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Multi-Site Conference

Mar 19, 2008 Authored by Mark Driscoll | Category: Church Planting

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Roughly two years ago Mars Hill Church experimented with multi-site church, thanks to the influence of my friends at Leadership Network and pastors they connected me with to learn from, such as my buddy Larry Osborne. That experiment has proven wildly successful and we are now a church with seventeen services on six campuses and are expanding campuses rapidly. For us, multi-site has become a second form of church planting and has revolutionized how we do ministry.

Since we started doing multi-site we have been asked innumerable questions from Christian leaders either curious about trying multi-site, or already doing it and seeking to network with others to learn in community. In response to this kind of growing interest, Leadership Network is hosting a conference dedicated to multi-site. Anyone interested in joining us at the conference should visit http://www.multisiteexposed.com./.

The conference will be on Monday and Tuesday, April 14 and 15, at Mars Hill Church in Seattle.

Pastors John Bishop, Dave Browing, and myself will be available live to answer questions and serve you as best we can with this growing trend. My friends at Leadership Network, who have been helping us learn since our church started, have said in books such as The Multi-Site Church Revolution that:

  • Well over 1,500 churches are already multi-site.
  • One out of four megachurches [2,000 or more people] is holding services at multiple locations.
  • One out of three churches says it is thinking about developing a new service in a new location.
  • Seven out of the country’s ten fastest-growing churches offer worship in multiple locations, as do nine of the ten largest churches.
  • We predict that 30,000 American churches will be multi-site within the next few years, which means one or more multi-site churches will probably be in your area. . . . We estimate that one-third of the churches in America could succeed as multi-site congregations.

The good news is that each of our churches does multi-site differently, which will expose those who attend the webinar and/or conference to multiple models and help them decide what is best for their cultural context, rather than simply promoting one method. Research by Leadership Network shows no less than five types of multi-site churches in America today:

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

Lastly, members of the three churches’ leadership teams will be on hand at the conference to teach breakout sessions and connect with folks who want to learn about specific aspects of multi-site ministry. In short, our hope is it to make this a practical time for ministry leaders and ministry teams to save themselves a lot of the mistakes and troubles we have experienced in improving how we do multi-site at our various churches. We would love to have you join us so that we can help serve you and learn from you as together we explore one of the leading-edge innovations in church ministry.