by Sandy » Tue Nov 03, 2015 8:36 am
The satellite congregation has become a new model of extending the influence of a particular church or pastor's ministry. We have a couple of churches in our area where the worship is led by a local team, then a curtain opens or a screen drops, and the sermon is beamed from some mega church somewhere else. I know there's one here connected to Andy Stanley. In Houston, both Second Baptist and First Baptist are doing the same thing, approaching churches with developed facilities that have gone through a transition or decline in order to pick up a satellite location. The satellites aren't really reaching people, they just become gathering places for the cluster of members of the mega church that happen to live nearby.
When I was still in Houston, during John Bisagno's pastorate, FBC was offering to take over the bills and maintenance on the property of many inner-suburban and city churches that were dying, and "revision" the ministries. Most of those churches were dying groups of a remnant of old people driving in from the burbs. In one case, First moved their deaf church into a facility, and then launched a Spanish speaking church there, and in another case, not too far from their own campus, they turned a church facility into a "mission center" with three or four ethnic congregations meeting there, plus serving as the headquarters for its apartment complex ministry. In many of those cases, now that the core of their members have moved away, they've closed the property down and sold the building. There was a lot of controversy when Second Baptist took over the property of Forest Cove Baptist, which was a large, suburban church on its own, during a controversy with the pastor over his independent preaching and media ministry. The church leadership jumped into the agreement when a split happened that put them in a bad position on their mortgage and maintenance, and it was supposed to be a merger, but most of the Forest Cove people wound up leaving.
If this strategy produced evangelistic results, it might be viable for churches that are struggling or have had problems that have become serious enough to effect their ministry and existence, but all I see is that it becomes a way for a larger church to either grab up property with monetary value to add to its own ministry later on, or to develop a satellite congregation for the convenience of its members who already live in the area, and have probably contributed to sucking the life out of the existing churches by competing with them through gimicks and giveaways.