Multi-Site Road Trip Blog Tour

As churches continue to expand their thinking regarding multi-site opportunities, three impacting leaders have once again joined together with the latest information on where the movement has been AND where it’s going.  Backed up by extensive research and insights, Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon, and Warren Bird have authored  Multi-site Road Trip, a fantastic (and fun!) resource for any church that is considering multi-site, OR is already deep into the journey.

I’m thrilled to have been invited to join with several others in the multi-site world to host a blog tour for the book today.  I highly recommend it.  Recently, I was able to ask Geoff, Greg, and Warren about their findings:

JB:  What differences are you seeing between established churches going multi-site years into their church history compared to churches that set out to be multisite from day one?

GS, GL, and WB:  This is really a question about church culture and leading change.  When a church makes a decision to be multi-site from the start, they are cooking into their very DNA a commitment to reproduce and a comfort with change.  An established church may or may not have a reproducing mindset.  We have worked with many established churches who have made the transition to multi-site rather smoothly, largely because they were already involved in church planting or other church reproduction efforts.  As a result moving to multi-site was just another expression of “who they were” and “what they were committed to.”  For others, the transition was more taxing because for the new multi-site strategy to take hold, “empire-building” and “change resistant” mentalities had to be rooted out.

JB: So what are the unique challenges each one faces, and has one proven to be more challenging than the other?

GS, GL, and WB:  Multi-site church plants include multi-site in the vocabulary of their church from the beginning.  Established churches have to introduce new vocabulary to their staff and congregation.  Our experience, both personally and in interaction with the hundreds of multi-site churches we have served, is that it is always easier to launch with it in the DNA than to graft it in along the way.

Admittedly, the question comes from our experience here at Granger.  One of the greatest challenges of our first two years into multi-site has been “reprogramming” the mindset of our church to THINK multi-site in all areas.  And understandably so.  After 23 years of impacting, influential ministry in one location, it’s a radical shift to move to multiple physical locations and still communicate “one church”.  No question that we have a reproducing mindset when it comes to people, but it’s a challenge to think of reproduction in terms of a campus.  Every area of ministry is radically impacted (communication, group life, programming, staffing structure and responsibility, etc.). I’ve connected with several other well-established churches that have also entered the multi-site arena after great impact and growth in one location.  Every church has experienced these challenges as well.  The great thing at Granger – we’re led well, multi-site is championed from the top, we have an incredible central team wrapping their minds around it, and we’re committed to keep moving it forward!  It’s a process, but the culture and mentality are changing.  And good thing:  being multi-site is all about mission, bringing Jesus to new communities!

Check out more Multi-Site Church Roadtrip Q&A at the authors’ blog www.multisiteroadtrip.com. You can also contact them via Twitter – @geoffsurratt, @gregligon or @warrenbird. And if you haven’t picked up a copy of the book yet, click here and get one!  You can click here for more info or to order Multi-Site Church Revolution, their first book on the subject (great resource as well).