MultiChurch

Brad House, Gregg Allison

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780310530541
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Église chrétienne

Is it time for your church to go multisite? How do you know if it's the right solution for your congregation?

MultiChurch brings clarity to the multisite movement and assembles the lessons it has learned over the past 15 years. Combining insights from multisite church pastor Brad House and Christian theology professor Gregg Allison, this book will help anyone interested in multiplying gospel-centered churches to effectively evaluate and develop the best multisite model for their own church context.

In MultiChurch, you will:

• Explore the opportunities presented by the various forms of multi-site church.
• Identify areas of concern while addressing criticisms against multisite models.
• Understand how multisite is not only a biblically sound ecclesiological model, but also a model that provides a compelling solution to contemporary reductionism in the church.

This theological, philosophical, and practical guide traces the history of the multisite movement and assembles the lessons—the good, the bad, and the ugly—learned over the past two decades.

1

A MultiChurch Evolution

The multisite movement has been and continues to be in a state of flux. Indeed, one of the characteristics of this movement is constant evolution. Such fluidity drives many people crazy—especially critics of multisite.

What is true of the multisite movement is also true of multisite churches: they evolve. Multisite leaders are fond of borrowing a phrase from startup companies that boast about “building the plane in the air.” This is a necessary hazard of frontier development. Whether a church or a company, you chart new territory without the comfort of examples that have gone before you or the time required to test ideas before employing them. We are not beholden to some arbitrary clock of success, but learning through trial and error is often more time-efficient. Cutting-edge movements are driven by those willing to risk boldly rather than those who are bogged down with “paralysis by analysis.”¹ This leads to more mistakes but also increases the chance of success. For those of us involved in building the plane, the messiness is exciting, frustrating, and very real—just part of our everyday experience!

As we begin this book, we trace for you the evolution of a particular multichurch: Sojourn Community Church. Every church story is unique in some sense, and while our story at Sojourn is irreproducible, it is helpful for other churches to get a concrete and real-world example of how a multichurch can develop. This is not a story of how we, with clear eyes and strong hearts, looked into the future and nimbly plotted a path to multichurch success. On the contrary, the more appropriate image is me walking through my living room in the dark, stepping on Legos, banging into the couch, stubbing my toe, suppressing a curse, and fumbling for the light switch. So with expectations clarified, let us share in brief how we got to where we are today.

The Mother of Invention

Sojourn was a church plant in January of 2000 that started like many church plants. About a dozen young Christians, full of angst and ideology in Louisville, Kentucky, began gathering and prayerfully seeking to reimagine what it means to be the church. Like most church plants, church structures beyond the traditional single-service model were not even on our radar. Borne of deep theological convictions, some overrealized preferences, and a dash of naiveté, a single-site church was planted to reach people in our context.

Within three years Sojourn had two hundred people attending. Many of these had been previously unchurched (turned off by religion and thus strangers to church) or overchurched (involved in traditional, often legalistic churches and thus burned out on formal Christianity). Sojourn had two emphases during this time: all members gathering for worship on Sunday (one church with one service) and then scattering throughout the week into community groups. In its third year, Sojourn became financially self-sustaining. At the heart of this growth was the conviction that the gospel changes everything—human hearts, interpersonal relationships, work, play, families, the city, and the world. Driven by these convictions and seeing a pattern of growth, Sojourn had little reason to think about other structures of church at that time.

Like most nomadic church plants, the congregation bounced around between leases until it found a little fixer-upper it could afford. Few things change your reality like home ownership. After I purchased my first house, many things changed. I found myself caring way too much about the length and quality of my lawn, not to mention the outrage I carried regarding this newly discovered offense known as “homeowner’s dues.” I knew the joys of having a place to entertain friends and the responsibilities of ownership.

Home ownership brings with it many changes that can be similar for church plants. Having a brick-and-mortar permanent location brings legitimacy to the church, which cannot be faked by a good social media presence. The city looks at you differently and so does your congregation. For us, having a permanent location ushered in a new season of growth and, with it, a few new problems.

One of those problems was, believe it or not, Sojourn’s physical stability. Permanence meant that as we grew, we no longer had the option to lease a bigger space. We were what we were: constrained by the size of our auditorium space.

These constraints drove us to an early expression of multisite as we began multiple services to accommodate growth. Practically speaking, we had few options. Turning people away who wanted to hear the gospel was simply not an option. This move to a multisite expression was driven pragmatically by a need for space, and little thought was given to the trajectory on which this set the church. This pattern of growth is typical for most churches as they stumble into multisite.

During this time, multisite was becoming all the rage. A team of church members was commissioned to study the theological implications and biblical plausibility of this “new” methodology popping up around the country. Sojourn had a conviction to plant more churches in Louisville and at that point had already planted three. It was time to have a conversation about integrating this new idea.

Gregg was commissioned to lead the theological study. The group read The Multi-Site Church Revolution: Being One Church . . . in Many Locations (Zondervan, 2006). At the time, this was the only book-length treatment of this movement. They also read various articles on the phenomenon and interviewed several churches (Highview Baptist in Louisville, Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, and Harbor Presbyterian Church in San Diego). In the end, the idea was mothballed until our multiple service solution to growth reached its limits.

As the old proverb states, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Like most forays into multisite beyond multiple services, we took our first steps toward multisite because we ran out of options. We could not keep up with growth, so we needed another solution. We would have preferred to have chosen multisite out of conviction, but in reality multisite chose us.

Eyes Larger Than Our Stomach

Despite the research done during our “multiservice” phase, Sojourn had precious little to go on when we decided to become a multisite church. To reinforce the idea that multisite chose us, you could describe the next phase of our existence as “the season of opportunism.” This too is typical for churches as they enter into multisite. Rather than being proactive, prayerfully and deliberately planting a new location, many multisite churches are reactive, responding to opportunities that come their way. We were no different. While looking for a solution to significant growth and considering the possibility of multisite, another local church offered to partner with Sojourn. Fifty members from Sojourn joined with this small group, and our second site officially launched. This transition was fairly smooth, which was a testament to Sojourn’s leadership. However, this is not always the case. We’re sure it is difficult to imagine two merging churches having any problems, but trust us, smooth transitions are worth rejoicing over.

Although this new experiment was fueled by several pragmatic considerations, we also kept in mind the biblical values that surfaced through our earlier investigation of multisite. Could the biblical virtues of interdependence, connectedness, cooperation, and unity—expressed in the motto “life and ministry together”—be realized through this new model of multisite?

One of the first hurdles we faced was how to unify the preaching of two campuses. Our solution was to have Daniel Montgomery, one of the founding pastors of Sojourn, drive between locations and preach at all the services. Many ventures into multisite start this way. That might be due, in part, to the exotic idea of riding the circuit with your Bible in the wind like old John Wesley himself. Unfortunately, like most fantasies, the reality is quite different. The challenge of coordinating multiple services and the toll it took on the preacher made this solution unsustainable, which prompted us to change course and hire a full-time pastor for our second campus. As you can see, it didn’t take long before we had to start improvising.

During the next two years we became addicted to improvisation. While the second campus was still establishing itself, new opportunities came our way. Even though our first location was being held together by a bare-bones staff and some amazing volunteers, we pursued some of these new opportunities. Another church gifted us a building and merged its dwindling congregation into Sojourn. As if we weren’t changing enough, we purchased a building across the river in southern Indiana to start our third location within three years. Sojourn rapidly expanded to be a church of four campuses in the greater Kentuckiana region.

If this sounds chaotic, that’s because it was. We had not developed a clear plan for moving to a multisite model, so most of the decisions we made were in reaction to growth and the other challenges the church faced. At the time, we had few resources to lean on. This “reactive” leadership put a significant amount of strain on the staff and volunteers as the church expanded.

All of this was extremely exciting, as growth always is. However, our eyes were bigger than our stomach. As we will discuss in future chapters, multisite has the unfortunate advantage of helping churches to expand faster than the leadership can grow to lead them.

Sojourn had embraced the vision of “one church in several locations,” but knew little of the implications of this model. In those first three years, things were moving so fast that we had little time to worry about it. But as the dust settled, we began to feel the pains of rapid growth and organizational ambiguity. We burned out several good leaders who were instrumental in our success. Because we weren’t sure what multisite would look like in the future, we hired leaders with job descriptions that quickly became obsolete. All the things that made the growth phase so exciting started to lose their luster. People got tired of reorganizations, reinventions, re-visioning, and the like. We had grown to about 3,500 members, yet we had the infrastructure of a church of 800.

From Crisis to Change

Milton Friedman understood the mechanics of change. “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the . . . impossible becomes the . . . inevitable.”² This statement sums up the condition of Sojourn in the fall of 2012.

The crisis for us was the realization that our jerry-rigged multisite solution would not be sustainable long-term. Sojourn’s leadership was autocratic, leaving our campus pastors feeling disconnected from decisions implemented at their campuses. As we will discuss in chapters 8 and 9, our ministry organization and finances placed a heavy burden on our campuses as they strained to maintain what we would later admit to be a bloated central staff.

Sojourn was unified on the vision of what we wanted to accomplish for the kingdom of Christ. But it was becoming increasingly clear that we needed to change our approach. We were staring in the face of Friedman’s crisis.

The next season at Sojourn could be described as a soul-searching journey to redefine who and what we were as a church. We had many questions that needed to be answered. What did it mean to be a multisite church? How could we build a sustainable model? How did this affect our polity, ministries, and finances? These questions and more needed to be addressed, and it led to a complete reimagining of our church. You could say we needed to grow up as an organization in order to reflect the reality of our growth. Growing up required a change of polity, financial model, ministry model, and leadership structure.

The rest of this book is a look into our journey of discovery and reimagining of what it means to be a multisite church. Along the way we discovered a new vision of hope for building a church of multiple interdependent churches that through collaboration and unity can accomplish much more together for the kingdom of God. We call this vision multichurch. We believe it’s the future of multisite.

The transition to a multichurch was much like the expeditions led by John Wesley Powell during the emergence of United States. A successful expedition required preparation, faith, and a little luck. In the following chapters we can help you with the first of these. As Powell said, “We may conjecture many things,” but conjecture will not get us to our destination. We must begin the journey, so let’s do some scouting.

SECTION 1

SCOUTING

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn’t the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

SIR EDMUND HILLARY

Scouting involves engaging in reconnaissance to prepare for an expedition. The goal of scouting is to obtain information about the meteorological, hydrographic, and geographic characteristics of a particular area.¹ You would be foolish to attempt an expedition without first taking the time to prepare and getting familiar with the potential dangers and opportunities that lie ahead.

You may already be on the multisite journey—or perhaps you are just getting started. As we look to the future, we believe the best place to start is with a little scouting. What is the terrain, and where are the existing paths and the dangerous places to avoid? Our goal in this section is to find a high bluff, where we can look back at where we have come from and discern the potential obstacles ahead. From here, we will be able to see our destination on the horizon. Let’s climb to the top and take a look.

2

Landscape

Multichurch—and the broader multisite movement for that matter—is nothing new. While it may seem like a recent phenomenon—something fresh, unique, and unprecedented—it’s actually the latest variation on a very old way of doing church. Every generation is prone to what C. S. Lewis referred to as “chronological snobbery,” the assumption that our time and our contributions are uniquely the best or the most advanced. The real story of multichurch, the idea of one church meeting as multiple congregations in a city, can be traced back to the first century, to the beginning of Christianity. It would be more accurate to say that contemporary manifestations are more of a renewal of early church methodology than a truly new development.

Multisite in the Early Church

The very first Christian church was a multisite church. The descent of the Holy Spirit on the morning of the day of Pentecost filled the 120 disciples and multitudes of onlookers with wonder (Acts 2:1–21). In response to Peter’s preaching of the gospel (2:22–40), the initial group of Jesus’s followers who had been baptized by the Spirit expanded, growing to about three thousand believers (2:41). This new, Spirit-generated church in Jerusalem was characterized by a number of elements. We read about them in Acts 2:42–45:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.

The apostles preached the gospel and explained how repentance and faith unites people to Jesus Christ. Identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, vividly portrayed through baptism, brought about the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit (2:38). The new brothers and sisters in Christ experienced a deep sense of unity, flourishing in community and engaging in sacrificial giving. These new believers worshiped God “in spirit and truth” (John 4:24 ESV). They were true worshipers through the crucifixion—the broken body and shed blood—of Christ, clearly illustrated in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. These new disciples devoted themselves to prayer, praising and thanking God, rejoicing in their salvation, interceding for one another, and entreating God ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. A Multichurch Evolution
• Section 1: Scouting
• Section 2: Orienteering
• Section 3: Setting Out
• Appendix I: Grievance Policy
• Appendix II: Micropolity
• Notes