Are you serving in a multisite church and sensing some tension building between members of your broader team?

Do you currently feel a sense of competition with other campuses that isn’t entirely healthy?

Do you serve on a central support team and are looking for ways to increase the unity amongst the teams you help lead?

If you want to experience a more profound sense of unity among the staff team at your multisite church, you are not alone! The most recent comprehensive study of the multisite church movement by Leadership Network discovered that one of the top ten issues that leaders are facing is how to increase unity across locations. 

I’ve been a part of the multisite movement since the early 2000s. During those years, I’ve led the launches of 13 campuses and then helped manage those campuses as they began to work with their churches’ other locations. Over the years, I’ve also seen all kinds of break downs in unity among campuses. However, through prayerful leadership, we were able to develop a more profound sense of unity among our teams. Here are a number of the best practices that have helped churches to develop a deeper understanding of community amongst the campus teams.

Defer to Younger Campuses

One of the dynamics that drive healthy, growing multisite churches is that they defer to the newer campuses regularly. This is a heart attitude of humility that needs to be continuously championed with your leaders.

If you’re going to choose where to invest financial resources, it needs to be in the youngest campuses. 

If you’re making a decision where you’re going to send your best campus teams, you should point them towards the new locations. 

If you’re building a new process, you want to make sure it works best at the campuses that are the latest to launch.

Every campus at your church was started because the “original location” sacrificed to launch out the next location. They led the way and got the ball rolling. As leaders connected to this movement, we need to echo that heart and defer to the needs of the younger campuses.

Why? Because we know that campus is the most fragile in their early days; the hardest weeks and months are always at the beginning of the process. Accordingly, you should do everything you can to lift up those locations as they get started.

We need to keep this reality in front of our leaders as we roll through new launches. Moving leaders beyond a “scarcity mindset” that focuses on their location to an “abundance mindset” is the best strategy for building unity in a multisite church. 

Get the Language Right

So many problems in developing unity in a multisite church can be avoided by simply getting the language right. Think carefully about how you refer to the various aspects of your ministry and shape your words in a way that reinforces unity. 

Avoid some of these common language pitfalls:

* Don’t refer to the first location as headquarters, mothership, or the main site.* Avoid using language that diminishes your campuses like “satellite location,” “overflow,” or “extension campus”.* Make sure to honor the leaders at all the locations by paralleling their titles like Campus Pastor or Community Pastor. * Campus distinctions that assume the first location (“First Church North”) because that subtly communicates that campuses are only an appendage to something else. * Overreaching in titles.