I recently read an interesting article in the Leadership Journal on multi-site churches and why one pastor felt led to abandon that model, despite great success with it. You can find the article in its entirety here.
I don't claim to know everything about church plating strategy, and as the pastor of an average congregation, I can see why my voice may not carry weight in the conversation, however, my uneasiness with that particular model boils down to one of the 3 points by the author. Namely, my concern lies with the pastor-teacher not knowing his sheep. This is something, I believe, that the multi-site minister cannot accomplish.
What is difference in a member of a multi-site congregation staying home with a few friends and watching one of several great pastor-teachers on television or listening to them on the radio and them attending the service? Would that not be the similar in experience? The message would be no more or less specific than what they would experience in either venue. In a multi-site setting, a pastor-teacher must continually be thinking of preaching based on the larger context and mission. If something particularly tragic or scandalous happens at one campus, the pastor-teacher cannot entirely address the issue from the pulpit for concern that it is not something happening across all campuses.
Pastors should smell like their sheep, their sheep should know their voice, and he should know them by name. This is not possible in the multi-site context. We must stop and evaluate if that model is driven by scripture, or by the fame of the pastor-teacher. If it is the latter, we must re-evaluate and go another way.
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