On a typical Sunday, some 5 million people—almost 10 percent of Protestant worshipers—attend a multi-site church in the United States of Canada. As the multi-site revolution continues to expand, the leaders of these visionary churches have developed innovative strategies for selecting additional campuses to increase the gospel’s reach into different parts of their cities.
For example, five years ago, metro Chicago's Willow Creek Community Church conducted a survey that indicated that their church had the most impact in the lives of people who lived within a twenty-mile radius of the original South Barrington campus. As a result, Willow Creek launched a series of new regional campuses with good results. Church members who had been driving to the original campus and shifted to one of the other sites reported that they volunteered more, gave more and were more involved in sharing the gospel with their neighbors. Today Willow Creek has a total of six campuses.
If you are considering a campus addition but don’t know what questions you should be asking, consider this free, informative download: Selecting Locations for Additional Campuses…Whether it’s Your Second or Fifteenth Site, by Pat Springle. The paper takes a close look at the campus selection processes that many successful multi-site churches have gone through (representing many sizes of multi-sites), evaluating which strategies have worked and which strategies have not. Read it here.
Warren Bird, Ph.D., is Research Director at Leadership Network, and co-author of 21 books on various aspects of church health and innovation.
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