Multi-Site Churches: Part 1
The following post is James’ contribution to Scott McConnell’s Multi-Site Churches: Guidance for the Movement’s Next Generation (B&H Publishing, 2008) 19-23.
It may come as some surprise, but Harvest Bible Chapel didn’t have any big plans or strategy or even desire to go multi-site. God was blessing our church with growth, and we were completely overloaded. We were meeting in a big old warehouse and were running six shuttle buses for four services.
Our response to our growth problem was to start planting churches. We had a vision to plant ten churches in ten years starting in 2000.
And so we started sending people out to plant churches. The first year we sent out two groups of three hundred people, and then we continued to send people out for each new church plant. The Lord has really exceeded all of our expectations, and here in 2008 we hope to have launched our thirtieth church.
We would send three hundred of our best leaders out. These wonderful people would go, and then new people would come in kind of on the first floor. Then we helped these new people grow as leaders, and we would send them out. Then even more would come in. Church planting is a wonderful, biblical thing to do that Harvest Bible Chapel is very committed to do. Yet as wonderful and as fruitful as it was to these people going out and establishing new churches, we found out that church planting did not solve our growth problems.
So, we sought to relocate our church to a larger location. Here in the northwest suburbs of Chicago the population is very dense. As we looked, we found that there were really no properties or locations available to us. Ultimately we ended our search. This was a dark time for our church as we honestly did not know what we were going to do.
Then out of nowhere the Lord provided for us a campus that was outside of our search area. Through the generosity of the Green family that owns the Hobby Lobby stores, we were given an eighty-acre campus with a 280,000 square foot building and a nine hundred-car parking garage. It was built in the mid 1990s for about $53 million, and they gave it to us for a dollar.
At first, we thought, “Wow! We’ll just move our whole church out there.” But the problem was it was too far away. We couldn’t move our whole church a half an hour away. As the reality of this development sunk in, we realized we were forced to become a two-campus church.
Similar to our church plants, more than seven hundred people left the original campus in Rolling Meadows and went to launch the new campus in Elgin. Since then, their spaces have been filled at the original campus while the new campus has grown to more than thirty-five hundred people in attendance.
This all seems overwhelming looking back, but in the midst of all this a little church down in Niles, about a half an hour in the other direction, came to us. They only had about thirty-five people attending in a three hundred fifty-seat worship center. They hadn’t had water in the baptistery in three years, nobody was getting saved, and really nothing was happening. And they said, “Can you help us?”
They agreed to disband their former church government. They voted to never vote again, and they accepted our elder form of government. We set them up as a video site, and we called it Harvest Bible Chapel Niles. Within about three years, this campus became packed out in four services with about eleven hundred people attending there every week.
Since that time one of the churches we planted ran into financial difficulty, and their elders agreed to come back into partnership with us. The church had dropped from eight hundred to five hundred in attendance and was facing bankruptcy. By providing leadership and Harvest’s video teaching, they have rebounded to more than one thousand in attendance and have gotten into a new facility.
In addition, we had a number of people who had moved to Phoenix for retirement or semi-retirement who couldn’t find a similar church. This base of leadership was ready to plant a church and Harvest was willing to help. Initially the right pastor could not be found, so they utilized video teaching just like the other video services Harvest has. Now that the church has grown to more than two hundred fifty and has a pastor in place, it has become an autonomous church.
When we stared to go into multi-site, our attendance was between five thousand and six thousand. And while we have continued to plant churches we have almost eleven thousand in weekly attendance.
With such a tremendous story of God’s provision, you may expect us to be outspoken proponents of multi-site. The truth is that we are reluctant participants in multi-site.
(part two coming soon…)
Categorized as: From James, Harvest Bible Chapel, Ministry
