Pastor Jim Downing asked members of First United Methodist Church of Sedalia, Missouri -- a long-established rural congregation -- to open their wallets and purses and take out pictures of their children and grandchildren. The congregation happily showed the photos to others in the room.

"Does everyone in these pictures go to church? Do they all have an active faith in Jesus Christ?" the pastor probed. The mood in the room changed. Many shook their heads no.

"What would you do," he continued, "if a church in the town where they lived would actually reach out to them and provide a place for them to say yes to life, to love, and to God?"

The congregation overwhelmingly agreed, "We'd do almost anything to see that happen."
Dr. Bob Farkas thinks twice is nice as the Sedalia, Mo., church opens its second service venue.
The pastor now had both their interest and hearts. "I believe there are Christians in other cities, whose children or grandchildren have moved to this area, who are praying for a church here in Sedalia to do the same thing--to reach out to them. What if God is calling us to be that church?"

So began the decision of an old but growing congregation, with its facility one block off the county courthouse square, to add a second campus 2.7 miles away. There are only 30,000 people in the entire county, but the church caught a vision for their 7,000 friends and neighbors who do not attend any church. With a say-yes attitude, the congregation was determined to create a new campus with the understanding that it was for someone else.
From those 1997 discussions, when annual attendance averaged 136 for the year, it was a bold step for the congregation to open a new campus in 1999. Today, combining both sites, more than 750 people worship with First Church. Almost 300 of the newest people have come on profession of faith in Jesus Christ. And weekly, there are more than 350 people serving in a ministry area that fits them. The growth does not surprise Downing, who affirms, "There is a whole community around us without Christ."

The church, which named its website www.firstsayyes.com to symbolize its "say yes" attitude, is adding a third site in Green Ridge, a town of 500 some 15 miles away.

Measuring the Risks. . . Evaluating the Opportunities
To decide if multi-site ministry will work for your church, you will have to prayerfully measure the risks and evaluate the opportunities of your situation.

Becoming a multi-site church changes--and presumably enhances--who you are as a congregation. It adds value to your church and to the people you're reaching by providing additional options for both outreach and service. Sometimes it helps free up resources and recover values lost along the way, such as a corporate sense of more intimate community. But it also increases certain risk levels.

In assessing how much risk to take when spinning off multiple campuses, churches tend to ask self-diagnostic questions such as these:
How far are we willing to extend ourselves. . . To other rooms on our campus? Across town? Across our state or province? Around the world?
How different will the satellites be from the original campus?
How centralized will we stay and how much control will the original campus maintain?
How much permission will we grant for an off-site to fail?
Pastor
Jim Downing
How much momentum should be expected to determine if a new site is viable?
How soon do we expect the extension campuses to move from being a resource drain to being a contributing resource?
How many people (leaders and artists) must be in place before we launch a new site?
How will we prevent a loss of quality in the new site, and what are the defining points for deciding an acceptable level of quality?
How much money is required to launch a new site, and to keep it going until it reaches a point of self-support?

Three Crucial Questions about Timing

If you are considering shifting to multi-site ministry, the following three questions can help you gauge whether the timing is right. Your answers will help predict the likelihood of success or failure in launching a new location:

1. How healthy is your church?
Is your church growing? Is it a great gathering place for people to find their way to God, to be discipled, and to find a place of ministry? Launching a second site will not bring health to an ailing congregation; it's generally not a good idea for an unhealthy church to reproduce itself.

2. Is there a driving impetus behind your desire to go multi-site?
Successful multi-site churches open a second site because they see no better way to fulfill God's purpose for their church. For some, their building is packed, they are out of viable service times and building a larger facility doesn't seem to be the answer. For others, there is a sense of mission to go into the next city or the next county, or to cross a cultural chasm. Still other churches desire to take the ministry of their church into the neighborhoods of members. In each case, multi-site is not seen as merely another program or strategy, but rather becomes a key component for fulfilling their God-inspired vision.


3. Are the key leaders behind the decision?
Going multi-site can stretch the budget, invite criticism from other churches, and make new demands on church leadership; therefore it is vital that the key leaders of the church be unified and enthusiastic about the decision. It is always difficult to get 100 percent buy-in for a new direction. But if the executive leadership is not sold on the concept of doing church in multiple locations, it should be a major warning light.

Adapted from the forthcoming book, The Multi-Site Church Revolution: Being One Church in Many Locations, Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon, and Warren Bird, Zondervan (April 2006 release).

Did this article interest you? Learn more by checking out the featured resources in this issue or click here. Or you can connect in person at an upcoming Multi-Site Conference scheduled for October 24-25, 2005 in Chicago.