A Saddleback Church on every corner?

I was reading an article in the Christian Post today about how Rick Warren’s church, Saddleback, plans to launch NINE new campuses.

I am still a little weary on multi-site churches, which is odd, since my home church would like to become a multi-site church in the future. The problem I have with Saddleback’s strategy is how they emphasize the “go” stage of their program.

When I think of “go and make disciples” (Matthew 28:19), I think it encompasses a lot more than just baptizing people and making sure they’re right in their Christian walk. We should be helping people develop their spiritual gifts and the abilities that God has given them. Some of these people who attend Saddleback would make great pastors, but how can they be given the opportunity to preach when the message is broadcast live to each church?

The article also states that they hope their members don’t become passive in their faith. There may be many men in that audience who have the potential to be great pastors, if anything is limiting them, it may be the fact that Saddleback is trying to “mass produce” the church.

One thing I really enjoyed when I came to Grace was our church planting initiative. If I remember right, Grace helped launch Genesis, Bridgeway, Trinity, and others. I feel this is a better model because it takes people from the “mother” church and goes out to expand into the Kingdom of God.

I liken multi-site churches to Starbucks. When there was one Starbucks store, it was a truly unique experience. Then they expanded to a few stores, while still keeping that uniqueness. But now, you have a Starbucks on every corner trying to duplicate the “Starbucks Experience” that first originated with the first group of stores. I say that to say this, the more you “duplicate” a church through the multi-site model, the more you cheapen the experience.

I think that Jeffery Johnson of Eastern Star does it just right. His church has three locations and he manages to drive to each location on Sunday. Each church has similar programs, but run by different people at each location. The big difference in Johnson’s church is that the pastor is there in person to deliver the message. And the great thing is that Eastern Star hasn’t stopped planting churches! In fact, Brother Eric Wiggins is now pastor of New Horizons Church which meets at Northview Middle School in Indianapolis.

I hope that as churches look towards the multi-site model, that they don’t try and “cheapen” the experience. You can use all the technology in the world to beam your message to satellite churches, but many of us are already slaves to our television. You may think that it isn’t important for the pastor to physically be present, but it is to many folks and we must not forget that.

We must remember that if we are maxing out the capacity of our auditoriums, that we have excellent opportunity to turns those people into pastors, Sunday School teachers, administrators, worship leaders and to send them out into the kingdom! Notice, Jesus could have spread the message Himself. But he chose twelve disciples and sent them out in pairs to spread the gospel.

Those are my thoughts, I’d enjoy hearing what you think!