multi-site musings

The Multi-Site Church Roadtrip

My wife passed the first chapter of this book on to me. I believe this book is making a case for why multi-site churches are a good thing and how God is working in a variety of ways through a variety of structures. This does not go to the rightness of their argument but I found myself caught up by their language. They suggest that one of the strengths of multi-site is that they simultaneously offer the best of big and small church. But is that the point of church? And who is offering what? Isn’t the church all the people that make it up? Do they mean that the paid staff can offer the best of both worlds? If that is the case then it seems the way they frame their argument has been taken captive by the language of our consumer culture. Maybe later in the book they do this but at least in the first chapter they do not define what a successful church is or does and therefore seem to define success by number of sites, total people coming, diversity of sites and people coming to church services.

I really should read more of this book but the examples they use for churches that have multi-sites all seem to have in common that they started with one church building and that building was located in the suburbs and then subsequent sites moved both to the urban and rural areas. I am not really sure what that implies but it seems worth noting. What cultural reality exists in the suburbs that are distinct from both rural and urban America? How might this movement, if reality, impact the American church in years to come?

I think of Honduras as a good example of this reality. My experience of the evangelical church in Honduras is that has been directly impacted by the brand of politically conservative Christianity exported from the U.S.

I really do believe that multi-sites are neither good nor evil. They just are but how we talk about them and what these communities are trying to do is important.