Multi-site Churches are Not Congregational

If you’ve got a lead pastor overseeing a group of other pastors, yup, in some sense, you have episcopal church government. The question is whether you’ve got some of the safeguards openly episcopal churches have against abuse of this kind of system or not.

So once-a-Baptist and now Anglican priest (with a pit-stop in Presbyterianism) Michael Bird is experiencing “enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others” (the Merriam-Webster definition of schadenfreude) because he perceives that his former denomination contains elements of the form of church governance that is practiced by his present denomination?

I’m not quite sure what to make of that…..

…the man’s got a history, but again, what do you call a guy supervising a staff of pastors in diverse location but “bishop”? Here’s a bit of news about one such bishop from the Babylon Bee.

and looked for counterpoints…..

I found this article from 9Marks informative:

https://www.9marks.org/article/what-thing-anyway-multi-site-taxonomy/

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Here’s J.D. Greear’s (the SBC’s new president) take:

https://jdgreear.com/blog/multi-site-a-biblically-sound-model/

I’m a bishop! Therefore, I guess you would call the guy over other guys in other locations … something else?

I’ve been on staff at a church that is multi-site for 13 years. When I started we had one location and were out growing our facility and the local authorities would not allow additional building on our site. We considered church planting and decided to move multi-site and launched our second location in 2007 which was not ground breaking but fairly early in the multi-site movement. From a pragmatic perspective multi-site has a higher success rate then church planting and this is what we’ve found with now 12 locations. We’ve scaled our approach with locations now having auditoriums from 300 to 1,000 depending on the size of the community and increase the number of services to best leverage the facility and meet the number of people gathering. Some locations having as many as 5 services per weekend. We feed via satellite the message from the originating location using a teaching team of 5. Each location has a staff and a campus pastor who is responsible for that staff and local congregation. Just a little of my experience, It’s been an interesting journey.