I've been following several churches, who have made the decision to go multi-site. While such a decision can be primarily for strategic growth purposes, these churches made the decision because their churches are growing so much that it is unrealistic to build a larger campus or to offer even more services.
Last night I was listening to the podcast of the August 16th weekend services of The Village Church in Highland Village, Texas, led by Matt Chandler. Here is some of what he had to say to his weekend audience:
Last week, here's what happened. We had six services at this campus... At the 5 o'clock last week, we had 665 people (in this auditorium), which left 50 seats. That's all we had... We turned away over a hundred people from the 7 o'clock... On Sunday morning there were 41 seats at the 9, and there were 72 seats at the 11, which is the third time in four years that we did NOT turn away from the 11 o'clock... On Sunday night, 581 left 144 seats open (at the first evening service) and 615 which left 110 seats open (at the second evening service) and at 7 o'clock on Sunday night there is nothing, no childcare; it's worship and the sermon. What I want you to see and feel here is that there is no where to tell people to go... The weekend before we turned away from three of our services. So half of our Highland Village services ended with someone getting into the parking lot, checking in their children, walking up to the front door and having our hopefully very gracious greeting team say, "I'm so sorry."
Matt goes on to tell his congregation that the answer is not adding yet another service. "We're done," he said. Unless certain things line up, there's just no more places to put people in their Highland campus. This is a multi-site church, which has already added the Denton campus. So many people are coming that they have no more places to put people at their main campus.
In another example of God bringing an incredible harvest, I read with great interest the post of Perry Noble, the pastor of New Spring Church. When reading about his last weekend, one can feel the excitement about what is happening at NewSpring. Here's an excerpt from his "Sunday Night Reflections" :
We were 150 people away from 10,000 people today…there were around 200 people sitting in the lobby at 11:15 at our Anderson campus because the sanctuary was FULL. Honestly, I think today was a great warm up for what we are going to see the Lord do next week! Trust me on this one! We had several people receive Christ today! I made the announcement today that we are starting a 4th service on the Anderson campus in two weeks! We’ve GOT TO! And when we do…we are going to need several of you to COMMIT to attending that service! We will announce the new time this week! We thought that when we started the Greenville campus that we would have more room in Anderson…but the attendance actually INCREASED…which blew our minds. Greenville campus had over 1,600 people today…amazing! I feel like this fall is going to be one of the most amazing seasons of ministry we’ve ever seen here at NewSpring Church…GREAT THINGS are in store.
Then there are the weekly writings of Gary Lamb, pastor of Revolution Church in Canton, GA, who is within days of the launch of their multisite. I love reading his "Sunday Night Mind Dump" posts. I usually feel better about everything I have on my plate when I read about all the balls he's trying to keep in the air. But I am always excited to see how God is working at Revolution Church. Here's an excerpt:
Can you believe we are two weeks away from launching our second campus? Blown away! Tim has done a GREAT job leading up our construction project. Love him and Courtney. We have a lot of work left to do this week. We will send out a work schedule later this week... HUGE WORK DAY ON LABOR DAY. WE’LL COOK OUT AND PUT THE FINISHING TOUCHES ON EVERYTHING! BE THERE OR BE SQUARE!... We are about 90% full in our second service and we need some of you to move to the first service! We are working HARD to allow the theater to let us move our two services times to 9:30 and 11:00. Please pray this happens because it will even out our services more and free up more seats. The next two weeks are going to be insane! I honestly can’t remember a time in our church where things were so busy! It is insane! The vibe among our people right now is off the hook! Seriously, God is doing some cool things.
These are just three examples from three different churches, in 3 different locations, of different sizes and church personalities, but all three are using the multi-site strategy to reach a larger audience for the cause of Christ. Why go multi-site? Because it's cool? Because it's so now? Because we can? No. We do multi-site in obedience to God's Spirit moving in such a strong way that we know of no more effective way to reach a lost world for Christ!
