Baptisms, Members, Attendance, Gatherings... Multi-Sites

I have been at the wonderful Outreach Convention the past 3 days. I will post more about that next. It was great as usual and one of my absolute favorite conferences because of the people and the focus.

I did have an experience that I was very amused and intrigued by while there. I observed two pastors who were friends and seemed like that hadn't seen each other for a while. As they greeted each other and began talking the one asked the other the question "How many you got now?"

Now, this in the past could have been talking about number of members of the church. Or number of people attending. Or perhaps number of baptisms. Or could have been asking about number of worship gatherings.

But as I listened, they were talking about how many "sites" as in a multi-site church.

Our comparisons or measurements in church numerically was once baptisms. Then we were measuring and talking about attendance numbers. Then we were counting and talking about the number of services each church has as we began to multiply worship gatherings instead of only having one. Then the numbers moved to not just hundreds, but numbers that are in the thousands when we say "2" or "4" we mean 2,000 or 4,000.

But now we are asking "how many sites?" as a measuring standard. 

I remember another time hearing one pastor say they had 4 sites. But as I listened, two of the sites were less than 50 people. So you have a multi-site church of 4 campuses, but it wasn't that large of a church. It was interesting as in that case it almost felt as though there was subtle pressure to say you had more than one site. So even if you had a TV monitor in a room in another building that became a "site" to add on and now count being "multi-site".

It is really quite fascinating.  It can almost feel now if you aren't in the multi-site counting and adding on new ones - you aren't keeping up.I know it's not intentional and multi-site churches are launched for seeing more and more people come to know Jesus. But I am sensing it is sort of creeping in as a new comparative standard of measurement. 

I am not against multi-sites.

When we add our next gathering in our church, we will then maximize our space. We are talking about launching other gatherings at other building or "sites" in our county as our next step. If we do this, for our church community, we would never use video. Although I don't say "never" too often, I can say "never" with pretty good assurance about us never launching video venues. For our philosophy and culture we would be training new leaders and communicators and sharing the teaching via a live team vs. video. We actually do use live video now. But it is for overflow on the church campus in a room and it still feels somewhat like everyone is together. .

I will post more about the Outreach Convention, but I just found it fascinating hearing that at the conference. "How many you got now?" .... as multi-site is now in our church measuring language.