Twenty-Two Problems with Multi-site Churches

[Bert Perry]

driddick wrote:

Many are writing as if satellite locations don’t have pastors. Has anyone ever attended a satellite campus that didn’t have an on-site pastor (or multiple pastors in many cases)? I’m just not tracking with the thought process that people attending a video teaching location can not be shepherded and discipled by a pastor. Would welcome feedback on this.

Probably best to answer this with an acknowledgement and two questions. It is granted that it seems very wise to take the man who seems to excel at teaching and let him handle the lion’s share of it. Now the questions:

1. Are not all elders/pastors (Titus uses the titles interchangeably) called to be “apt to teach”? How do they demonstrate their fitness for their office if they do not get regular chances to do so?

2. For the “chosen one”, so to speak, how does he bring the text down to where the “rubber meets the road” if he is not actively involved in the lives of those to whom he is preaching?

So it would seem that, even beyond the relative anonymity of large auditoriums used for video screenings, the “video church” phenomenon is going to work against active discipleship.

Bert, question back at you…for your #2… Wouldn’t you be throwing out books, preachers who have passed on, and in a sense, even the Bible’s messages if you hold that a person must be actively involved in someone’s life to bring the text to bear upon the hearer?

I think a key metric to evaluate for the large and/or multi-site church is the number of churches they plant, and people they send out. For instance, if a church has 5 campuses in their city, at first blush, you say “Boo..multi-site.” Then you learn over the past five years they’ve sent 20 pastors and hundreds of individuals to plant completely independent churches across the country as well as in other countries. Not just random people in the church, but key pastors and leaders being encouraged to step out and plant. Wouldn’t that be the definition of discipleship and equipping? Preparing men and women to move out and start new congregations. When a church is focused on sending more than “growing” it has to mean something regarding the heart of the church’s leaders even if it’s coming from a large and/or MS church.

Regarding driddick’s questions:

It is certainly plausible that a multi-site church could theoretically rotate preaching duties so that all could be trained. Now what is the reality? If you have chosen a preacher to be televised based on his perceived ability, do you consistently give the pulpit to the “second, third, and fourth string”? The very premiss—based in the economic law of comparative advantage—is going to work against you in this.

Moreover, there is still the issue of whether the one preaching—first or tenth string—really knows the people he’s preaching to. Can the pastor of campus A really be aware of the needs/concerns of Campus B? Not without ESP or some such thing!

Which leads to Micah’s comment. I’m not saying that every bit of teaching needs to be done in light of the specific knowledge of the congregation. As he notes, we would have to discard Spurgeon, Matthew Henry, and (going out on a limb) even the Apostle Paul if that were true. What I am saying is that there will be consistent times in church life when it is important that the person doing the teaching know and understand those to whom he is teaching.

Example; the youth group in my former church was going through a video series that was actually pretty good in what it did, but what I noticed quickly is that the kids weren’t catching on to the topics—it was aimed at senior high/early college, and these kids were/are small town and were in junior high at the time. So we stopped it and started going through the book of Matthew. It was simply more relevant to them.

More importantly, I’ve learned that a “canned” video series (video pastor, canned Sunday School series) often serves to hide some pretty egregious shortcomings on the part of those teaching. Same setting as above, going through Matthew revealed quickly that other adult volunteers did not have consistent times in the Scripture. Now had the author of the video series been trying to pull a fast one, what are the odds they’d have caught it?

Make no mistake; I’ve got The Treasury of David, Matthew Henry’s Commentaries, and a host of other books on my shelves which I consult routinely. I just think that if we are seriously about the business of making disciples, we’ve got to be careful about this and need to consciously “take off the training wheels” to let God’s people grow. One especially bad form of “training wheels” is, in my opinion, the multi-campus church.

A S/I author is working on an article. Won’t give anything away other than to say - from what I’ve read so far it is very interesting.

What are the advantages of a multi-site church compared to having separate churches?

Also, what is the connection between groups that gather at different locations?

[Mark_Smith]

What are the advantages of a multi-site church compared to having separate churches?

Also, what is the connection between groups that gather at different locations?

Mark,

Below are the highlighted findings of the largest survey of multi-site churches conducted by Leadership Network. While all of the findings are not “advantages” some of them could definitely be argued as such.

Key Discoveries and Fast Facts
1. An impressive 85% of surveyed multisite churches are growing—and at the strong rate of 14% per year.
2. Churches typically go multisite in the 1,000 size range, though almost half say they could have become multisite at a smaller size.
3. Campus viability starts at 75-350 people, depending on your model.
4. The typical multisite church is just 4 years into the process, and 57% plan to launch an additional campus in the next 12 months.
5. One in three (37%) churches started a multisite campus as the result of a merger.
6. The vast majority (88%) of churches report that going multisite increased the role of lay participation.
7. The vast majority (87%) of campus pastors are found internally—trained and hired from within the church.
8. Multisite campuses grow far more than church plants, and likewise multisite campuses have a greater evangelistic impact than church plants.
9. Nearly half (48%) of multisite churches directly sponsor new churches.
10. The recommended distance between campuses is a travel time of 15-30 minutes.
11. In rating what campuses do well, spiritual growth and volunteering are near the top, and newer campuses do better at reaching the unchurched.

dmichah and driddick, I’m just wondering if you read the article, because it seems he responds to all of your questions in it, and brings up far more objections that the few you have tried to answer?

Dan

Good points raised. My question—really guided by years watching corporate executives fudge similar stats, and watching mega-churches come and go—is about whether that growth is sustainable, and by what measures they’re evaluating. Is growth from new converts, or is it poached from other churches? What are the measures of engagement?

Now I’ve got to concede that small churches are often deader than a doornail, and that’s going to drive a lot of people to big churches, but my take is that you’ve got to look very closely at stats before endorsing them wholeheartedly. (can you guess what I do for a living—think “Deming”, but I’m nowhere near as good as it as he was)

[Mark_Smith]

Why not just have the local facility have the local pastor do the preaching? I can only think of one reason to have a multi-site church….a celebrity preacher. And by extension the local people wanting a hot, hip preacher. Where am I wrong?

Would something like a mother-daughter church plant be sufficient? I could see that working if a pastor were helping launch a new church about an hour or so away, at least until the new church had its own minister.

Dave’s post was interesting:

I have attended one of the satellite campuses of Driscoll’s church while visiting relatives. I thought that at least for the services I was there, they handled it very well. At the service where we got Driscoll’s message by video, the local pastor actually led the first part of the service, and the music was local as well. After the message, the pastor announced that he and other counselors were available after the service, and they remained near the front so anyone could find them. The other service was entirely local and preached by the local pastor, and at that one, they had communion at the end.

I’d pretty much agree that just having a local church plant there would have been sufficient, Even that group was a little large for the local pastor to know everyone, but that is certainly true in larger fundamental churches as well. You really need more than one elder and a good smaller-groups ministry to be able to shepherd everyone in a large church well, but even the apostles had to deal with that in Jerusalem.

I don’t really have a problem with this particular method of ministry, but I think the goal is to strive for the satellite churches to start moving towards a minister of their own asap, even if he has to tentmake or be bi-vocational for a while. I think the days of a pastor as full time employee are fading quickly as society’s veneer of respect towards Christianity falls away.

I do not agree with the idea of the multi-site ministry as subsidiaries of an ecclesiastical enterprise. That has multiple layers of fail written all over it.

[Greg Long]

dmichah and driddick, I’m just wondering if you read the article, because it seems he responds to all of your questions in it, and brings up far more objections that the few you have tried to answer?

Yes, I read it in its entirety.

[Bert Perry]

Dan

Good points raised. My question—really guided by years watching corporate executives fudge similar stats, and watching mega-churches come and go—is about whether that growth is sustainable, and by what measures they’re evaluating. Is growth from new converts, or is it poached from other churches? What are the measures of engagement?

Now I’ve got to concede that small churches are often deader than a doornail, and that’s going to drive a lot of people to big churches, but my take is that you’ve got to look very closely at stats before endorsing them wholeheartedly. (can you guess what I do for a living—think “Deming”, but I’m nowhere near as good as it as he was)

Bert,

I think your point is absolutely valid. I don’t think any survey or data set should cause us to change course on a dime. That being said, discussions like these only get better and more helpful when they include two things:

Experience - meaning, I was there, I worked in it, I visited it, I tested it, etc.

- and/or -

Data - My experience or opinion has been validated/invalidated by measurable data on a much larger-scale than my anecdote.