Yesterday I took a look back at the first book I read about multi-site church, back in 2006. It was written by Greg Surrat and others, Greg being one of the pastors of what I consider the flagship of multi-site in this country, Seacoast Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
I was interested to read something Greg wrote about their first campus, the beginning of them going multi-site -
When we first proposed the idea of doing off-site campuses at Seacoast, I had a line of people at my office door, telling me why it wouldn't work. Why do we need to replicate ministries that we do poorly at the original campus? We don't have enough leaders, volunteers and musicians for the services we are already doing, how can we do more? Budgets are stretched tight, how can we spend money on additional campuses?
I wanted to argue with them, to show them that we had a divine mandate from God, but they were right. Some of our ministries were held together with rubber bands and duct tape, we had no backups for our music teams, and our finances were so tight we had to bring WD40 to budget meetings. Going multi-site didn't make sense, except for the fact that we had no other choice.
Sounds very much like us. Why did he write they had no other choice?
Because if you're choosing between what God has told you to do and human reasoning, God wins every time. And when you obey him, you win too.
