path forward, and identified four “doors” which God would need to open for that to be possible. We remain in a middle ground where no doors have been closed and some are decisively open. We are trying hard to keep this process moving forwards.
We believe that a larger space enabling continued growth for Hope City in the next few years will ultimately help us plant more and better. Leaders are broadly acknowledged as the key constraint on church planting – and are a particular challenge when planting with a bivocational team of leaders (as we aim to). We have struggled to effectively multiply leaders at our present size and believe a larger scale will give us more capacity to focus staff on this key enabler for church planting.
Q2: Is it in the future plans of the church, with this 4 story building, using some of the space for ministry training?
We’ll have space for all manner of things and we’d love to use that to pursue the goal of being a leader multiplying church. That said, we don’t believe space is the key constraint on this – plenty of space free in our current building during the week. We’d be delighted to see the space used as a resource for the wider church but we anticipate there will be some constraints on what we can do arising from planning restrictions and other complex matters related to building regulations.
We currently believe our best viable option is to designate under half of the floor space as “place of worship” with the remaining space remaining in use as “office”, and that we will need to be the only formal occupier of the building to maintain rates exemption and to avoid triggering regulations which would require far-reaching upgrades of the building to current standards.
We believe this means we could not sublet space to a separate organisation as a full-time occupier – but will continue to be able to allow other organisations to use our space on an hourly basis.
Q3: Is there strong evidence to suggest that if we have more space, that we will grow?
On the one hand, there are plenty of large and largely empty church buildings in our city. Simply having a larger building clearly does not mean you will grow to fill it. On the other hand, there is good research showing as churches become fuller, growth slows. This matches our observed growth trajectory and gives us reason to believe we may grow faster, and further, in a larger space. As they say, “the proof is in the pudding,” though.
One of the reasons we are particularly keen on the building we have been pursuing is that it gives us the opportunity with relatively low risk to explore for some time whether a larger space really does benefit us before making a large commitment. Because of the way our lease on the current space works, we have no opportunity to exit until May 2025 (giving notice in Jan 2025). Lord willing, we will have some months in a new space to see if it helps with growth or has no impact where we have an easy opportunity to “retreat” back into our current space.
Q4: How much do we have in reserve?
At the end of January, we had £42,973 of unrestricted funds in reserves. Our “regular costs” (costs we are committed to for ordinary running of the church vs. special projects or optional spending we choose) for the last 12 months are £218k meaning reserves equate to ~2.4 months of regular costs, under the 3mo we target.
Q5: How do I know if my financial support was going into the right account of Hope City Church?
Please email finance@hopecityedinburgh.org to confirm your financial support has arrived with Hope City, and has been allocated to general funds or a specific fund you designate. In general, please provide as much guidance as you can to our team in the memo field of your transaction – the team are doing their very best.
Q6: When was the last time one of the elders taught or helped at HC Kids? How aware of the issues at HCKids the elders are? (lack of helpers, kids poor behaviour)?
There are elders serving in HCCreche but not presently in HCKids – however a number of our wives do serve there. Jo Rose, our ministry leader for Next Generation (0-18s at Hope City) oversees Mary Cameron, our team leader for HCKids. Both Mary and Jo teach regularly in HCKids, and Jo meets with Matt regularly to review this ministry area. We feel we are reasonably well aware of issues.
It’s a challenging yet rewarding ministry and we’re very thankful for a committed, gifted and hard-working team serving our children week after week with a heart for them to know and love Jesus.
Recruiting the appropriate number of team members to teach and help in HCKids and HCCreche is an ongoing challenge as it is for most churches with a significant number of families. You will probably have seen periodic notifications of opportunities to serve and the needs in different areas as a part of this. In addition, the team identify and approach directly people we think may be suitable. Please do consider whether this is somewhere you’d be willing to serve and let us know if so through https://hopecityedinburgh.org/serve
Different families and cultures have different expressions and expectations for social interaction so there will always be some degree of tension in a diverse church family like ours and this is compounded by the current space pressure that the team is working under. We’re thankful for experienced educators who serve within HCKids and have expertise in behaviour management and the challenges of integrating diverse classes with different learning styles and a mix of additional needs.
Our heart is to see every child at Hope City grow up knowing and loving Jesus and our conviction is that the primary responsibility for this lies with their parents, HCKids supplementing this. In Scripture, God commands children to obey their parents, and we are taught that discipline is a fruitful expression of love. We do believe we could be investing more in creating opportunities for parents to learn and grow in support of this and we hope to begin to make progress here this year.
***********************************
In case you would like to catch up, here's a recording of the Hub:
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