Multi-site Church Road Trip

Multi-Site Interview with Alex McManus

Check out this blog radio interview: http://bit.ly/cTMa9a.

During the 35 minute conversation, host Alex McManus interviews Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon and Warren Bird, co-authors of Multi-Site Church Revolution and Multi-Site Church Roadtrip on current developments in multi-site, especially related to church planting.

Rick Warren on Biblical Basis of Multi-Site Church

If you missed Rick Warren’s recent RADICALIS conference, Christian Post reporter Lillian Kwon wrote a great summary of one of his segments. Her article is entitled “Rick Warren: Megachurches, Multi-Site Venues Are Biblical”

Here’s the link to her complete article, and here’s an excerpt:

Where did the more than 100,000 people attending the first church in Jerusalem meet? Warren posed to pastors at the "Radicalis" conference.

They met in temple courts (plural emphasized) and from house to house, he said, citing the New Testament book of Acts.

"They met in different courts," Warren underlined. "Notice: one church, multiple locations. One church, multiple venues."

"That's a biblical concept," he stressed.

Saddleback Community Church in southern California currently has 12 "temple courts," eight of which are on the Lake Forest campus and four of which are in other cities. Rather than build one large temple court, or a stadium to fit the some 22,000 weekly attendees, Warren chose to have a campus with multiple smaller buildings and several separate campuses, in keeping with the standard set by the first church.

Plus, it's better stewardship, he said.

"I'm not interested in building a stadium. A building that's that big is used once a week and sits empty [the rest of the week]," he said. "You need to understand this, pastor: nobody really likes big churches. The only people who like big churches are pastors because we like to preach to a large crowd. People don't go to church because of size. They put up with size in order to get the benefits."

posted by Warren Bird, Ph.D., research director, Leadership Network, www.leadnet.org

Great Post on Multi-Site Churches in EUROPE

For an excellent free report titled "European Snapshots: Models of Multisite Church in Europe" go to leadnet.org/multisiteresources, and scroll down to the "downloads" section. Here's what it's about: "Across Europe, there is growing interest in multi-site church. This paper describes three very different churches in Europe who are developing multi-site, and explores the logic behind their going multi-site, the life of their sites and their leadership development." The author is Joanne Appleton of the European Church Planting Network – a project of Dallas-based Leadership Network.

If you want the condensed version: Lillian Kwon of the Christian Post wrote a super summary of the report 2/24/10 with title Multi-Site Churches Spreading in Post-Christian Europe.

posted by Warren Bird, Ph.D., research director, Leadership Network, www.leadnet.org