Multi-site churches: A new variety of religious experience – USATODAY.com
My dad sent me this link today and I thought it was a great article I think that this really is the way that we can mutiply ministry in the best possible way.
A big question I have is how this would trickle down to some of the sub-ministries like youth ministry. Would there be an area youth ministry. Would there be a central location for the youth and other specific mininstries to build community throughout the larger community? I guess it could be done a number of different ways, but it woudl depend on location, size, dynamic and other factors as well.
Here is a piece of the article. Please take a read of the whole thing
Green recognizes, “We’re just not looking for that kind of relationship with a pastor anymore. Today, it’s all about a personal relationship with God, not the culture of a church. And a megachurch or a multisite church can still offer this. If you are there to hear a message and it’s a powerful one, it shouldn’t matter how it’s delivered.”
“Even if people are just watching the senior pastor on a screen, they are still gathering, as the Bible commands, they are still serving the poor, engaging in worship and study, and encouraging one another,” says Ed Stetzer of LifeWay Research in Nashville, which studies church trends.
Protestant churches are not the only houses of worship to have multiple sites.
A few downtown Jewish synagogues developed secondary sites as members moved to the suburbs in the 1970s.
In the past five years many major Catholic dioceses, faced with low budgets and a shortage of priests, consolidated parishes and sent priests to serve “clusters” of parishes that still retain a distinct identity.
But it is chiefly young evangelical Protestants who have embraced the multichurch idea.
Craig Groeschel wanted to branch out in 1996 when he was a 28-year-old Methodist pastor, but denominational leaders deemed him too young to plant a new church. He went anyway, “to engage with people like myself.”
Now his LifeChurch.tv is the second-largest church in the USA. From Edmund, Okla., his sermons are beamed to 26,776 people gathering every weekend for worship and fellowship at 13 meeting sites or “campuses” from Phoenix to Albany, N.Y.
Groeschel sees the multi-site route as a way to offer a classic evangelical message — “the Bible is true and salvation is only by grace” — at bargain volume rates. His website boasts that LifeChurch.tv reached 1 million people in July, at a cost of 7 cents each. “For us, multisite is only a tool, nothing more,” he says.
