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Saturday, Aug. 09, 2008

Company offers portable churches

DETROIT — Starting a ministry requires little more than faith, but a Troy, Mich., company has launched a growing business by supplying all the tools the faithful need to get a new church on its feet.

Portable Church Industries was founded in 1994 as a consulting and equipment firm, offering services to congregations with temporary spaces. Today, the company has about 30 employees, and sells about 100 full church systems a year across the country, with growth of 20 percent annually over the past few years. Several Kentucky churches, including Bethel Harvest in Nicholasville and Buck Run Baptist Church in Frankfort, are on the company's client roster.

The company's calling card is a tabernacle in a trailer that holds everything a modern church needs to hold services for up to 400 people, from high-end audio and video equipment to children's toys for the nursery — with batteries already installed.

Portable Church's founder, Peter van der Harst, designed the kits around speed and efficiency. The gear comes loaded on a 24-foot trailer in custom-designed cases the company builds to maximize storage space. A Portable Church kit can go from trailer to service-ready in about 45 minutes — a key concern for congregations reliant on volunteers to assemble and tear down equipment every week.

Brian Koehn, Portable Church's general manager, says the company's customers are typically new churches holding services in rented spaces or ones waiting for newer facilities to get built.

”Picking everything up, putting it in trucks or SUVs ... it gets very tedious, week after week,“ Koehn said. ”We've really learned to appreciate having an efficient system.“

While a typical Portable Church trailer runs $75,000, Koehn says the kits cost less than what a congregation would pay to assemble its own gear and the ability to easily store equipment saves time and money. As churches have become more tech-savvy, the business has adapted: Portable Church's latest kits include flat-screen televisions.

Koehn said the sluggish national economy had affected the company's growth, but that it was working on less-expensive systems for smaller congregations — roughly $20,000 to $30,000 for kits that would fit a 12-foot trailer.

”Anything we can do to make it easier on the churches, we do,“ Koehn said. ”That way they can focus on what they do best, which is life change in their community.“