You find the entrance to John Mark Comer's office at the back of a hip coffee shop in Portland, Oregon. Stop for a moment to savor a couple shots of freshly roasted espresso pulled by a man who looks like a logger with sleeve tattoos and an iPhone. Leave the cup in the bin, then make your way through the renovated warehouse. When Comer welcomes you into his small office, note the view of the Pearl District, the stuffed deer head on the wall, his retro bicycle, and that mid-century couch under the window.
Only the Bible on the desk and the theological books on the shelves suggest this is still a pastor's space. Comer's warm welcome and gesture toward a comfortable seat open a lively conversation.
Comer came of age in the ministry spotlight, taking over Solid Rock, a megachurch in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, when he was only in his late 20s. From early on, Solid Rock had the makings not just of a large church, but a very large church, even in the "post-Christian" Northwest.
I'd heard that the church was restructuring. People on the fringes gave me conflicting reports—some said the church was splitting, albeit amicably. Others reported that it was just expanding to more locations. Still others claimed it was planting new, unrelated churches.
Each version turned out to be both wrong and right. I sat down with Comer to get the story straight.
You're transitioning from "multi-site" to a "family of churches." Are you just calling the same dog by a different name?
Definitely not. They have some similarities, but there's a vital move toward locality and autonomy with the "family" concept.
Solid Rock Church started out in the suburbs and grew to be a megachurch. After we'd grown we planted a campus in downtown, then another campus in a different suburban neighborhood. We did the multi-site thing, but from the beginning we never used video venues. We never believed they would work even in our original suburban context, and certainly not in urban, anti-corporate Portland. There is such an emphasis here on small batch, home-grown, do it yourself, local, organic, etc. People around here place a high value on authenticity and have skepticism toward "chains."
The multi-site model is basically ministry franchising. It's the Starbucks model of "local" church. Now the good thing about Starbucks is you get the exact same cup of coffee everywhere in the world. I was in England recently (not known for good coffee), and seeing the green Starbucks sign was like finding an oasis in the desert.
With multi-site models and video-venue preaching, large churches have changed how we've done ecclesiology for 2,000 years.
But the bad thing about Starbucks is that their conformity flattens the creativity of individual baristas or shop owners. It's an a-cultural expression. It all tastes the same. So whether you're in downtown Portland or in Mumbai, India, you get the exact same cup of burnt-tasting coffee.
That's what a multi-site model (especially with video) is—despite attempts to counteract those tendencies. The very nature of it flattens diversity and color. Maybe it's bad or maybe it's good, but there it is.
Now, I want to be clear—I have a great deal of respect for some pastors who do this. Many of my friends in ministry work this way. I don't want to come across as the arrogant young guy, or dismissive, or overly critical of something that the Lord's using to draw people. But I'm finding that this type of ministry takes church in a direction that we need to pause and consider.
With multi-site models and video-venue preaching, large churches have changed how we've done ecclesiology for 2,000 years. That doesn't necessarily mean it is wrong, but I think there should be more of a conversation about it. People bought into it really fast. Maybe it is the next best thing since the pew and the sound system. But I don't know. The broader community needs to wrestle and critique it.
What does it mean for a pastor to live in one city and be the primary preacher for people in another state? Should we think about that a little bit before we adopt this model? It might be wise. The model is very American—and not in a good way. In the UK, for example, they don't have the celebrity thing like we do. They loathe branding. They have much more respect for tradition and homegrown. So if we swallow a cultural hook without thinking about it, is that really going to produce solid ecclesiology?
It seems odd to hear this caution from a megachurch pastor. What led to the change of strategy?
Learning to adopt a more missional posture. We can't do that without being highly contextualized. Being truly locally oriented is incompatible with a multi-site model. Even if a suburban church has the same ethos, same theology, same value system as its urban sister, it should feel different.
Multi-site inevitably ends up being personality-driven, non-contextualized, and fails to effectively raise up leaders capable of contextualizing. It promotes consumerism—even if it's masked behind several layers of "missional-speak."
My buddies—at Mars Hill, for example—argue that it doesn't, that in fact their least consumeristic people are at their video campuses. Well, I have never done it, so I can't really argue with that. But I do know that we are interested in having an authentic, local experience. Even when we were doing the multi-site thing, we wanted to be aware of contextual dynamics. We wanted it to be actual real people that are there.
What do you wish someone had told you at the beginning of this transition?
How hard it would be. How long it would take. Oh, and I wish somebody had told me that it would be harder on our leadership than anyone else.
Are we getting people to help us do OUR thing, or are we figuring out how to equip and empower people to live THEIR calling?
For those who have grown up around an attractional church, it's a totally different set of metrics for success. It's a different way of thinking about what it means to be a successful pastor. Attractional churches tend to attract very different leadership personalities than a "missional" expression of church. A different kind of pastor thrives in each.
It can be disturbing for a pastor who's developed his or her whole identity around having people come to church rather than sending them out. The attractional church is about getting people to buy into and serve the pastor's vision. It's not all bad, but church should be about the pastors (plural) serving the vision that God has put in the people, as described in Ephesians 4:11-12: "So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up."
That requires a fundamental shift. Are we getting people to help us do our thing, or are we figuring out how to equip and empower people to live their calling?
Five years ago we would have defined a successful pastor as somebody who works their butt off and has people with them constantly. Now we gauge it by asking, "When was the last time a nonbeliever asked you over for a beer? Did you get invited to Christmas parties in the neighborhood last year? Is your family healthy? How many missional communities have you started? How many people have you released to do stuff outside of the church? Are you cultivating people's understanding of their vocation and calling?" It's a different metric system. And it's deeply disturbing for most pastors.
I think one of the reasons that the church is so non-missional, is because pastors are typically non-missional. We are often the most insulated, sub-cultured people in the world.
What do you mean by "most sub-cultured"?
I hate the modern Christian subculture. It's got a music, a fashion, an insider language, a strip-mall architecture—that I think is terrible. So I have always mocked it, preached against it, tried to shred that Christian subculture. But then I woke up one day four or five years ago as we were moving into another neighborhood. I realized that I had subtly become the insulated subculture that I mocked.
I think one of the reasons that the church is so non-missional is because pastors are typically non-missional.
I realized I no longer had any non-believing friends. I had no meaningful relationships in my neighborhood. We were moving out of the neighborhood, and I thought, People here won't miss us. It hit me. I had succeeded as a pastor and failed as a missionary, failed as a disciple of Jesus in my neighborhood. I realized I can start a church that grows to thousands of people in a few years but absolutely fail as a disciple of Jesus in my neighborhood. If the rest of my church was to live how I'm living, then the church would die. We would never be a kingdom presence.
I had a profound sense of failure and rebuke from the Holy Spirit. We repented, and moved into our new neighborhood praying, "God, lead us to just the right house; open doors for relationships." We started investing time in the community. Another elder moved in a house over from us, and a good friend moved in around the corner. We started doing life and community together, eating together, sharing, shopping together. And it turned my life upside down. It's been hard but the best thing that ever happened.
How can we lead the church somewhere we haven't gone ourselves? On our staff, some people just get it immediately. Others drag their feet until they get a taste for it. Still others dig in and resist giving up an attractional mindset.
But to come back to the question, hands down the hardest part of the transition for us has been bringing our leaders along. And it has been exhausting. I'm proud of them for the changes that they're making. But it's been exhausting.
If you're making this change, spend a ridiculous amount of time with your leaders and have honest conversations. Some of them might not buy in. That's fine. But they should move on. We worked so hard to stay together on this, and it worked—we didn't lose a single leader. That's great, but it's taken a great deal of energy.
Has your transition to a "family of churches" impacted your view of individual church members' vocations at all?
Yes—this idea of "vocation" is massive for a truly missional vision of church. We devote the largest chunk of our lives to our careers, so the hope and prayer is that whatever it is we do with all that time, it matters for the kingdom of God. As we shift, we're learning to work overtime to help people see that their vocation is just that, a "calling" from God to participate in his renewal of all things. And that what they do, and how they do it, matters to Jesus. It's a matter of discipleship. It's one of the primary ways that we follow our Rabbi.
Okay. So what new things are you learning about empowering people in your church to pursue their individual callings?
We're learning that there are hundreds of years of dualistic, separatist thinking that needs to be undone. People have learned to divorce their discipleship to Jesus from their jobs. To think of the kingdom of God as something far removed from their office or job site.
Christians have elevated the role of the pastor over that of the banker, or the stay-at-home mom, or second-grade teacher, or barista, or architect. We've said that "spiritual" work matters way more than regular work. The problem is that almost all people do "regular" work. So people have all sorts of wrong ideas—mostly because church leaders taught them the wrong stuff! So it takes a heart of repentance and humility for church leaders to say, "Hey, we got it wrong over the years and we're sorry. We exist to serve you and build you up, not the other way around. We want to help you discern God's calling on your life, and then help you go do it really, really well."
Tell me how a "family of churches" is different than multi-site.
From the beginning, Solid Rock used live teachers at our different sites. But the running joke quickly became that people are a lot more difficult to work with than DVD players. We could see where the temptation for video venues comes from.
In order to get the kind of leaders you need for our vision of contextual mission, they have to have freedom to truly lead—not just franchise your "successful" recipe in a new location. They need to have space, autonomy, and elbow room to be who God's called them to be and to do what God's called them to do.
So transitioning from multi-site to a "family of churches" allows for increased independence for other leaders. If on one side you have a video-based, multi-site thing and on the other side you have an Anglican parish system, we are somewhere in the middle. The idea is to take the resourcing power of a megachurch, which is way more than just financial, and spread it between closely related churches. We're centralizing things—accounting, website, HR—so that our pastors can actually plant churches instead of running organizations. We can share the burdens of organization, and still allow each church to be its own community.
Practically, what does that mean?
All of our churches have their own elders, their own deacons, and their own lead pastors. They have their own feel, their own vibe, and their own justice initiatives that they do. But we're all still technically one organization. There is a central elder team that oversees all three sister churches in the city. I'm still technically the pastor over all. We do one shared sermon series, but it sounds very different from church to church. Each year, I will take a month off and each church does its own thing.
Really, we're working to combine cultural diversity and megachurch power to plant churches that are small and contextually meaningful. We're still exploring though. It's an experiment that we call "The Jesus Church Family."
How much oversight do you give to the other churches?
Well, we're right in the middle of the transition right now, so I'm giving more oversight than I will when we're in a rhythm. It's been a year so far (only public since September), and will probably take two or three more before it has settled in. As I said, there are leadership bodies for each church, but with a lot of oversight and connection.
Honestly, it's still in the "logistical nightmare" phase. Accounting, for example, is complex (three budgets for each church!) and lagging behind. We have to decide what each church sends in to cover central costs. I look at the legwork right now, and think, "This isn't what I dreamed about when I envisioned it." But it's necessary.
While we have a couple other churches exploring this (like Trinity Grace in New York), there aren't a lot of people doing this right now—at least that I know of. Which might mean it's a disaster. Or that we're on the cusp of a good innovation.
This doesn't sound like a church growth strategy.
You're right! Honestly, our goal right now is not to get our church bigger, but to get it smaller. We'd like to define our success by how many people we're sending, not how many are coming to Sunday services.
Paul Pastor is associate editor of Leadership Journal.
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