After you get over the shock, you get real, look at options, make adjustments and announce plans that by some calculations might be considered staggering.

Newhope, the Durham church at 7605 Fayetteville Road named the 10th fastest growing in America by Outreach Magazine last year, has announced adjustments to its worship schedule to accommodate increasing attendance, along with the imminent launching of a new campus in the north Chapel Hill/Hillsborough area, and a long range plan to add additional space to its worship center.

On a recent Sunday, Pastor Benji Kelley asked the morning congregations to join a "family huddle" for major announcements regarding the direction of newhope Church.

Times for the three Sunday services will be shifted on Sept. 11 in order to help relieve overcrowding in the worship center. The 8 a.m. service will be moved to 8:15 a.m.; the 10:10 a.m. service in the worship center will stay the same, but a new Coffee House Worship in the Student Ministry Center will be scheduled at the same time. The third service that now meets at 11:45 a.m. will be moved to noon in the worship center, and a Latino ministry, Nueva Esperanza, will be added in the Student Ministry Center.

Preliminary discussions regarding plans for enlarging the worship center, which the congregation moved into only two years ago, are now beginning, according to Kelley. Preliminary ideas are to enlarge the center from its present 700 to 1,100 seating capacity and to add additional space for offices, children's nursery and student ministry.

Currently, newhope, which refers to its Fayetteville Road location as "Central Campus," has a second campus in Garner, launched this past spring. Organizers are seeking final approval for a location for a third campus in the Chapel Hill/Hillsborough area, Kelly said. Plans are already under way for a fourth campus in the Pittsboro/Sanford area in what Kelley refers to as the "newhope movement in central North Carolina."

"We now have people driving in from all these areas," he said.

Newhope, organized in Chapel Hill nine years ago with only the pastor, his wife and three children, has posted phenomenal growth. Attendance has grown from 600 in 2007 to 2,500 on most Sundays in 2011. Last Sunday's count was 2,600.

"We are at 90 percent capacity," Kelley said, "running out of space for projected growth."

From the beginning, Kelley said the church has vowed to do "whatever it takes" to fulfill the dream of the "newhope church movement."

The latest undertakings, although ambitious, are just another step toward realizing the dream to Reach, Teach and Release, the church motto, the pastor said.

About 100 people attended a membership class last Monday night.

"This was the largest class we've ever had," Kelley said. "What's happening at newhope is a God thing as well as the result of good leadership from a staff of 40 people."

While Kelley attributes this growth to God, the office administrator in the East District Conference of the Wesleyan Church says the explosion on Fayetteville Road has a more mundane explanation.

Pastor Darrell Scruggs said that newly planted churches often show rapid growth during their first few years.

"Also, this church has very good pastoral leadership," he said. "There is no doubt this is the case [at newhope] where the ministry is very relevant to the day and age in which we live and everything the church does is done with excellence."

Large churches like newhope are not unusual in the Wesleyan denomination, Scruggs said. In a listing of Wesleyan Churches in the U.S., five were listed as "mega churches."

Kelley, 40, is a gifted and charismatic speaker and leader. He leads worship in his blue jeans and heads up a young staff that plans creative and rowdy worship services. In addition to high voltage Christian rock, his congregation is never sure what Kelley and company may cook up on any given Sunday.

Recently, he rode onto the stage on his Harley and called on men wearing beards in the congregation to come forth to have beards measured. He made it clear during his sermon that it takes much more than a beard and a Harley to be a real man. "Finding your ultimate purpose in God makes you a man," the pastor said.

Although newhope worship may be described as "rowdy," this pastor's messages are well thought out, and he spends about 15 hours a week in preparation, he said.

In a sermon series on Christian marriage back in the winter, a queen-sized bed with bed skirt, coverlet and pillow shams was center stage - a strong symbol for his ideas on the subject, but also an innovative way to catch the congregation's attention.