September 25, 2009

Rick Moore and his growing church hope to implement their big plans in a small way. The pastor and his congregation are part of an emerging shift away from single-location megachurches toward multiple site churches that hope to bring a best-of-both-worlds approach to ministry.

These multi-site churches, also known as campus or satellite churches, typically consist of a central worship service from which the sermon is transmitted or streamed to smaller congregations that can be right next door or on the other side of the world.

The core concept is to provide as many people as possible with a strong sermon message while moving away from the impersonal, humongous single-site church - such as Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church in Houston, where 44,000 people meet each Sunday in a former NBA arena.

"It's almost like me starting a church plant with 150 people, but with a paid staff and resources of a 1,000-person church," said Moore, who is the satellite pastor at Community Christian Church in southwest Ohio. His congregation meets at a high school about 12 miles from the "mother church" location. Unlike many multi-site situations, that close proximity allows the two churches to stagger their start time so the sermon can be delivered live at both sites.  

"When we started the second campus (in 2008) it was a smaller church of about 50 or 60 members," Moore said. "Now we're averaging over 150."

That growth spurt fits with a new report appearing in the October issue of Outreach magazine that lists the 100 largest U.S. churches based on attendance figures compiled by Lifeway Research in Nashville. Lakewood leads the list, as it did in 2008, but the next 10 largest all are multiple sites.

"Multiple sites are the new normal for fast-growing and large churches. Lakewood is the exception. The next 10 all have multiple sites," says Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay. "They're contemporary, aggressively evangelistic and evangelical and they're moving beyond the 'big box' megachurch model." 

Several factors contribute to the growth increase of the multi-site churches, said Scott Thumma, a sociologist of religion at Hartford Seminary and co-author of "Not Who You Think They Are: The Real Story of People Who Attend America's Megachurches."

"Most likely it is the medium-sized megachurches that are saying, ‘We need to grow ... but because of the financial state we're in we can't just build from a 2,000-seat building to one that is 5,000 or 10,000 seats,' " Thumma said. "So instead they're opting for the multi-site thing which has satellite campuses in a theater here or a high school there. Then they are either linked by direct feeds or you run the earlier service over on a DVD.

No two multi-site churches operate the same, but often each satellite campus will have its own service wrapped around the televised message.

"The have their own praise band and often their own campus pastor," Thumma said.

Moore, for instance, handles pastoral care at his campus, while also giving the broadcasted sermon once a month in place of the senior pastor.

"Anyone who comes to our Trenton campus, I'm the one they see and talk to," he said. 

Moore said the church plan is to increase from one campus to two next year by touting the benefits of convenience.

"What we've said is, it's one thing for you to come to church and like it so much that you're willing to drive 30 minutes," he said. "It's another to get your next-door neighbor to load their kids and come. So we want to produce the same quality stuff at our campus so you can drive 10 minutes instead of 30. As we reach out to the county we want to move to them, not be a church that expects them to come to us." 

Thumma said similar techniques seem to be working nationwide.

"On one hand, it's a great sort of growth strategy," he said. "Even in our 2008 survey of megachurches, those with satellite churches had significantly larger attendance than those without."