Pathway · Newly Established
The launch worked. Now build the institution that outlasts your energy.
Your church is somewhere between eighteen months and three years old. The first crisis is behind you; the second is coming. What kept you alive through launch — the pastor's willpower — will not scale into year five. This is the window to write the institution down.
The three quiet risks of years one to three
The pathway is designed against the three failure modes that catch most young churches by surprise: founder-dependency, process debt, and quiet drift. None of them presents as a crisis until it has already cost you a season.
1. Founder-dependency
When one person carries the vision, the schedule, the theology, the finance approval, the volunteer recruitment and the last-minute Sunday fix, the church is not an institution yet — it is that person's shadow. The pathway names every dependency and hands you a rota for delegating them.
2. Process debt
Things get done because you and three friends remember how. Nothing is written. When one of the three friends moves, the process moves with them. The pathway gives you a Sunday run-sheet, a volunteer onboarding, a giving procedure, and a safeguarding policy that will still work when the friends are gone.
3. Quiet drift
What launched as a discipling church is subtly becoming an event. What launched as a hospitable congregation is subtly becoming a clique. The pathway teaches you to measure five numbers monthly, and to notice the trend before it becomes a story.
What you will build
- A written 3-year operating plan for the church
- A governance document you can hand to a lawyer without embarrassment
- A finance stack you can hand to an accountant without shame
- A staffing model with named roles, not personal favours
- A discipleship pathway from visitor to leader
- A dashboard of five numbers your board sees each month
“We survived our launch. What MBS gave us was the discipline to build a church that would still be here in ten years, whether or not I was.”
How you will study
The Ministry Executive Program is the flagship fit for newly established churches. Four semesters, self-paced, with a 1:1 mentor conversation each semester and a written artifact from every module.
The next three years decide the next thirty.
Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
Apply now