Multi-Site Thoughts

Since we are 7 Sundays away from launching our second campus, since I have never been to a conference on going multi-site, and since we are launching a campus 8 miles away and that is supposed to be a no-no, I figure I am an expert on multi-site church.

In all seriousness, we don’t have a clue what we are doing and we are flying by the seats of our pants, but that is how we roll at Revolution! Even though we are so new into this thing, I am already learning HUGE benefits to the multi-site model and I thought I would share some of what I have learned already.

• Video teaching is NOT an issue - I will admit, I have been a little afraid of this but One Prayer proved that video teaching is a non-issue.
• Multi-site multiples your volunteers - New opportunities create new volunteers. We have not even started forming our launch team yet (yes, we launch in 7 Sundays) and we have already had a HUGE amount of new volunteers at BOTH campuses.  People are pumped. No matter how big your church becomes there are only a limited amount of people you need serving and multi-site creates more opportunities.
• It is the most economical way to grow - We are spending about 50 grand on launching our second campus and it is in a permanent facility. I will admit we already have a lot of the sound equipment, the video equipment was given to us, but we have done this thing on a shoe-string budget and it is going to be very nice!
• It is a huge buzz creator - I can’t believe the hype from our people and people in the community. To have a church our size in our community is unheard of. To have one church in two locations is insane! Our critics think it is going to be the death of us and our fans are cheering us on. Either way, they are talking about us and I love that!
• Music is the BIGGEST issue - We operate at a very high level musically at Revolution and we will operate at the same level of excellence at our new campus but it has forced to be very intentional about our musicians and especially lead worshipers.  We have some awesome guys we are developing and will be ready long-term. But in the short term, we are getting very creative.
• Don’t over-complicate it - I am sure it gets more crazy at campus 3 and 4, but we are treating this campus like adding services. We aren’t even using a campus pastor. We will have a member of our Lead Team there every week but we don’t feel the need with it being so close. We’ll see how it works out and we are open to change if it doesn’t work. However we are operating like one church all the way down to staffing and budgeting.
• Our people are the most unselfish people ever! - I was at the campus today and as I looked around it occurred to me that not one of our guys there doing construction is even going to attend that campus.  Can you believe that? They won’t even benefit from the campus, yet they are working around the clock to make it happen. Amazing!

I am as excited about launching our second campus as anything we have ever done at Revolution! It is so weird to know we are doing all this work just like we are launching a church and I won’t even be there for the first service because I’ll be at our Canton campus! God is doing an awesome thing and I can’t believe we get to be part of it!