Multi-site perspective by Mars Hill Church

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Multi-Campus Churches

There is a growing interest in multiple campus churches, video venues etc. The following are some brief summary thoughts gleaned from friends and our own experience at Mars Hill offered in hopes of being helpful to the curious about this growing phenomenon.

Trends

There are roughly 2000 churches in the U.S. doing church in a multi-site format and Leadership Network is in touch with half of them.
1 in 4 megachurches (2000 or more people) is doing multi-site according to Leadership Network which is the primary researcher on this trend

Formats

There are 5 key multi-site models which have emerged according to the researchers at Leadership Network:

Video-venue model
Creating 1 or more on-campus environments that use videocast sermons (live or recorded), often varying the worship style.
Partnership model
Partnering with a local business or nonprofit organization to use its facility beyond a mere "renter" agreement
Teaching-Team model
Leveraging a strong teaching team across multiple locations at the original campus or an off-site campus.
Regional-Campus model
Replicating the experience of the original campus at additional campuses in order to make church more accessible to other geographic communities.
Low-Risk Model
Experimenting with new locations that are low risk because of the simplicity of programming and small financial investment, but that have the potential for high returns in terms of evangelism growth.

Resources

Multi-Site Revolution by Geoff Surratt is the only book written on the subject
www.leadnet.org has many resources and learning communities on the issue and is the best place to go for learning and networking with other churches doing multi-site

Leading Edge Churches

Named the nations most innovative church by Outreach Magazine, Lifechurch.tv has 37 services on 11 campuses in 3 states for 20,000 people. The pastor is a personal friend, good man, and is having amazing success with this model. His biggest room seats only 1200 people. A trip to his church to learn is helpful.
Larry Osborne at Northcoast in San Diego is one of the video venue pioneers and is a good friend who uses model #1 above.

What we have Learned at Mars Hill Church

We are currently doing #1, #2, and #4 above. We currently have 7 Sunday services in 3 locations with 4 live sermons and 3 video. We opened our first video campus in January 2006 with roughly 200 people. That campus has grown to more than 600 in one year at a rented facility. In one year we went from having no people in video services to now around 1500 people a Sunday in video services. In the next 18 months our plan is to expand to as many as 7 locations with as many as 23 services for as many as 15,000 people. This is very helpful for us as our city has essentially zoned out the building of large churches which means the only way we can grow is to spread around our city and region in multiple campuses. And, while there is no one way to make this happen, we have found the following to be true:

Each campus must be treated as a church plant with a clear mission to reach their community and be more than just an overflow room for a main campus so that it is a missional reach of a church into a culture/area with programming, style, etc. that is most effective for contextualizing the gospel and not simply replicating what is done elsewhere like a franchise
Each campus must have their own paid staff (e.g. campus pastor, campus administrator, children's leader) along with some unpaid elders and deacons (e.g. premarital, small groups, membership, etc.)
Each campus ultimately needs its own full time use facility if it is to be a church rooted in that community.
Each campus is branded by the musical style which should vary from campus to campus to best suite each cultural area.
Each campus benefits from having full midweek programming including membership classes on site.
Each campus must have a full time paid campus pastor to lead the mission. That campus pastor opens and closes services and is available after the service along with the campus elders to pray for and counsel people. The campus pastor also covers the pulpit 10-12 weeks a year when the main preaching pastor is out of the pulpit so that every campus has a visible leader who can speak to their needs and issues. This also allows the campus pastors to simply run their campuses and cover their pulpits full time should something ever happen to the main preaching pastor.
Each campus must have some Sundays each year for family business such as baby dedications, baptisms, new leader installation, and new member introduction to be done by the campus pastor.
Each campus must be served by a unifying central support staff that does such unified efforts as the web site, printed materials
Each campus should be plugged into the main broadcast campus so that when there is training events and conferences people can simply attend their normal campus and receive the training simultaneously. For example, when Dr. Piper comes to speak at our Resurgence event in February 2008 he will be live simulcast to every one of our campuses and more people will see him on video than in person as he is broadcast to a wide geographic area.
The membership of the church is not tied to any campus. People can attend any class, small group, or service they like and move around as they need as their membership is to the whole and not just a campus of the church.
A large geographically spread church that remains male elder lead and governed requires working elder teams broken up by campus and department with clear delegated authority for decision making. These elder teams have meetings, and also come together for a larger all elder meeting once a month that includes mainly training and informing as most of the business decisions are made by the executive elder team made up of 7 men who architect and lead the entire elder team. That executive elder team meets every other week and the campus pastors attend but do not vote so as to speak into events and remain up to speed on what is happening in the church globally.
Insofar as technology goes, we have chosen to use television broadcast technology over internet as we find it cheaper and more established and reliable. This means that we will be beaming from the main campus to satellite dishes on our campuses live with a buffering system similar to tivo at the sites as of late summer 2007. This switch was made after consulting with Craig Groeschel who makes compelling arguments for doing so.
We do not have a Saturday night service to capture video as most multi campus churches do. We see nearly half of our attendance at Sunday night services and we did not feel it wise for the key leaders to give their entire weekends to church because of the cost to their family and so we do not offer a Saturday evening service but rather only Sunday morning and evening services.
We have found that some services do not need childcare. For example, our 7pm service is often our biggest and filled with singles and college students and we do not offer childcare.
To connect the air war of preaching and ground war of care we base most of our small groups on the sermon.
Churches that are dead and dying can be revitalized by a larger church turning it into a campus thereby saving many churches from dying altogether and also providing great real estate opportunities to be redeemed for the gospel.