Too busy to read a long message? This one’s important. Here’s the key points:
Dear Church,
At Hope City our central focus is seeing new people come to know Jesus and follow him. We are committed to equipping and challenging each of us to step out in everyday ways and share the hope that we have in Jesus with the world around us. And we’re committed to being a church that welcomes in people exploring what it would really mean to follow Jesus.
Many Sundays we’re very close to full in our main space and Hope City Kids is under intense space pressure too. This is why we’ve been talking over the last eighteen months about making room for growth: not so we can be the biggest church, or to feed our egos, but because our mission is our priority.
Being full can make us relax and take our “foot off the gas” in our mission because it looks like the mission’s accomplished; being full can make it awkward to invite people, and uncomfortably intense for them when they do come: each Sunday there’s a lot of energy; there’s a lot of noise; but there’s not a lot of space. Making room for growth is critical to our mission.
So what are we going to do? If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ll know we looked at our options about eighteen months ago and concluded a bigger space was the best way forward. We’ve been pushing hard on that through those last eighteen months. We’ve been on the cusp of securing something we think really might work – but we’ve been there for a long time now, and a few weeks back, we learned of another significant delay.
The Elders have been discussing how to respond – and we think our urgent mission combined with being so full means the time has come to move forward with an interim solution even as we continue to wait for and pursue a larger space.
If you read our original thinking on how to respond to growth you might remember our preferred “plan-B” was to pursue a multi-site solution - but plenty has changed since we did that thinking so we wanted to revisit our options. We arrived at a clear consensus – but around a different next step: multiple gatherings in our existing space each Sunday.
- We’re exploring moving to multiple gatherings each Sunday in our existing building.
- We need to know which gathering time you’d go to - or whether you’d be willing to go to either (pretty please).
- Fill out this short form: https://hopecityedinburgh.org/gatherings
Dear Church,
At Hope City our central focus is seeing new people come to know Jesus and follow him. We are committed to equipping and challenging each of us to step out in everyday ways and share the hope that we have in Jesus with the world around us. And we’re committed to being a church that welcomes in people exploring what it would really mean to follow Jesus.
Many Sundays we’re very close to full in our main space and Hope City Kids is under intense space pressure too. This is why we’ve been talking over the last eighteen months about making room for growth: not so we can be the biggest church, or to feed our egos, but because our mission is our priority.
Being full can make us relax and take our “foot off the gas” in our mission because it looks like the mission’s accomplished; being full can make it awkward to invite people, and uncomfortably intense for them when they do come: each Sunday there’s a lot of energy; there’s a lot of noise; but there’s not a lot of space. Making room for growth is critical to our mission.
So what are we going to do? If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ll know we looked at our options about eighteen months ago and concluded a bigger space was the best way forward. We’ve been pushing hard on that through those last eighteen months. We’ve been on the cusp of securing something we think really might work – but we’ve been there for a long time now, and a few weeks back, we learned of another significant delay.
The Elders have been discussing how to respond – and we think our urgent mission combined with being so full means the time has come to move forward with an interim solution even as we continue to wait for and pursue a larger space.
If you read our original thinking on how to respond to growth you might remember our preferred “plan-B” was to pursue a multi-site solution - but plenty has changed since we did that thinking so we wanted to revisit our options. We arrived at a clear consensus – but around a different next step: multiple gatherings in our existing space each Sunday.
Why this change of plan?
We’d originally preferred the idea of multi-site: one church, still, but meeting in several different places at the same time:
At the same time, we knew:
We’d originally steered away from multiple gatherings in our existing space each Sunday because every Scottish church we’d spoken to about it told us:
We also expected multiple gatherings would mean we’d no longer be able to have a weekly evening gathering (which included our small groups at the time), a major problem given how important those groups are to our strategy for community, mission and discipleship.
Thinking back through the advantages and disadvantages of the different options, the elders concluded:
On volunteer cost, we always saw a balance of arguments for and against the increased demands of multiple gatherings vs. multiple sites, and we have manage to keep participation high as a church meaning we are relatively well placed to take this on. Our most resource-intensive area is HCKids/Creche. Here the volunteer load would mostly be redistributed rather than multiplied up so long as we can find times which roughly balance the children at each gathering.
So, overall, we think multiple gatherings each Sunday is currently our best option without a larger space to move to – and we feel we have been “on pause” too long, waiting for that. It is time to prioritise our mission, to make room for growth even if that is difficult, even if it makes us uncomfortable - so it’s time to act.
We’re exploring launching multiple gatherings with the new school year in August if we can organise ourselves in time – but we recognise there is plenty of thinking and work to do on the way there, and we know we need to get started right now if we’re really to manage that.
- It’s a natural stepping stone towards church planting, our big dream.
- It benefits our mission: there’ll be a gathering closer to people you might invite.
- Most significantly, multi-site offered the best chance of preserving our diversity as a church in each gathering; different ages and stages; different nations and peoples.
At the same time, we knew:
- Another suitable venue could be challenging to find - and expensive.
- We’d need to buy extra gear.
- It would be a stretch for our leadership capacity.
We’d originally steered away from multiple gatherings in our existing space each Sunday because every Scottish church we’d spoken to about it told us:
- It placed a very heavy load on their volunteers.
- They ended up with families and children clustered in one gathering with everyone else in another.
We also expected multiple gatherings would mean we’d no longer be able to have a weekly evening gathering (which included our small groups at the time), a major problem given how important those groups are to our strategy for community, mission and discipleship.
Thinking back through the advantages and disadvantages of the different options, the elders concluded:
- We might be able to find a pair of gathering times which would give us a good mix of people in both gatherings.
- We still have good hope for a new larger space in time so we’re only searching for a short-term solution, and we still don’t believe we are ready to multiply churches; we think we need more time and scale to get properly ready. So, although multi-site is a better stepping stone towards planting, that’s probably not our next step.
- We’re also feeling the pressure financially which makes the higher cost of multi-site weigh on us more.
- Small groups have already been moved away from Sunday evening gatherings so that’s no longer a downside of multiple gatherings.
On volunteer cost, we always saw a balance of arguments for and against the increased demands of multiple gatherings vs. multiple sites, and we have manage to keep participation high as a church meaning we are relatively well placed to take this on. Our most resource-intensive area is HCKids/Creche. Here the volunteer load would mostly be redistributed rather than multiplied up so long as we can find times which roughly balance the children at each gathering.
So, overall, we think multiple gatherings each Sunday is currently our best option without a larger space to move to – and we feel we have been “on pause” too long, waiting for that. It is time to prioritise our mission, to make room for growth even if that is difficult, even if it makes us uncomfortable - so it’s time to act.
We’re exploring launching multiple gatherings with the new school year in August if we can organise ourselves in time – but we recognise there is plenty of thinking and work to do on the way there, and we know we need to get started right now if we’re really to manage that.
Questions you might be asking:
What times would we go for?
We have some ideas, but we haven’t decided. We need to hear from you what you would do given a few different time pairs, then work out if there’s an option that balances people well.
How are we going to approach doing things twice for two gatherings?
We think we’ll ask our bible teachers to teach live and do Q+R at both gatherings - given we have developed a significant team, this isn’t too much extra load on any individual. We think we’ll end up with different teams serving the different gatherings for almost everything else rather than asking people to do both.
How will this work for music?
We love the richness of our music and the way so many people can be a part of making that happen – but we don’t think we could ask a volunteer band to play both gatherings on a Sunday, and we don’t think we could make two different bands work each week with two different rehearsals and two different sets of music.
We think we’ll aim for the sort of bands we have at present only at one of the two gatherings each Sunday, rotating between them, and have something much simpler, leaning heavily on our staff musicians to anchor small bands at the alternate gatherings – and that should reduce the load on our critical sound team, too. This does mean we need enough time between our gatherings for a different band to set up and rehearse – so our two gatherings have to be at least 90 minutes apart if not more.
What about provision for children?
Everyone we talked to who’d tried multiple gatherings here in Edinburgh found all the children and families ended up at only one of their two gatherings – even when that wasn’t what they were aiming for. We don’t think that’s healthy for church family – and if that happens, we’ll still have a space problem!
We plan to offer HCCreche and HCKids at both gatherings, and we’ll try and pick gathering times which result in a good number of babies and children at both gatherings – and a viable number of teachers, leaders and helpers too. We’re avoiding some common timing options which were very likely to end up with exactly this split.
This is why it’s so important that we know which gatherings you, and your family if you have one, would be willing to go to: we need that information to figure out if this could work, and we need you to be as flexible with gathering timings as you can be.
What about the livestream?
We think it would make best sense to have a consistent timeslot for the livestream to help anyone joining us online. That probably means only one gathering would run a livestream – but maybe there’s an opportunity in offering something live at another time of the day. Right now, our livestream attendance is over 10% of our in-person attendance – so it’s genuinely significant.
We’ll begin to build out a set of frequently asked questions and our responses to them over the next weeks as we get closer to our planned launch.
We have some ideas, but we haven’t decided. We need to hear from you what you would do given a few different time pairs, then work out if there’s an option that balances people well.
How are we going to approach doing things twice for two gatherings?
We think we’ll ask our bible teachers to teach live and do Q+R at both gatherings - given we have developed a significant team, this isn’t too much extra load on any individual. We think we’ll end up with different teams serving the different gatherings for almost everything else rather than asking people to do both.
How will this work for music?
We love the richness of our music and the way so many people can be a part of making that happen – but we don’t think we could ask a volunteer band to play both gatherings on a Sunday, and we don’t think we could make two different bands work each week with two different rehearsals and two different sets of music.
We think we’ll aim for the sort of bands we have at present only at one of the two gatherings each Sunday, rotating between them, and have something much simpler, leaning heavily on our staff musicians to anchor small bands at the alternate gatherings – and that should reduce the load on our critical sound team, too. This does mean we need enough time between our gatherings for a different band to set up and rehearse – so our two gatherings have to be at least 90 minutes apart if not more.
What about provision for children?
Everyone we talked to who’d tried multiple gatherings here in Edinburgh found all the children and families ended up at only one of their two gatherings – even when that wasn’t what they were aiming for. We don’t think that’s healthy for church family – and if that happens, we’ll still have a space problem!
We plan to offer HCCreche and HCKids at both gatherings, and we’ll try and pick gathering times which result in a good number of babies and children at both gatherings – and a viable number of teachers, leaders and helpers too. We’re avoiding some common timing options which were very likely to end up with exactly this split.
This is why it’s so important that we know which gatherings you, and your family if you have one, would be willing to go to: we need that information to figure out if this could work, and we need you to be as flexible with gathering timings as you can be.
What about the livestream?
We think it would make best sense to have a consistent timeslot for the livestream to help anyone joining us online. That probably means only one gathering would run a livestream – but maybe there’s an opportunity in offering something live at another time of the day. Right now, our livestream attendance is over 10% of our in-person attendance – so it’s genuinely significant.
We’ll begin to build out a set of frequently asked questions and our responses to them over the next weeks as we get closer to our planned launch.
What next?
We are very aware this is a major change, and we’re sure it will be a major challenge; we’re not suggesting it because it sounds cool, fun or easy - but because we feel the time has come for us to make room for growth without more delay. Please do pray with us that the Lord would direct our steps and preserve our unity as leaders and our unity as a church as we walk forward into this challenge.
Many of you had the first chance to hear this live at a Village Lunch; to discuss a little and share thoughts and questions. If you didn’t, or if you’ve had more thoughts since then, we’d love your feedback: concerns, hopes, ideas and any questions raised: https://hopecityedinburgh.org/feedback
Here’s the really important thing: We are considering three pairs of gathering times to begin with; hopefully one of these will work as a pair which balance our church well. Please can you tell us which you’d pick out of each pair for the next six months – or whether you would be ok with going to either.
Many of you had the first chance to hear this live at a Village Lunch; to discuss a little and share thoughts and questions. If you didn’t, or if you’ve had more thoughts since then, we’d love your feedback: concerns, hopes, ideas and any questions raised: https://hopecityedinburgh.org/feedback
Here’s the really important thing: We are considering three pairs of gathering times to begin with; hopefully one of these will work as a pair which balance our church well. Please can you tell us which you’d pick out of each pair for the next six months – or whether you would be ok with going to either.
Try and think it through: remember many serving roles will need extra time before or after the gathering. Think about your kids, if you have any, growing up over the next six months. You probably want to give the same answers for each person in your family – so if just one of you responds, we’ll copy those across to the rest of you.
We’re going to use what you tell us here to evaluate each option in some pretty serious detail, thinking about kids classes, team sizes, key roles – so pick something you think you could manage out to Christmas.
Grace and peace to you all,
Matt and the Elders
We’re going to use what you tell us here to evaluate each option in some pretty serious detail, thinking about kids classes, team sizes, key roles – so pick something you think you could manage out to Christmas.
Grace and peace to you all,
Matt and the Elders