In 1996, at the age of twenty-five, I began gathering a core group for what would become Mars Hill Church in Seattle. We started with a small Bible study in a home my wife Grace and I rented in Seattle, eventually opening with a public service in October of that year with perhaps 150 or so people in attendance. Within a year we expanded to two services-both in the evening.

Over the years, obtaining adequate Sunday meeting space has been a tremendous difficulty, as it is for most growing urban churches. At one point I was actually preaching six long sermons (more than an hour each) in three locations throughout the city and driving between them like an old Methodist circuit rider. To help alleviate our burgeoning young church we started sending out people with various church plants but that did not relieve any pressure on our over-capacity services.

We eventually purchased a 40,000 square foot warehouse that we renovated to seat 1,300 people. We began worshipping in that space nearly three years ago with services at 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Since that time we have continued adding services (we now have five each Sunday) yet we have again outgrown our facility. We investigated every available large room for purchase or rental to no avail, and found the costs and time associated with building a larger space essentially out of reach due to zoning restrictions and costs.

So, we began researching the growing trend of multi-site churches in America. These churches have everything the same as a normal service (e.g., worship band, childcare), with the exception that the preaching is via video on a screen rather than live. On Sunday, January 22, we undertook a new season in the history of Mars Hill Church. I preached at the 8:30 a.m. service and then returned home to care for my wife and five children, including our youngest, Gideon Joseph, only days old. The other services at our large facility (10:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m., 5:00 p.m., and 7:00 p.m.) all had me preaching via video. On the same day, we also launched our first off-site video venue in the northern suburbs of the city. We were hoping for 200 people and had an amazing first service of 450 people. The room was filled beyond capacity and that site already needs to expand to multiple services. Many new people showed up simply because we had missionally gone into their neighborhood, rather than expecting them to drive out of their neighborhood and into the city. Overall, the day was a great success in one of America's least churched cities where there are more dogs than evangelical Christians. Subsequently, in addition to continuing to support church planters, we are now also investigating where to expand our church next. It seems probable that we could be a church meeting in many locations and sharing the resources of a large church while providing the relational intimacy of a smaller church.

For those pastors and Christian leaders who are curious about this trend there is a great book coming out that I believe is the first of its kind. It is called The Multi-Site Church Revolution: Being One Church in Many Locations and is written by my friends Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon, and Warren Bird. It is part of the Leadership Network Innovation Series and, along with my book Confessions of a Reformission Rev.: Hard Lessons from an Emerging Missional Church, is due out in the spring as the first in the series.

I had the pleasure of reading a pre-release copy of The Multi-Site Church Revolution and found the following quotes insightful and hopefully incentive for you to purchase the book when it is released (used with permission):

• Well over 1,500 churches are already multi-site.
• One out of four megachurches [a megachurch is a church of 2,000 or more in attendance] is holding services at multiple locations.
• One out of three churches says it is thinking about developing a new service in a new location.
• The multi-site movement is represented in every area of the country, across many denominations, and in churches of all sizes, especially those with attendances of 250 and up.
• We predict that 30,000 American churches will be multi-site within the next few years, which means one or more multi-site churches will probably be in your area.
• [Twenty] percent [of churches] need to consider multi-site immediately because they are growing and face lack-of-space problems, whether seating or parking or both. Multi-site might save these churches huge amounts of money that would otherwise be poured into a facility-expansion program.
• Up to 20 percent more could successfully experiment with multi-site using a low-risk approach.
• Nine of the ten largest churches in the U.S. are multi-site with the only exception being Lakewood Church with Joel Osteen in Houston, Texas.

With a reported 3,500 churches dying and closing each year in this country, 80 percent of churches reportedly plateaued or declining, and an average reported attendance of around eighty and actual attendance of fifty to sixty, it seems imperative that churches who have successfully learned how to reach their community do so as many times and in as many locations as possible. Subsequently, the future of the church in America seems to be moving toward very large multi-site megachurches and very small house meta-churches.

The most common criticism of video venues is that they are impersonal. But the hard truth is that, generally speaking, if a pastor is a gifted preacher, their church will grow. As it does, people will be watching the sermon on screens at the back of the room, or watching a video feed on an overflow screen in another room. Furthermore, as a church grows, the relational center of the church is not one pastor but rather a team of leaders that makes a church healthier and more diverse. Subsequently, the alternative to an impersonal church with a gifted preacher is a personable church with a less gifted preacher. If the goal of the church is to reach new people and not just connect with existing people, then a degree of inaccessibility to the preaching pastor must be accepted and other pastors must be raised up alongside of him to care for people.

Lastly, some pastors and churches will feel threatened by the ever-growing footprint of larger churches expanding into new communities through the use of video technology. But, what has been most surprising to me as we have transitioned to a multi-site video sermon format is the number of pastors from smaller and struggling churches who have contacted us to inquire about plugging in to Mars Hill. They each articulate that they enjoy the pastoral work of caring for people but struggle with the management of their church and carrying a pulpit every week. To them, the thought of a larger church with a large staff taking over the administrative duties and allowing them to function as a site pastor sounds like a relief. The site pastor, who cares for people and covers the pulpit roughly eight to twelve times a year, is freed up to work in their area of gifting most effectively. In the end, perhaps the multi-site revolution will become a win for larger churches, a win for smaller struggling churches, and a win for lost people.