We never planned it this way. We had no strategic plan to do seven church services each weekend. It just happened. But now the multi-congregational approach is an important part of who we are. Along the way, we learned a few things, some the hard way, about making it work.
Like many churches, we began to grow and ran out of space. So we started a second service. We continued to grow, and we ran out of space again. Instead of launching a construction project, we started yet another service.
On it went, until we reached seven weekend worship services: four on Sunday morning, one on Saturday night, and two on Sunday evening.
Is this the end? We don’t know. As our church continues to grow, we may continue creating new congregations.
Many churches have more than one worship service. Except for the number, our approach wouldn’t appear to be unique, except that (1) we have designed some services to appeal to some people but not others, and (2) in many ways we consider each service a fully functioning congregation. We follow the Willow Creek model of having two types of services-seeker services and believer services. The five Saturday night/Sunday morning meetings are for seekers, and the two services on Sunday night are for believers.
To put it another way, instead of worrying whether multiple services will divide an otherwise united congregation, we’ve begun to intentionally create multiple congregations. We don’t expect all the staff or any one pastor to be at every service.
Recently, as I was reading the Book of Acts, I wondered if this wasn’t merely a variation of what the early church did. After the thousands had been added to their number at Pentecost, “every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.”
I had always thought, What dedicated people these must have been to meet seven days a week. We can hardly get people to come two or three times a week! But then I realized the text doesn’t say that every believer attended every meeting. It says the church met every day-in temple courts, and they also “broke bread in their homes.” Could it be that the average believer in Jerusalem in the first century attended one large “temple court” meeting and one or two small “breaking bread” meetings per week?
The church could meet every day, but each church member would not attend each meeting. Maybe they were, to some degree, multi-congregational. Our seven services over two days each week looks pretty modest by comparison.
Even though our approach was unplanned and has evolved over the last few years, we’re now convinced it works better for us than constructing a larger building to get everyone into one or two services or making Sunday morning the main event and other times auxiliary events.
We are not only willing to risk breaking our congregation into “cliques,” we’re encouraging it. In fact, we are beginning to call ourselves a “multi-congregational church.”
Advantages of Multi-Congregations
We moved in the direction of a multi-congregational church by Providence but we’ve already seen the many advantages it affords.
First, we save a Mount McKinley of money. Dollars not spent on I-beams, cement, and bond interest can hire staff, raise funds for mission projects, and pay for aggressive outreach programs.
How much do land and buildings really cost? Land prices, of course, are fixed at the time of sale. But constructing buildings is another matter: Church consultant Lyle Schaller says, “Experience tells us [it] will turn out to be two or three or four times the original estimate.” A pastor’s worst nightmare.
In our (Southern Baptist) denomination, if you divide our total Sunday school attendance by the total property assets of our churches, we’ve spent $6,000 per attendee on land and buildings. That’s a lot of overhead. Schaller points out that the result of all this investment may be “very attractive, but most of the time empty, buildings.”
Plus there are the ongoing expenses for maintenance and utilities.
Walk into an empty auditorium and ask yourself this question: If McDonalds spent this much on little-used overhead, could they stay in business? (That causes me to reflect on the grace of God!)
Second, the multi-congregation approach allows us to specialize. We currently use two styles of music in our services: in some services it’s semi-traditional, in others contemporary.
One of our members recently told me that he went to a different service each week, depending on how he needed to see God that week.
“I need to see both sides of God,” he explained. “Sometimes he is reflective and serious. Sometimes he is exuberant and exciting.”
I hope someday we can offer other music types, perhaps an even more traditional, high-church style, or a country-gospel service, or, in our area, a mariachi style.
Specialization is no small advantage. When we started our 9:45 Sunday morning service, the number of college visitors jumped dramatically. We gained the reputation of conducting “a service for students.” Others have told me straight out that if we did not have the contemporary service, they would not attend our church. This variety can reach baby boomers while still ministering to our more traditional members.
On the other hand, if we ran only the contemporary service, I would not have my job. And we wouldn’t be touching people needing the more traditional structure.
Keeping Unity Amid Diversity
A church trying this approach will need to deal with at least two issues. First, how do you keep a multi-congregation church from becoming fragmented and isolated? Can such diversity be unified?
In a traditional church, one or more “whole-church events” still punctuate the week, whether on Sunday morning, Sunday night, or Wednesday night.
This contributes significantly to the unity of the church.
The multi-congregation church has no such luxury. What sociological glue holds the multi-congregation church together? Although we’re still discovering the various adhesives, a major part of the answer lies in the staff.
A minister of music at a traditional church once told me, “If the staff is divided, the church is divided. It will not be long before the church begins taking up sides. A united staff is the only way to have a united church.” If this is true in a traditional church, how much more so in a multi-congregation church.
The multi-congregation approach has worked well for us because staff members share the same vision for the church and are friends with a high level of trust. We are working on the same objectives and the same agenda. We are each comfortable with our role on the team.
An appreciation of diversity also bonds our church together. All of us do not like the same kind of music, but we all believe that different styles of music should be provided. We do not all find it convenient to worship at the same time, but we all agree that choices should be provided. Our overarching philosophy of ministry helps keep us moving as one body.
Another adhesive is the common identity of being a part of Calvary Church. Suggest to a Saturday night attender that he or she is not part of the real Calvary, and they would wrestle you like a bear. This is true of people in every service. They all share a common identity of being members in full standing, not second-rate members. There is no pecking order between the various congregations.
When to Start a New Service
The second issue the multi-congregation approach constantly raises is when to start a new service. Three factors enter our thinking.
First, we consider the capacity of our meeting room. We follow the theory that when a room is 80 percent full, it is full. Any more people than that will thwart the growth of the group.
I was serving as greeter one Sunday night when we had an especially full house. Four college students arrived late. I explained, “There are no more seats, but we’ll soon pause in the service to greet each other. When we do, we’ll get some chairs out of the choir loft and bring them down.” They complied, but I haven’t seen them since. Was the seating hassle part of the reason? I suspect so.
Our auditorium holds about 280. This means that if any one service averages over 200 for a month or two, we know that at our rate of growth (about 15 percent annually) we will soon hit the 80 percent mark, so we know it’s time to start planning a new service.
Second, we consider the calendar. Since winter is the growing season for most churches, beginning a new service in early fall allows the longest growing season before the slower summer months. On the other hand, Easter can also be a good time because it attracts outsiders. We would never start a service, however, between Easter and Labor Day.
Third, we consider congregational stress. We only start a service when we feel the church is healthy. If we try to introduce such a change during an already volatile time in church life-right after the loss of a staff member or during a controversy over a church business decision-people will receive it poorly.
Giving New Congregations a Running start
We’ve found we can’t just casually announce the beginning of a new service and then do it. Prayer and sensing God’s direction is key. But in addition, before starting a new service, we do a number of things to give it a greater chance of success.
Give people plenty of time to think. I read somewhere that people do their best thinking after the meeting is over, usually in the car on the drive home. This was true as we prepared to go multi-congregational. We formally voted to start our Saturday night congregation three months before our opening service. We held numerous meetings with committees, deacons, Sunday school teachers. We let the idea sink in without hectoring for closure. We resisted the sales technique “You must sign up now.” Doing that to people you want to support a new congregation can spell multi-disaster.
The nice thing about the multi-congregation approach is that you can take it gradually, a step at a time. We may have thirteen congregations eventually, but at any one time, we present the need for “one more.”
We have found the word experiment to be very useful. We use it often.
Start one week before you start. When we birth a new service, we hold a dress rehearsal. This is especially true when we want to offer a new format or different type of music. Expectations for the practice service are different if attenders know it is a dress rehearsal, and that gives us elbow room for mistakes.
When we started our 12:15 Sunday service, only twenty people showed up, including the staff and musicians. But that was okay. No one was discouraged because it was “practice.” The next week attendance started to climb.
Advertise. We punch a new service with as much advertising as we can afford. Then we double the amount.
We have used both telemarketing and direct mail. Both work, but telemarketing takes an enormous amount of work, and in some cases, even though it brings people in, it can also put people off.
So we’ve begun to use direct mail exclusively, especially since it’s just as effective with less trouble and fewer negative side effects. Yes, it costs more, but we’ve found that the money invested in advertising is generally repaid in six months.
We spend about fifteen cents per piece of mail, which includes postage, printing, and processing. Of those who receive the mailing, between half a percent and 3 percent have attended one of our services. In other words, if we send 10,000 pieces of mail, we may see 100 visitors. They don’t all come the same week, of course, and they don’t all fill out cards indicating they received our mailing. But if a third of them eventually join, many of them eventually giving an average of twenty dollars a week, that would mean the advertising pays for itself in about half a year to a year, depending on how quickly people join the church.
We advertise to ensure a critical mass of new people at the new service (consultant Elmer Towns says that you need 125 for critical mass, but I think it also depends on the size of the building). Besides, new people make a new service exciting and provide an extra incentive for our people who attend the new service to invite their unchurched friends.
Move groups by moving leaders. Try as we will to get current attenders individually to change times, most will not.
We’ve discovered two principles: (1) people go in groups, and (2) people follow leaders. Our 8:30 service succeeded because the choir moved to 8:30 en masse. Our Saturday night congregation took hold because many young marrieds and young singles migrated together. (The young marrieds didn’t like getting their kids up on Sunday morning; the young singles liked staying out on Saturday night.)
When we started our 9:45 service, we encouraged the college department to attend it.
To get a viable group started, we also target a handful of key players to join the team. Others will usually follow.
Give people a reason to move. We who preach can overestimate the preacher as the reason people attend any one service. The preacher is critical, but there are at least four other determining factors: the convenience of the time, the musical style, the peer group that attends, and the location.
My secretary, for example, told me she and her husband would attend at 8:30 no matter who preached, who attended, and what the musical style. For them, the key value is the convenience of the time. For others, the key value is their friends. They would attend at any time as long as their group went with them.
Very few people will change times simply out of a sense of duty. They will not inconvenience themselves, leave their friends, or endure a musical style they don’t like simply because the church needs it. The new service must benefit them somehow.
Point newcomers to new services. When I call on visitors, I encourage them to attend one of the new, less populated congregations. “Many of our young marrieds attend on Saturday night,” I will say. In the newer services, they are more likely to find people who are looking for friends. People in the established services may already have their networks formed. That’s not bad-people need close friends. But it means that one of the advantages of a new congregation is that people are still finding their way around, and newcomers can fit in more naturally.
Share the preaching load. Our seven services occur within a twenty-six hour span. We’ve found that it’s not realistic to expect anyone to preach more than five times on a weekend. So we try to share the preaching responsibilities among the staff.
Still, it can be a problem. I once told our pastor, “Sam, you’re too good. Everyone wants to hear you and only you. If you were not quite so good, others could preach some, and it would be fine.”
Expect lingering problems. Multi-congregations mean multi-problems, but then so does any path to ministry. For us, for example, staffing a fully graded Sunday school can be a hassle. Starting the 8:30 Sunday morning service was a piece of cake. People could attend the 9:45 Sunday school immediately afterward. When we started a Saturday night service with a complete children’s program, it was a migraine-not enough teachers or students. To run a fully graded Sunday school we had to increase our teaching staff by a third overnight.
But I’m convinced that it’s easier to start an additional congregation, even with a fully graded Sunday school, than it is to build a new facility.
An Experiment That’s Working
Conducting seven services each weekend is mind-boggling trouble and work. And it hasn’t completely eliminated our need to expand our facilities.
Still, we’re committed to this experiment. We often recall the words of John R. W. Stott (in The Spirit, the Church and the World): “Change is painful to all of us, especially when it affects our cherished buildings and customs, and we should not seek change merely for the sake of change. Yet, true Christian radicalism is open to change. It knows that God has bound himself to his church (promising that he will never leave it) and to his Word (promising that it will never pass away).
“But God’s church means people not buildings, and God’s Word means Scripture not tradition. So long as the essentials are preserved, the buildings and the traditions can go if necessary. We must not allow them to imprison the Living God or to impede his mission in the world.”
The multi-congregation church is working for us. Although it is neither easy nor a cure-all, we believe it is an effective way of doing church.
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