A couple of weeks ago I started a series of posts on Five Lessons I've learned about multi-site. Today I want to pick up part 2 of that series with a mistake I've seen at several multi-site churches I have visited over the past few years; offering an inferior experience at the offsite location. It seems like a no brainer that if you want people to attend your new site you need to make sure to offer something as close as possible to the original. If Ruth's Chris Steakhouse second location had opened with a menu of mystery meat and mac and cheese there would never have been a third location. Here are several areas where I have seen churches miss the mark in launching a second campus.
Poor teaching: If your church has been built on excellent teaching then your offsite campuses will need excellent teaching. The challenge is that great teachers are hard to find. You can find teachers who are effective with groups of 50, 100 or 200, but once you get beyond 200 people it becomes difficult to find teachers who can effectively engage a larger audience. That's one of the reasons Seacoast uses video teaching almost exclusively; we are able to leverage the teaching gifts of our primary communicators and allow our campus pastors to focus on their areas of strength. As my brother Greg often says, many people feel they have the gift of teaching; the question is does anyone have the gift of listening.
Poor music: The second most important leader at most campuses, after the campus pastor, is the worship director. If you put a poor band led by a mediocre singer in front of a skeptical crowd followed by a video preacher; people aren't going to come back. In fact if you choose to use video teaching you will need an extremely effective musical worship experience to capture the people's hearts. I saw this in action at North Coast in San Diego. The best worship band on the campus is in one of video venueus,The Edge, not in the auditorium where Larry Osborne speaks.
Poor children's ministry: This is often an uphill battle. Your original location has children's ministry space that would make Walt Disney envious; 3d characters, state of the art lights, sound and video, and backdrops straight off a Hollywood set. But you ask parents at the new site to drop their kids off in a dingy high school classroom or a dark, empty theater. Often they'll make the sacrifice for a few weeks until the kids beg to go back to WallyWorld. The first key to children's ministry in an offsite campus is to look good until you can be good. We often start with a video curriculum and put as much money and effort as possible into making the space look fun and clean.
Poor technology: We talk a lot at Seacoast about the good enough line; we want our technology to meet the expectations of the audience, but we don't stress about having the best cutting edge equipment available. For example we are still using standard definition video in all but one of our venues. The challenge with a good enough line is that it is very important to stay above the line. I have visited several churches that use video teaching and are either straddling the good enough line or woefully below it. Often they are capturing video that is hard to watch. The lighting is poor, the backdrop is cluttered, and the camera is poorly operated. Asking people to watch video teaching is a leap; you have to help them make that leap with appealing video. The same is true of sound and lights. You don't need Broadway, but you do need better than a Jr. High sock hop.
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