Observers are not sure what to make of these actions.
Thom Rainer, president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources, predicted that during 2017 a trend to watch would be multisite congregations becoming neighborhood churches. So when The Village Church in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in Texas announced in late September that it was transitioning the six sites where the church meets each week into independent neighborhood churches people took notice.
Is this the beginning of a new trend, many asked?
Warren Bird, director of research and intellectual capital at Leadership Network, does not think so. “Whenever a high visibility church (like The Village) makes the shift, people ask if this is a new trend or even a sign of multisite failure. I say no to both counts.”
The Village Church is a Southern Baptist congregation with headquarters in the Flower Mound area of greater Dallas. It averages about 11,400 in weekly worship with about half attending at Flower Mound. The church went to the multisite approach after six weekly worship services in Flower Mound proved inadequate to accommodate those in attendance.
Matt Chandler has been pastor of the church during this phenomenal growth period. He also serves as president of the Acts 29 church planting network, making him a prominent voice about church growth.
Reaching Dallas
Chandler said the reason for the decision to transition multisite locations into local autonomous churches is because the new approach offers the “best possible ability and capacity to contextually reach the city of Dallas with the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Said another way, concentrating on individual local churches offers the best opportunity for witness and ministry to local communities and for church planting. The new churches will be expected to start new churches to help reach the 7 million people of the Dallas metroplex.
One of the six locations has already rolled off into an independent church. The other five will do so in the next five years.
Beau Hughes served as local pastor of the Denton campus of The Village Church. Now he serves as pastor of the new church. Hughes said in an interview that becoming an independent church “increased the unity of the congregation.”
‘Beautifully united’
“In the last 10 years of being a pastor here, I’ve never seen anything that has more beautifully united us and formed us together as a congregation that this transition because it thrust upon us the responsibilities that come with being a church,” he said.
Interestingly, The Village Church is the second major multisite congregation this year to announce it is abandoning the multisite approach in favor of independent local churches. In May, Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City announced each of its three campuses will become independent churches. Redeemer Presbyterian is not as well-known as its pastor Timothy Keller who recently announced his retirement from pastoral ministry. Keller is one of the most influential voices in evangelical circles today.
The church, which averages about 5,300 people in New York City, has been involved in social ministries from its founding in the late-1980s. But the hope is that the three smaller churches will each be more effective in witnessing and ministering to their particular communities.
It also is anticipated each of the three churches will plant new congregations, growing the Redeemer network from three churches to six to nine neighborhood-based churches within 10 years. Already one new church has been launched called Redeemer Lincoln Square.
Just as one dot doesn’t make a line, two examples do not make a trend. Still there are some interesting similarities at both The Village Church and Redeemer Church.
Both seek to be more involved in local communities. The big word is to “contextualize” witness and ministries. Both churches concluded this could be done more effectively as independent churches rather than through the multisite approach for a megachurch program.
Initial reaction to the change has been positive from campuses becoming independent churches. The Denton campus pastor quoted above called it a “beautiful” process and reports indicate reactions from other campuses are just as positive. In New York, Redeemer West Side has already started a church plant.
More people are being drawn into leadership as responsibilities have to be assumed and decisions made by now independent congregations. That means more trained and functional church leaders.
These similarities are hauntingly close to observations made in the 1970s by the late James L. Sullivan, then president of the Baptist Sunday School Board (now LifeWay).
In a book titled “Rope of Sand With Strength of Steel,” Sullivan wrote the Southern Baptist approach was to start several neighborhood-based churches in an area rather than create one megachurch.
He explained that having many churches allowed for a variety of cultures to attract different people. The combined attendance of the neighborhood churches would outstrip the attendance of the megachurch, he said, and neighborhood churches could minister more effectively to their communities than a single large church could. He also said that more Christians were trained for leadership roles through neighborhood churches than in a single large congregation.
Not mentioned but evidently true judging from reactions shared by both The Village Church and Redeemer Church is that members seem to take on more responsibility when they have to make decisions rather than having decisions made for them by someone else.
Also interesting is that Redeemer made its decision to separate into independent neighborhood churches at the time of Keller’s retirement. Chandler also noted that transitioning to independent churches eliminates concerns about succession.
Celebrity pastors
In 2015, Christianity Today studied multisite ministries and concluded that when led by a celebrity pastor, multisite ministries can work well. “But when things go poorly, multisite churches can become another struggling American franchise, precariously built on the brand of a celebrity pastor — and one step away from collapsing like a house of cards.”
Whether The Village Church and Redeemer are the front edge of a trend or just isolated examples remains to be seen.
Whatever the ultimate answer and whatever strategy is embraced, the goal for all of us must always be to share the good news of Jesus Christ and to fulfill our Christian vocation of reflecting God’s glory into the communities where we live and work.
Share with others: