Architecting the Church: A Multi-Campus Approach

Part four in a five-part series about church leadership structures (read the introduction, the biblical principles, and the organization of MHC).

Several years ago we reached a place where we had nearly outgrown our relatively new (three years old) building located in Ballard. All four of our Sunday services were nearing maximum capacity, which forced us to think through what was next for our church.

Do we close the doors and stop growing?

Do we go look for another larger building to rent or buy?

Do we exclusively plant churches from now on?

Or do we explore becoming a multi-site church?

It didn’t seem like a biblical option to close our doors and tell our people and our city that we can’t accept new people and are done growing. We considered every venue in Seattle, and there were no viable options to either support another move to an existing place or buy enough land to build a bigger building—unless we decided to move out of the city, which conflicted with our ministry philosophy and calling. We’ are already actively involved in planting churches through our work and coordination of the Acts 29 Network and plan to continue, however we still continued to grow.

The only other option was multi-site.

What started out as somewhat of a reactive response to not having enough room quickly evolved into a very proactive approach to establish and empower a strong network of local campuses that each have a campus pastor, a team of elders, deacons, and a core of faithful and dedicated members. In this way, we decided to establish outposts for the gospel in different areas of our city and wherever God should lead next.

Our multi-campus approach allows us to function as one church that meets in many different locations. Each campus in and of itself does the work of a biblical church—including teaching, pastoral shepherding and leadership, large gatherings, small group gatherings for community and fellowship, membership, financial giving, communion, baptizing new Christians, and serving as missionaries to non-Christians. Each campus pastor preaches roughly twelve times a year.

While each campus functions much like its own church we have also recognized that there are very strategic resources, benefits, and blessings that come from being a single church entity, Mars Hill Church. Those resources are primarily: preaching, theological unity, church planting efforts, administrative operations, technology, and the sharing of leadership training and ministry development. (For more on our use of video, watch Pastor Mark Driscoll’s explanation of “Videology.”) Through these shared resources we work together for the good of the gospel, regardless of campus affiliation.

As we continue to expand geographically throughout our city (and hopefully beyond), we are always wrestling with the question of how to effectively operate the balance between distributed and centralized leadership and care for the people who call Mars Hill home.

Tomorrow: what have we learned in our experience?