"Multi-site Megachurches" transitioning sites to churches

[Sandy]

https://www.baptiststandard.com/news/fa ... lk-trends/

I think this is a good idea. Multi-site churches are a big topic among the megachurch, "church growth" circuit, though there's not much acknowledgement of the fact that the way they grow is largely by attracting Christians from surrounding congregations, and there's very little evangelistic activity. I've read a lot of Chandler's information and material. He seems a little more inclined toward allowing satellites a larger degree of autonomy, at least in the long run, than some of the multi-site churches whose pastors are almost completely about controlling the content of the preaching and teaching. Many of them have even abandoned a Sunday School/Small Groups approach in favor of gatherings that play the pastor's video or live-feed preaching from the main site. It will be interesting to see how many of the SBC multi-site megas follow suit.

[William Thornton]

This is interesting. The idea of sitting around a small group and watching the pastor's on demand media is ridiculous, a
Though this is a big money maker for chandler.

[JE Pettibone]

[Haruo]

A couple of weeks ago, I attended worship at the Japanese Christian Church of Victoria, BC, which meets in that city's First Baptist Church. Their pastor was in Japan, so the sermon was delivered on a TV screen by some guest pastor in Hawaii. It seemed like a pretty good sermon (given the limitations of my Japanese comprehension). But I find the idea of watching a distant pastor on a movie screen in a church sanctuary to be just weird enough that I couldn't do it more than an occasional week at a time. When I was doing my church-a-week thing back in 2011, and went to Mars Hill's U District franchise, Mark whatshisface was on-screen for the sermon, but they had a local pastor who did a lot of the other pastorly stuff.

[William Thornton]

Sandy mentioned "Many of them have even abandoned a Sunday School/Small Groups approach in favor of gatherings that play the pastor's video or live-feed preaching from the main site."

Sattelite, franchise locations that use a live feed friends from the main megapastor have been around a long time. The compilation or creations of a Netflix-type subscription service for use by small groups is newer. Maybe it's the same as buying printed lit for a Sunday school class, just technologically updated but I'm not liking it. It feeds the celebrity system and, seems to me, would ultimately hinder development and growth of lay leaders. But maybe I'm out of touch.

[Sandy]

I've searched for a quote that one of the multi-campus megachurch pastors made that stood out to me, and can't find it, so I won't use a name, but it was to the effect that they preferred the electronic delivery model, using the pastor's teaching and preaching packages for small groups because you can't always control the content of the teaching when volunteers or other paid professionals do it. When we first moved here, we visited a church that had a live satellite feed of a pastor preaching in Georgia, and aside from a little bit of live worship at the site here, we could have stayed home and watched on television.

Maybe I'm out of touch, too, but there's something that doesn't quite sit right with me, when I think of "church" as it is defined in the New Testament, and the first thing you see when you walk through the door is a bookstore that prominently features all of the pastor's books, and in which one whole wall is devoted to CD cases with videos of his sermons, packaged by series, with appropriate logo, on sale for what I consider a hefty price. The proceeds from the sales go to the royalties he is paid by the "ministry" corporation he has set up, separate from the church, to market his "products."

[Tim Bonney]

I could see how people get used to this. If you are sitting in a mega-church sanctuary you are probably looking at the screen to see the pastor anyway. It isn’t much of a step to the pastor being somewhere else broadcasting to your location. Like Haruo, I’m not sure I’d want a weekly diet of that.

I was at United Methodist Church of the Resurrection a couple of weeks ago for their leadership institute. The preaching was superb and the music was at a professional level. I can see how people are attracted to such churches where you can find every option for worship, programming, etc. that you can imagine at a high level of quality.

[Sandy]

I've grown to appreciate the intimacy of a small congregation, worship characterized by simplicity and a measure of thoughtful spontaneity that gives evidence of being guided by the Spirit, acoustic instruments, no sound system or video equipment, congregational interaction during the preaching, and no formal clergy "structure" or staff. Everything from weekly cleaning of the building to mowing the grass, to building maintenance done by volunteers so the offering can go more to ministry. Pretty much everyone is involved, and it makes the fellowship sweet. Every Sunday service is followed by lunch, up here called "carry-in dinner," down South it was "pot luck." I really like that, and don't miss the more formal atmosphere of a larger congregation. I'd be bored in a service where the sermon was delivered via video from a different location.

[Haruo]

I get my sermon in PDF, with a backup in a language I don't thoroughly comprehend.