Leadership Lessons in Building Big

Dave Smith started Kingsgate Community Church in his front room with his wife and nine other people in 1988. Today 1,500 people gather each Sunday in the impressive Kingsgate building. To have grown to this size in any UK town would be noteworthy, but Peterborough is a relatively small place with a population of only around 160,000, which means that Kingsgate is already gathering a ‘tithe’ of the town.

Dave spoke about the leadership lessons he has gone through on the Wednesday evening of our Newfrontiers leaders Prayer & Fasting gathering in October, 2008. Prayer & Fasting takes place over two days, three times each year. We have used various locations over the years, but for the time being Kingsgate are kindly allowing us to use their building.

1. Harvest Vision
You have got to have big vision, a vision for people. Throughout the multi-million pound building project that has been Kingsgate Dave has kept the church’s vision laser-sharp on the fact that it is about people, not buildings. When the floor went down in the auditorium thousands of ‘miracle cards’ were set in a compartment under the concrete. These cards contained the names of people the church were praying for to come into relationship with Jesus, and pointed to the fact that the building was for people, not people for the building.

Kingsgate was built not because Dave and his team thought it would be nice to have a big building but out of necessity – there was nowhere else in the town big enough to accommodate the growth they were seeing.

2. Wise Planning
The auditorium at Kingsgate was not built as large as originally planned (1,800 rather than 3,000) in order to leave more space for parking, ‘social space’, children’s ministry, etc.

Wise planning means planning what you want and why you want it. It also means working on your team and taking their capabilities into account – sometimes money needs to be spent strengthening the team in order to be able to save money down the line.

3. Good Communication
For a vision to be successful there has to be widespread ownership of the vision.

Dave and his team worked hard at constantly reinforcing the vision in people’s thinking and explaining the ‘what’s & why’s’ of what they were doing. This was worked into preaching series, videos showing what the building would look like, and so on.

Above all, the vision needs to be rooted in the Word.

4. Financial Sacrifice
People do not give for buildings, they give for a vision!

Dave had worked hard at building a culture of generosity and financial boldness before going for a huge capital campaign. People were already used to giving generously before they were asked to give millions.

It is also important to have well organised campaigns rather than ad hoc gift days. Giving needs to be planned over years.

And it is vital that people trust their leaders – the leader needs to build credibility before making the big ask. At the bottom line people need to know the leader is going to stick around and see this thing through.

5. Personal Courage
Big building projects are challenging! It always costs more than you think it will – both financially and spiritually.

Tackling big projects tends to stir up spiritual opposition and the leader must be ready to face this.

6. Divine Favour
Dave spoke movingly of how they had experienced God’s favour in building Kingsgate, even when it seemed things had gone against them. For example, the first plot of land they went for was a six acre site, which did not pass through planning approval. But then they did get approval for a twelve acre site.

Throughout the process Dave tried to act with integrity, expecting to know God’s favour through it all. When the council turned down the initial application Dave encouraged the church to bless the council and speak well of them rather than abuse them and believes that the subsequent favour they received was a reflection of this.

Dave was also wise in never saying, “Thus saith the Lord” about a particular piece of land. Always the message he communicated was, “We will buy land.” This meant it was easier to pastor the church through the disappointment of losing the first site they went for.


David Smith from PLUGMEIN on Vimeo.