Dec
17
2009
Multi-Site Churches: Here to Stay?
Writing for USA Today, Cathy Lynn Grossman has an interesting article on multi-site churches in America. She opens by profiling Tim Keller, Council member with The Gospel Coalition and Senior Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York:
Susan Hong stops Pastor Tim Keller as he dashes up the steps of a Baptist church on a hectic corner of Broadway and West 79th Street.
She heard him preach at 10:30 a.m. on the Upper East Side. Now she has brought friends to hear him at the West Side 5 p.m. service. He briefly greets her, then slips into the service just before his sermon.
In 45 minutes, before the final hymn, Keller's gone — off to deliver the same sermon, "The Gospel Changes Everything," on the East Side.
Then, again, Keller, founder and senior pastor of Manhattan's Redeemer Presbyterian Church, will dash back to West 79th Street for his fourth service of the day at three leased locations.
It's not the traditional American mom-and-pop church, where the same pastor counsels parishioners, visits when they're ill or marries or buries them.
Keller's service-hopping — he usually preaches to three-fourths of the 5,500 people who attend Redeemer services — reflects a new model for worship spreading rapidly across the U.S. church landscape: multisite churches.
Toward the close of the article Keller states his rationale for the multi-site model: “The core of the multisite concept is that a church must 'reverse the flow.' Instead of drawing people to the church, take the church into their world."
Could the multi-site model be at least one good way to be obedient to Matthew 28:19 in our ecclesiology?