I (Chris) recently noticed a tweet pointing to an article entitled “The Two Sins of Multi-Site,” by pastor and theology professor David Fitch. Always curious to learn what sins our church is committing, I wandered over to have a look.
I was pleasantly surprised. Fitch’s piece is both insightful and charitable. He points to the two pitfalls he finds most endemic to the multi-site model and encourages those of us employing it to work hard to avoid them. It is refreshing to read critiques that don’t reflexively indemnify all those pursuing the model: “The real church should not be a cult of personality!” or “Real churches care about community!” Fitch recognizes that the model has both benefits and pitfalls, and seems concerned with maintaining mission and pastoral care within a multi-site model, not with tearing the model down. In other words, there is good multi-site and bad multi-site.
On the whole, I agree that both the pitfalls Fitch identifies are possibilities, and I am thankful to Fitch for calling us to be vigilant toward them. Both critiques are legitimate, and our elder team has worked hard to avoid them. We still have a long way to go, but these are issues we have thought about continually.
Pitfall 1: Hierarchical Leadership
As Fitch notes, multi-site is “built on the premise of centralized organization. It in essence makes decisions and funnels funds and other means of power from the center out. . . . The organization becomes centered and ordered towards the authority in one man.”
As with many critiques of the multi-site model, this isn’t specific to multi-site. This is a tendency for any church, a tendency that increases as the size of the church increases. One might even argue—as we have elsewhere—that having a multitude of campuses can increase leadership beyond the primary pastor, making hierarchicalism less likely.
But we shouldn’t be too quick to discount Fitch’s point. Far too many multi-site churches do simply allow one charismatic leader to call all the shots. And insofar as we notice that trend, we must actively work to counter it, empowering rather than seeking to consolidate power.
As I read the current evidence (which is growing but still woefully incomplete), it seems that multi-site is a zero-sum game when it comes to hierarchical leadership: done well, multi-site can create new leaders; done poorly, it can become a convenient cover for a one-man show. In any case, it is a good practice to constantly ask ourselves (regardless of our ecclesial model), “Are we consolidating power under a select few, or are we really letting the Spirit guide all of us?”
Pitfall 2: Lack of Local Contextualization
Once again, Fitch: “When one franchises either a teacher or a church model based on one location and transfers it [wholesale] to another location, one has in essence disregarded the local context, its culture and instead assumes that who we are and what we say as a church applies to you with no dialogue or presence needed. It asks people to come to me on our terms. We have what you need. It is a profound act of colonialism.”
If the first pitfall is about the way we do church, the latter is more concerned with the way we do mission. Multi-site, it is alleged, is inherently anti-missional and makes contextualization impossible. Shouldn’t our message, after all, be tailored to the people we preach it to? If it isn’t, and we really are just “franchising” our “brand,” the colonialism label—while stinging—seems appropriate.
Two comments are in order. First, while Fitch doesn’t bring the issue up in this article, this critique reinforces one of our key principles when planting new campuses: new campuses should be pursued only within the same metro area. At the Summit, we don’t plant campuses in other cities, other states, or other countries. Part of the reason is that the context in those places is so distinct that our approach must be equally distinct. Throughout all our campuses runs an “RDU” identity. A discerning observer will find distinctions, of course, between (for instance) our Downtown Durham campus and our Cary campus. But he would also find significant differences between certain members within the same campus. A healthy church is not one where the message has been so contextualized that it can only connect with one small slice of the city—yuppie church, empty nester church, cowboy church, urban church. “Contextualization” and “unity with diversity” should both be balanced. We believe we are preserving that balance by limiting our campuses to the Raleigh-Durham area.
Second, there seems to be an assumption made here that contextualization happens primarily through the weekend preaching. Thus, if the preaching is “imported” from another venue, we’ve failed to really hear our people and minister to them. And the preaching is important. But if we have a campus chock full of college students, we can recognize and respond to that reality in a dozen different ways beyond making the preaching series about “staying Christian in college.” The challenge, of course, remains: we must continually push our campuses to read their communities, assess their needs, and to be intentional about contextualizing beyond the weekend sermons.
All told, Fitch’s is a fair article, and issues a warning for multi-site leaders that we need to hear and continually heed. Just as there is good multi-site and bad multi-site, there is also good critique and bad critique. I’m thankful that Fitch has given us an example of the former.
