One of the more unexpected contributors to multisite growth comes from merger campuses. Leadership Network’s research found that more than 1 in 3 multisite campuses comes as the result of a church merger.
In Better Together: Making Church Mergers Work, a book I co-authored with Jim Tomberlin (and Outreach excerpted at outreachmagazine.com/mergers), we show that the greatest likelihood of a successful merger is not the approach of two equal churches, each adopting the best elements of the other—but a “lead church” and a “joining church” coming together, the former drawing the latter into its family.
When done well, the joining church—which is often motivated to merge because of hitting too many unmovable walls—gets to return to its original mission of reaching people for Christ. It starts a new chapter by reaching a new age demographic or a new ethnic group that has become dominant in its community. In the best of mergers, the joining congregation finds new roles, new joys and a new future.
At the same time, megachurches are championing local church planting as never before. The Exponential conference on multiplying new churches is a beautiful partnership of churches large and small, drawing more than 10,000 participants annually. Leadership Network research found that church planting and multisite reinforce each other, rather than compete. A church that is multisite is more likely to plant churches, and likewise church-planting churches are more likely to be multisite.
Church planting has shifted over recent decades from denominational offices to seminaries to district levels to individual churches. Today, the most common practice is churches planting churches, and megachurches are leading that charge as never before.
Challenge No. 5: Pioneering Microtrends
Most church leaders have seen a bell-curve drawing that describes the adoption of a new idea. It starts with innovators, then early adopters, then middle adopters and, finally, late adopters. According to that theory, larger organizations can create more space to play with innovation than can smaller organizations. Leadership Network’s CEO Dave Travis applies this principle to churches: “Larger congregations have more resources, both people and financial, to experiment and innovate. A failure is usually not as disruptive as in a smaller church where the consequences of failure tend to be much higher.”
It’s no coincidence that Outreach’s fastest-growing church last year, Cincinnati, Ohio’s Crossroads Church, ran an event to promote greater entrepreneurism in both church and marketplace. The event was called Unpolished. “Startups are rough and raw,” explains Senior Pastor Brian Tome. “Their leaders are an untapped resource for kingdom potential.”
Likewise, a number of outreach experiments are happening in large churches across the country, which might forecast more widespread adoption by other churches—scaled to any size context. They include:
Marriage ministry. Dallas, Texas’ Watermark Church, among others, believes that marriage ministry may be the best vehicle for advancing the mission of a church both inside and outside its walls. It developed a significant marriage ministry, led by Director of Marriage Ministries John McGee, and has championed many creative ways to strengthen marriages. “A great marriage ministry can help create a great church,” says McGee.
Church-community partnerships. By throwing its doors wide open to a community partner—offering weekly use of one of its multisite campuses to a free community health clinic—CedarCreek Church in Toledo, Ohio, is expanding its reach, fulfilling its mission and creating a model the church hopes other congregations can replicate. Similarly, in Wisconsin, Appleton Alliance Church worked with the community to build a health center, offering free medical services to the economically disadvantaged, currently unavailable elsewhere. “It’s a unique and gospel-centered approach to caring for body, mind and spirit,” Senior Pastor Dennis Episcopo says. “The community is really enthusiastic about it.”
Community transformation. Today’s era is one of large churches trying to step beyond their comfort zones and expand their influence in the name of Jesus to reach people currently underserved by churches. This is definitely happening in global missions, as large churches tend to focus on one specific geographic area. It’s also happening locally.
One example is The Life Church in Memphis, Tennessee, which discovered that its primary campus is only a short drive from an area known as the “hungriest ZIP code in the United States”—where 74 percent of children go to bed hungry every night. Soon the church was feeding 2,600 children each weekend in that area.
Another example is Ward Presbyterian Church, in greater Detroit, Michigan, which partners with a local community-development corporation to buy condemned homes in a blighted area, rehab them and help low-income residents settle into the houses. The church has a goal of buying 15 houses each year, and employing local workers and volunteers to get the job done.
Leadership development. Leaders at Community Christian Church in Naperville, Illinois, work hard to give their people permission to live “on mission,” from seminary-trained leaders who serve as church-planting residents to volunteer workers who are apprenticing one another. At one of their weekend services, church leaders said they would ordain any person who felt called to the ministry of a particular person or a place. The teaching comes from 1 Peter 2:9 on how every follower of Jesus is a priest. Lead Pastor Dave Ferguson then offered to anoint and pray for anyone who would accept that call into ministry. “I had no idea what would happen, but I was overwhelmed when we had more than 2,000 people come forward to be anointed and declare the people or place they felt called to reach,” he reports.
The Move to Better Disciple-Making
All of these microtrends are expressions of helping people become better disciples of Jesus Christ.
I recently interviewed 105 megachurch pastors, asking each the same set of open-ended questions like, “What keeps you awake at night?” My goal was to figure out what large churches saw as the next big issue on the horizon. I heard many of the particulars voiced in this article, but if there was any overarching theme, it was that of discipleship. I listened to statements like, “It’s not enough to draw a crowd; we need to keep raising the bar on what it means to follow Jesus with heart, mind, body and soul.” The specific variation that stuck most with me was the idea of moving from addition to multiplication. “We know how to add services and campuses, and how to start new churches, but one at a time is not enough,” said one pastor. “The world won’t be reached without spiritual multiplication.”
Seems like that shift is a pivotal challenge for megachurches, but also for churches of any size.
Read more about the 2016 Outreach 100 »
Warren Bird, an Outreach magazine contributing editor, is research director for Leadership Network.