By Bryan Rose
If becoming a MultiSite church, or adding another campus, is on your vision-radar right now, chances are you are primarily thinking in terms of Sunday morning worship. Most MultiSite church expressions initially begin with a weekly service. And, in most cases, the worship service is a natural and necessary way to most effectively reproduce your culture across campuses.
But what if MultiSite was less about your worship venue and more about your missional engagement? Best practices of the past do not automatically create highest effectiveness in the future.
As a strategic outsider focused on vision alignment, here are two outside of the box approaches to launching a MultiSite campus that I am seeing churches consider before beginning a worship service.
Serve First.
Starting with missional engagement allows immediate impact in the target area. The Serve First model tilts the investment scale toward leading people over assembling equipment. Immediate return with this campus launch model is meaningful activity in the community and the creation of opportunities for the core team to live the mission right away.
Groups First.
Another church is beginning meet regularly and grow as disciples in smaller gatherings. Instead of waiting for worship services, group members invite neighbors and friends into fellowship and life-change in the neighborhood. Allowing the notion of “campus” to be decentralized into homes, versus concentrated in a building, a felt 7-day presence is immediate.
Both of these approaches to MultiSite campus development naturally bring the necessity of developing leaders to live on mission, as opposed to recruiting volunteers to accomplish a task. Corporate gathering for worship and teaching can still occur, but with the freedom to do so in non-standard times and other-than-weekly rhythms.
As MultiSite churches numerically move beyond the 5000 milestone of 2012 and exponentially toward the next horizon, innovative approaches to reaching people and replicating DNA beyond the Sunday morning service will continue to develop.
How are you thinking about MultiSite outside the box?
Bryan Rose is a Lead Navigator for Auxano and has a strong bias toward merging strategy and creativity within the vision of the local church.
