Welcome back to our new podcast all about multisite! I’m chatting with a group of multisite ninjas and answering your questions about the ins and outs of launching new campuses. Our group is as follows:

Natalie Frisk is our family ministry expert. She is a key leader from The Meeting House. This church has 19 (!) locations and is doing all kinds of great stuff, including a killer kids’ & youth curriculum that they give away for free. Natalie’s a lot of fun and will have so many great insights around leading in a thriving multisite church.

Greg Curtis is our guest connections and assimilation expert. He leads at Eastside Christian Church, one of the fastest growing churches in the country, and literally, is the “go to” source for getting people to stick and stay in the church. (Eastside has assimilated something like 1,500 people in the last 18 months!) His coaching practice around assimilation is amazing.

Ben Stapley is our communications and service programming expert. Ben is one of the most helpful leaders I know. His day job is the Weekend Experience Director at Christ Fellowship in Miami, but he does so much to help other leaders with the “big show” part of church world.

And I, Rich, have been involved with 14 different campus launches over the years and enjoy helping churches that are thinking about multisite.

We are here to answer your questions about running a multisite church and are excited to be here today with our seventh episode.

Opening question: If you could switch out your role for any other role in your church, what would it be?

* Natalie – Either a lead pastor role at one of our campuses or (if we had such a role) some kind of guest connections role.

* Greg – I would switch places with our teaching pastor.  

* Ben -I would say something like a junior high or a grief share role—for me, those are the opportunities for some pivotal moments in people’s lives.

Q1: After several years of having a second campus, we really need a model for staff interaction. Is there a good starting point to begin to put a model in place?

Natalie said that a model is more than who reports to whom; it begins with an overarching vision. What is shared, what isn’t? What makes it a multisite other than two churches that share finances or branding? Make a list of essentials that helps guide your church to understand its identity. Get to a place with a shared program, shared structure, and shared resources. Connect on training times and create a common list of everything from setting up a classroom to supplies and toys. Natalie also advised that when you plan, don’t just plan for a few locations—plan for many locations and consider what the sites would look like ten years down the road.

Ben offered insights from a service programming perspective. First, evaluate the following: how do you help teams from a creative point of view? When you go from one to more than one, start planning your preaching calendar further in advance (e.g. plan it out in the fall for the upcoming year, and roll it out to the staff around December). To streamline communications, standardize your announcements and your events, and consider hosting just one event as a whole church instead of several smaller events which vary per site. Ben also suggested that churches move from live to video announcement, have a consistent playlist for the worship teams, and standardize social media.

Greg responded to this question with a series of questions for the executive team to reflect on. Where in the spectrum between a church plant and a campus is that church? If you’re referring to one site as the “main campus,” are the sites the same size or is one significantly larger than the other? Is there any vision for another campus? When it comes to assimilation, make it the same experience for guests at both campuses.