Church Multisite Campuses Reach New Audiences
This article explores how several churches used multisite campuses to reach unchurched and dechurched people in their communities. Through examples from Colorado and Pennsylvania, it shows both the opportunities and challenges of launching new sites while preserving a shared church mission.
- Rocky Mountain Christian Church launched a new campus that attracted many people with little or no church background.
- Discovery Christian Church shaped each site around the needs and culture of its local community.
- LifeBridge Christian Church found that multisite ministry created new opportunities for leadership and volunteer service.
by Darrel Rowland
The couple had a simple question: How much does it cost to join the church?
That’s when the leaders of Rocky Mountain Christian Church (www.rmcc.org) knew they were hitting their target audience of unchurched people with their first multisite campus.
“They said, ‘Don’t you have to pay a membership fee? Do you have to buy tickets? We’ve never been in church before,’” recalls Rick Thielen, who helped launch the new 30-acre site about 17 miles east of Rocky Mountain’s home campus in Niwot, Colorado.
“When you start getting those kinds of questions, you’re starting to get to the people who need to hear the good news,” he said. “If we’re doing it just to take people out of other churches, then I don’t believe that’s what God wants us to do.”
One reason for starting new sites is the same as planting new churches: They attract a different audience, and they are more likely to grow. Yet since the new site is part of an established church with a leadership structure already in place, beginning a new site generally is much cheaper and simpler than starting an entirely new church.
Rocky Mountain’s year-old location in a burgeoning area about 30 miles north of Denver is running about 1,000 each week, with 70 to 80 percent unchurched or “dechurched”—people who used to attend but fell away.
“We really have to bring the message down, because some of our people didn’t even know there was an Old Testament and a New Testament in the Bible,” Thielen said. “Some had never even heard the story of the birth of Jesus Christ.”
They’ve given away hundreds of Bibles to those attending the services, which are younger, louder, and a little more experiential than those at the main campus. One of the $18 million site’s first baptisms was of a local motorcycle club member, who then baptized his wife.
“God has just continued to open doors in a most amazing way,” Thielen said. “If you have to kick the door down, then God isn’t opening the door for you.”
Targeted, Downsized
Rocky Mountain began the new site to meet the area’s need for a family-targeted, Christ-centered ministry that a megachurch could provide. At the same time, the church is in a protracted legal battle initiated by the county government on plans to expand at its original location for the same purpose.
Because of the economic downturn and the combined costs of the new site and ongoing court tussle, Rocky Mountain has downsized its staff to essentially the same level for two sites as it was for one a year ago.
Thielen, who joined the staff eight years ago after working in the private sector, volunteered to be one of those let go. He has since launched RGT consulting to help other churches develop multisites.
Multifaceted
For Discovery Christian Church (www.discovertogether.com) near Pittsburgh, multisite means multifaceted.
In addition to the six-year-old home church in suburban Cranberry Township about 13 miles north of the city, parts of Discovery now meet in an art studio in Pittsburgh’s south side bar district, at an older regional mall called Waterworks, and in a Lutheran church for a service with Burmese refugees.
“A lot of the multisite congregations plant their campuses in areas that have similarities to where their main campus is located so they are all kind of uniform; they all look alike,” said Toney Salva, lead pastor.
“At Discovery, we wanted to be really diverse. Rather than trying to create one thing that works in all of our places, we just found it’s better to shape each campus to meet the needs of the people we’re trying to connect with.”
Discovery illustrates another strength of going multisite: the ability to experiment—and to pull the plug if necessary.
After meeting for two years in a movie theater, Discovery launched its first two additional sites on the church’s third birthday in 2006. But Salva said they quickly realized that what appealed to their suburban audience wouldn’t cut it in a more urban setting.
“They didn’t have the same needs, they didn’t speak the same language, they were a younger demographic, a little rougher around the edges. And our suburban message didn’t really hit home with them.”
Discovery calls itself “a church for people who don’t have one,” with members who “strive to find ways to build bridges to a cynical and jaded society.”
Cultural relevancy is underscored by creative approaches in this self-described “church with a media edge,” especially at the art studio services currently attended by about 70 each Sunday.
“We specifically started that church in the bar district to connect with the 20-somethings in that area,” Salva said. “Most of the people in that campus have tattoos from head to toe, piercings all over the place, and would never set foot in a traditional church.”
The church’s band plays music straight from the radio, including some songs that are not Christian-based. Often the church will conduct services on Sunday evenings in local bars, which are normally closed at that time.
Discovery has purchased land for a 1,000-seat auditorium, day care/preschool, sports facilities, coffee shop, and more for its main campus. (See the church’s vision at www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWen1PuV3Ps.)
Next year comes another experiment: a church plant in a growing area south of Pittsburgh, instead of another multisite location. Salva said he is looking forward to weighing the pros and cons of the multisite expansions versus a new church plant.
“We don’t know of any churches doing both right now. We kind of like the idea of doing an apples-to-apples comparison in a region.”
Face with the Place
Drew Depler has one of those newfangled titles that emerged with the multisite movement: campus minister.
While senior minister Rick Rusaw is the guy who appears on the big video screens at LifeBridge Christian Church’s (www.lbcc.org) two area campuses, most weeks Depler is the “face with the place” at the Tri-Towns location, 15 miles from the main facility in Longmont, Colorado.
The former information technology manager and LifeBridge elder says multisite is not only generating a new vocabulary, but is creating a newly committed cadre of churchgoers who weren’t involved before.
“Our biggest obstacle and our biggest success is the same thing,” Depler said.
“A hidden gem in all of this is when we launched our campuses we created an opportunity for people to serve that they didn’t have before, that they didn’t see before.”
In established churches, everything is ready to go when people arrive so they presume no additional help is needed to get things done, he said. In fledgling multisites, that’s obviously not the case.
“Through starting a new place, we were able to bring people along in terms of their leadership, their volunteering. We were able to raise up a whole new set of leaders to lead teams . . . who feel they are able to contribute and are able to do that in their own backyard and in their own community.”
The four-year-old site has 135 volunteers while weekend attendance averages a little more than 200—all in a highly mobile, rapidly changing commuter community. The church began a second multisite campus in nearby Johnstown in 2006.
“We had some very good people who just worked like crazy,” Depler said.
The two satellite campuses, the church says, combined with the original congregation “creates a blend of the ‘small’ and the ‘large’ giving the best of both worlds: a small church community where you can experience great relationships, with access to all the great resources and opportunities of our larger church family.”
Darrel Rowland is public affairs editor of The Columbus Dispatch and an adult Bible fellowship teacher at Worthington (Ohio) Christian Church.
