The Coming Multi-Site Church Revolution

By Greg Ligon and Warren Bird

On Sunday morning at Seacoast Church in Charleston, S.C. (seacoastchurch.org), a worship band launches into a hard-driving chorus while a video projects lyrics and background images on screens and TV monitors throughout the auditorium. The congregation stands to sing along with the worship leader.

The experience describes a typical contemporary church’s worship service on any given weekend in America. However, in South Carolina, this scene happens 17 different times over the same weekend in nine locations around the state. All sites are known as Seacoast Church. Using numerous bands and worship leaders, Seacoast’s 17 near-identical weekend services represent the new look of a church that chose not to fight city hall to construct a bigger building. Instead, the church has continued to reach new people by developing additional campuses.

At another church across the country, a congregation just north of San Diego sings, “How Great Thou Art“ in Traditions, one of five venues on the same church campus. North Coast Church in Vista, Calif. (northcoastchurch.com), has developed five different worship atmospheres all within a few feet of each other: Traditions is more intimate and nostalgic, while other venues range from country gospel to a coffeehouse feel to coffee-vibrating, big subwoofer attitude.

The unifying factors to these five on-site venues are the message (one venue features in-person preaching, and the rest use a videocast) and weekly adult “growth“ groups whose discussion questions center on the sermon everyone heard. North Coast has now developed multiple venues on additional campuses, so that on a typical weekend this month, worshippers chose between 19 different services spread across four campuses.

At Community Christian Church (communitychristian.org) in Naperville, Ill., five different drama teams perform the same sketch at five different suburban locations. Then up to three different teachers deliver a message either live or by video they’ve all worked on together.

Across the country, these churches, and hundreds more like them, are discovering a new model for doing church. Going beyond additional service times and larger buildings, churches are expanding into multiple venues and locations—and as a result, are reaching people they’d never meet otherwise, including diverse ethnicities and age groups.

According to Dallas-based Leadership Network’s (leadnet.org) research, at least 1,000 churches across North America could currently be described as multi-site—churches (one vision, one staff, one board, one budget) that extend themselves to more than one location across town, the state or around the world. And according to church researcher Thom Rainer, more than 30% of the churches he has surveyed indicate that they are considering a multi-site model. Moreover, early indicators show that these multi-site models are more evangelistic than single-site campuses, Rainer says. In the July/August issue of Outreach magazine, he called this move to multiple services a “new American Church trend.“

WHAT‘S FUELING THE TREND?

When North Coast Church launched its first video venue, it was “out of space, out of good time slots, out of energy and out of options,“ Senior Pastor Larry Osborne says. He echoes the comments of church leaders across the country struggling to keep up with their growth by looking for creative ways to expand.

On several Leadership Network surveys, the lack-of-space issue was the most cited trigger reason for launching multiple campuses or venues. Churches have discovered or are beginning to discover that the multi-site model can be the solution to meeting space and parking issues for congregations that don’t want to launch a massive building campaign or find themselves landlocked. The space issue was the primary reason North Coast launched its first venue.

“We wanted to create an overflow room that would be a reward rather than a punishment,“ Osborne explains. “We hoped that a few (5%) of our current attendees would prefer it over the sanctuary environment. By the second week, we realized we had a tiger by the tail, and our church would never be the same.“

In addition to space, lack of human resources is also fueling the trend. Growing churches that must add services to make room for people soon discover they don’t have the manpower to accommodate numerous services. Weekends start to spell burnout for pastors, worship teams, children’s ministry volunteers, tech crews, etc. Launching simultaneous services, such as video venues, or building leadership teams at other sites, can give overloaded staff and volunteers a much-needed break through new talent that emerges.

And, the multi-site revolution continues to be motivated by an increasing number of churches desiring to reach the unchurched around them. Results from Leadership Network’s 2003 survey of 1,000 multi-site churches showed that “evangelistic outreach“ is the dominant motivator for employing a multi-site or multi-venue approach.

For Community Christian Church, its first site launch was motivated by a desire to reach more of its community after a new Christian in the congregation asked the leadership, “How can we get the kind of community we have here in church into the real estate developments I’m building?“ The answer? Take the church to the people.

In Lynden, Wash., just three miles from the Canadian border and in a retirement area, Grace Baptist Fellowship (gbf-online.org) first launched its video venue to reach a younger age group—a segment of the population other area churches weren’t reaching, says Dave Dunkin, pastor of ministry development. After three years of services, the idea is working. Each Sunday, the Upper Room’s relaxed, small-church feel draws nearly 100 20- to 30-somethings, making the church multigenerational, Dunkin says.

“People who have never visited the main service are coming to the Upper Room, and they’re meeting Christ there,“ he says. “We see new young faces each week.“

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