Multi-Site Churches - Modern Day Bus Ministry

This article was started prior to my knowledge of the 9Marks EJournal. I have not read that yet. Any thoughts here are to be blamed solely on me.

I have mentioned multi-site churches before. A recent article about Mars Hill Church in Seattle going to its first out of state campus started me thinking again.

It used to be that the buses ran to bring the people to pastor. Now, the modern day bus ministry can take the pastor to the people. Is it bad? Perhaps not. But I think it deserves more thought.

Here’s a quick list of why I think that, some of which probably overlap, and all of which need some development, refinement, or answers as to why they should not be on this list:

1. Celebrity Preachers – Why listen to some local yokel when you can hear “the Big Guy”? This reminds me of Dan Phillips’ recent article on Porn and Paper Pastors.
2. Separation of the roles of pastor and preacher – One of the roles of the pastor is to shepherd his people through the preaching of the word. A DVD can’t do that. It ends up minimizing the role of pastoral ministry.
3. Minimization of local church emphasis – One of the main features of a local church (preaching) isn’t actually local.
4. Minimization of developing leaders – There is a decreasing need to develop biblical leaders who can teach the word effectively because you can download them. Qualifications for leadership begin to be boiled down to “Who can push play?”
5. Temptation to Kingdom building – Why do we need 100 campuses in different states?
6. Temptation to a belief in indispensability – “Smalltown USA doesn’t have a pastor who can preach like me. Let me send you a link so you can download a great church there.” Does Mark Driscoll really think God has no one these other cities who can preach the gospel? Is he really that indispensable? Yes, I know they have planted churches in many places, including local areas in Seattle. So why don’t they keep doing that? Train pastors and send them out.
7. Difficulty of pastoral training – You can’t learn to pastor by serving under a video pastor.
8. Separation of preaching and leadership – Local churches should be lead by … wait for it … local people. One of the key factors in church leadership is the pulpit ministry. When the pulpit ministry is hundreds of miles away, it seems hard to avoid a dichotomy between separation and leadership. A church essentially has a special speaker every week.
9. Difficulty in contextualization – Mars Hill (not the first multi-site, but the one that sparked my thinking here) is big on contextualization in ministry. How does Mark contextualize his preaching for a city he doesn’t live in and doesn’t know anything about? It will be hard to contextualize your message for a city you don’t live in and for a congregation you know nothing about.

I don’t think multi-site is always bad. But as Ed Stetzer recently said, there are some disturbing implications here.