By RaeAnn Slaybaugh
Genesis Metro Church was founded in 2002 with humble beginnings. Ever since, the church has seen explosive growth largely because Lead Pastor Tim Bourne and his team have bravely stepped out in faith.
So – critically – has its building partner.
The story of Genesis Metro Church begins simply: with Lead Pastor Tim Bourne’s call to reach the unchurched. It’s what inspired him not only to break ties with the more traditional denomination he’d spent his career serving, but to start a new church, in a new state, with no budget and no people.
“I grew up in an atheist household, so I have a strong desire to reach people that are outside of the gospel,” Bourne explains. Thus, at 28, he and a student pastor began researching cities across America. “We landed on Frisco [Texas] as the place that we felt called to go,” he recalls. “We moved there and started Genesis Metro Church.”
They began by offering small groups within the fast-growing DFW suburb. Soon, the church began hosting worship services at a local elementary school. Eventually, they bought and revitalized a 25,000-square-foot plumbing-supplies warehouse, transforming it into a 350-seat worship center.
Meanwhile, Executive Pastor Ben Berberich and his family were leaving a non-denominational Bible camp in Iowa, where he and his wife served as associate directors, for a secular job in Texas.
“As a family, we wanted to find a church before we purchased a house,” he shares. “We somewhat stumbled into Genesis Metro Church and never left.”
Indeed, they didn’t; in fact, Berberich came on staff in 2015.
A foundation to grow on
Thankfully, Bourne and Berberich had plenty of room to dream big, thanks to a miraculous series of events that enabled them to acquire a 12.5-acre tract of land along a major thoroughfare in Frisco.
Interestingly, this path to the land began with church leaders building an orphanage in Honduras with the first $100,000 raised for a building. Doing so — instead of putting down roots in Frisco, as planned — might have seemed counterintuitive. On the contrary; as Bourne explains, it was entirely in keeping with the church’s Kingdom-first mentality.
“It also unlocked a lot of opportunities that God brought our way,” he adds.
One of them was in the form of an introduction to a third-generation landowner who owned the highly desirable tract of land the church sits on today.
At the time, this acreage was accessible via a two-lane road bordered by cornfields. Today, that road is a six-lane highway; so the acreage is perfectly suited for a worship facility, with excellent visibility and accessibility.
Bourne inquired about the land with its owner. What followed was a years-long “dance.” Though the parcel perpetually had a “for sale” sign on it, Bourne was repeatedly told: “It’s not for sale. Look somewhere else.”
Further complicating matters, the landowner was a longtime member of a nearby Baptist church, not Genesis Metro. Even so, that church provided VBS materials for Genesis Metro’s first mission trip to the Honduras orphanage, where more than 1,000 people received Christ in four days.
“It was a Billy Graham crusade-like feel,” Bourne remembers. “I was trying to explain to our people — the vast majority of whom had never gone on a mission trip — that this was not normal. It’s atypical.”
When they all returned home, the landowner attended a service at Genesis Metro. Surprisingly, he offered to host a churchwide baptism at his home.
“Again, we didn’t have a permanent location yet; we were a mobile church,” Bourne remembers. “His house was about a quarter-mile from where our property is right now. We had about 150 people there and baptized 30 people in his pool. He grilled out for all of us. It was quite a time.”
That day, with the landowner’s blessing, Bourne filmed a video on the much-coveted acreage for the church’s first capital campaign. Sensing it was a significant moment, he picked up a 30-pound rock and told the person filming (the church’s marketing director): “If this ever comes to pass, this rock — just like in the Book of Joshua — will be my witness that this was the day that we walked this piece of property and asked God for our future.”
Fast-forward a year: Bourne and the landowner meet for lunch. As it turns out, the landowner had been withholding the property because he wanted his own church to plant a campus there — which his pastor had no intention of doing.
Finally, and prophetically, the $10-million parcel was offered to Genesis Metro for just $2.5 million. That night, the leadership team went out and celebrated.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves
All this is not to suggest everything went off without a hitch.
Sure, a lot of the elements were lining up just right. By 2018, when the time to plan their full relocation finally arrived, it couldn’t have come soon enough for Genesis Metro’s leaders. By that point, Bourne was preaching two Sunday morning worship services every week, with each regularly exceeding 80-percent seating capacity. Though more service times were added, the rapid growth continued.
Meanwhile, all the children’s ministry areas were pushing the limits of usable space. It was only a matter of time before they would officially “hit the ceiling” of the ministry they do in that space.
Knowing a building project was in order, Bourne and Berberich enlisted an architect but say they felt the disconnect early on. “We spent about three months working with them,” Bourne recalls. “In a nutshell, the problem was that it felt like they were more concerned about building their portfolio than building us the church we wanted.”
Discouraged, they called in Richardson, Texas-based Goff Companies. A family-owned and operated company, Goff works exclusively with churches, offering strategic planning, real estate services, church financing, and design-build solutions. Since 1996, their team has been involved in more than $750 million in church construction projects nationwide.
CEO Billy Goff was on hand for that first sit-down.
As Bourne recalls, they spent the first hour walking through the facility together — again, a repurposed plumbing supplies warehouse — to understand how Genesis Metro was functioning and, more importantly, what the church would need in its next home.
Over the next few weeks, Goff performed a Strategic Assessment for Facility Expansion (SAFE) for the church. Among other things, it identified specific barriers to further growth in the current facility.
“In short, our location was the greatest barrier,” Bourne says. “We were in the industrial part of Frisco, so we had no neighborhoods that were tangential to us, or even close by. If you didn’t know where you were going, you weren’t going to find us.”
Street parking was another big problem. It not only caused accidents, but no more than 300 people could park without major issues. And by then, the church was welcoming nearly 400 people at each worship service.
Further, the SAFE process identified the ‘cracks’ that were starting to show inside the former warehouse. The roof leaked. Water was getting through and under the retrofitted doors. Winds were wreaking havoc on the structure. The list went on.
With the SAFE identifying the church’s growth trends, ministry model, building use and local demographics, a plan was formulated to align the vision of church leadership with the church’s funding capacity.
That last part — the funding — needed to be approached strategically; Genesis Metro would need to sell its current building, while still needing a place to meet, while also raising significant funds, while also borrowing the remainder. That’s a lot of moving money parts.
Although multiple sale agreements for the building fell through, a buyer finally stepped forward that would purchase the building and lease it back to the church until its new facility was completed.
In another stroke of good fortune, acquiring the land for only 25 percent of its actual value afforded a lot of leverage when it came to funding the new building. (This built-in equity was especially important because the church would, of course, need to own the land outright to build on it.)
Ultimately, Genesis Metro relied on a combination of profits from the sale of its building and exceptional capital campaign. (Amazingly, the church raised twice its annual budget in just six months.) For the remainder of the funds, the Goff team prepared a Loan Request Package that resulted in multiple offers for financing.
Finally, with Plan Documents completed, construction was set to begin…
But then COVID happened (A familiar refrain, no?)
The pandemic shut down the world just 15 hours before Genesis Metro closed on its loan and started its building project. Instead of breaking ground, leaders canceled in-person worship for almost three months and delayed construction for a year.
“Now the question became, What can we do to get this baby born?” Bourne recalls. “That’s where Billy [Goff] really showed up and became our preferred contractor. And it’s fair to say that we both had to take some steps of faith in order to move forward during that crazy time.”
Ultimately, the church and Goff weathered the pandemic-inspired storm together. In the end, the Goff team updated the Loan Request Package, and a new lender was engaged. The church raised additional funds and, finally, construction began.
But even with COVID behind them, all was not smooth sailing: the church faced almost unprecedented cost increases and supply-chain deficiencies when it was time to dust off the plans and begin the re-launch process. Prices on primary construction components had doubled; lead-times had tripled.
Here, as before, the Goff team served as a guiding light.
“I think that’s when our partnership became more of a marriage in a lot of ways — for better or for worse, with a really a high level of dependency on and trust for each other,” Berberich shares. “Once we were in it, there was really only one way to move: forward.
“Without them, I don’t know how we would’ve overcome a lot of the pandemic issues, between inflation, supply chain, and so on,” he adds.
Case in point: steel and other components were ordered almost a year before construction was scheduled to start — pre-pandemic — to avoid delays after breaking ground. Though none of them could have predicted COVID at the time, it nevertheless proved hugely beneficial to the project’s bottom line.
When the concrete company that was mid-pour on the church’s foundation went out of business after the pandemic, Goff triaged the situation, avoiding domino-like delays.
When electrical switches finally arrived (after an eight-month delay) and none of the internal components were in place to power them, the Goff team supplied used parts they had on hand, in the interim.
Blessings upon blessings
True to form, it seems like nothing would keep Genesis Metro Church from realizing its God-given vision.
When the project was completed in Fall 2023, it included a 650+-seat worship venue, a large commons area, and a two-story, state-of-the-art children’s ministry space.
For longtime church members, the new facility is the realization of a 20-year dream.
“I would liken it to the children of Israel going through the wilderness in order to get to The Promised Land,” Bourne says. “Being in an elementary school, then in a plumbing supplies warehouse, none of our people ever thought we were in our forever home; relocating was always the plan. So, the overwhelming receptiveness of the standing members has been outstanding.”
Beyond this, explosive attendance growth began immediately at the new facility. In Genesis Metro’s former building, a good Sunday with two services welcomed about 600 people, and as many as 800 on Easter. In the new church home, weekly attendance doubled in the first month.
Within the first 13 months, membership tripled in size.
Thus, in January — years before Bourne anticipated needing one — yet another expansion was clearly in order. Again, he enlisted Goff Companies; this time, they would add 400 seats to the worship space, bringing the space to more than 1,050 seats. The goal would be two-fold: finish in time for Easter 2025 while also enabling the church to continue worshiping in the new sanctuary throughout its expansion.
Thanks to an expandable worship space design put in place from the beginning, both objectives were met, and even exceeded: this year’s Easter services welcomed an incredible 3,700 people!
Now, Genesis Metro Church continues to grow in attendance and community impact. By Bourne’s estimate, between seven and eight people become church members every week, and roughly 40 families attend worship services on any given Sunday.
During the week, it’s not uncommon to find Pastor Berberich giving tours to other church leaders who are considering their own building projects.
Collectively, it all speaks to the necessity of having the right vision, the right place, and the right people in place before any foundation is laid.
“I would say to all pastors: a compelling vision is where it all ends and begins, but there are some basics that cannot be overcome,” Bourne advises. “If you’re interviewing contractors and they seem to not care about or understand where you’re going, that’s a red flag.”
He also emphasizes the importance of embracing the leap of faith.
“With any project like this, there’s almost always going to be a point of decision when it’s going to feel unsafe. But I don’t recall any Bible story where it’s always safe,” he explains. “If your vision is anointed — if it’s from God, if it’s in your heart and soul — then pursue it with everything you have. God will bring the right people. He will lead you to the right place.”
