House Churches and Institutional Churches, Part 9 (Further on Multi-campus Congregations)

Price asked in a comment,

Jay…I find it amusing that you attribute many positive attributes to economy of scale and yet you begin to limit that scale to a certain radius…Why?

Price,

Let’s consider the analogy I offered earlier. No one wants to be treated in a one-room hospital. Bigger hospitals are better than smaller hospitals — up to a point. But there is a limit. I would be very upset if the Tuscaloosa hospitals were closed and absorbed into a giant Birmingham hospital. A giant statewide hospital would offer more specialists and services than a smaller local hospital — but what good does that do me if I die on the way to the emergency room? If my friends can’t come visit me? If the hospital doesn’t serve the needs of my community?

Perhaps a better analogy would be banks. Tuscaloosa’s banking market used to be dominated by two large locally owned banks. The banks knew that their growth hinged on Tuscaloosa’s growth, and so the banks poured resources into civic organizations, industrial recruitment, and even politics.

Those banks are gone, having been absorbed by giant multi-state banks. And the new banks offer more services and have deeper pockets. And the community has lost leadership — because to the new banks, we are a market rather than home. The difference is not conspicuous, but it’s quite profound.

In my view, churches should be intensely interested and active in the welfare for their home communities. They should have their hands in poverty relief, addiction recovery, neighborhood transformation — widows, orphans, and sojourners in their home towns.

They should, of course, also seek to plant churches and send missionaries elsewhere, but in their home towns, they should be the engines of spiritual growth. They should work hand in hand with all Christ’s churches to serve their communities.

Now, a multi-city church has a leadership structure that is headquartered somewhere else or that has elders from several campuses in multiple cities. What is their focus? Well, their church. They may want to serve their communities, but they can’t have a passion for all their communities because the leaders aren’t in all the communities. Rather, they suffer the same problem inherent in denominations.

Denominations suffer from being focused on, well, themselves. The headquarters of the Methodist Church is focused on the Methodist Church. When they focus on the poor, they focus in the abstract — that is, they want to serve “the poor,” not Bob Smith, the poor man who lives on 35th Street.

As a result of the distance of the headquarters from those being served, national denominations tend to get caught up in politics and policy rather than serving actual people with actual names. The Southern Baptist Convention is far more likely to vote on boycotting Disney than providing meals to the homeless people living under the bridge two blocks from the church on the west side of Tuscaloosa.

At best, the denominations can push their local congregations to get involved in such things, and some do and some don’t. But they don’t offer much that the local churches can’t do themselves and do better when it comes to local mission.

Most denominations were formed to differentiate themselves from and compete with other denominations. And that’s wrong — and we in the Churches of Christ are among the very worst — especially when it comes to local mission.

And I don’t see multi-city congregations as being much different from a small denomination. What is the motivation to plant in an entirely different city rather than in their own city if not to cherry pick a given class of members and build up their economic base? Aren’t there enough lost people in their own city to go around? Why hopscotch from suburb to suburb when there are slums in between? Well, because once you’ve built a model that “works” among the wealthy, it’s easier to repeat it than to transform yourself into a church that can expand among other classes of people. And because poor people don’t give enough money to make the original model work.

Thus, expanding into a new city is a misdirection of energies. It’s easier, but it’s not as faithful.

I know business, and multi-city churches are built on a very effective competitive model. It’s the same model as Chase Manhattan, Wal-Mart, and Gucci. For example, Gucci only knows how to sell expensive accessories. When they saturate a local market, they build a new store in another market with rich people. They let someone else build Wal-Marts for everyone else.

But that’s just not right for the church. In the church — if we were to think of ourselves as “the church” of our town, not several franchises competing with other franchises for a shrinking market share — if we saw ourselves as the ONLY supplier of salvation and transformation as a united, unified body, then we’d be busy spreading salvation and transformation where we are.

And you’ll prove me wrong when you cite an example of a multi-city church location targeted at poor members who can’t even afford to pay for their own building. So far, the only multi-city churches I’ve seen are targeting the affluent communities.

Now, of course, all churches should be planting new churches and sending missionaries to other cities. But in their own cities, churches should act like the one, singular, indivisible church.

And if there were but one church in your town, under a united, unified leadership, existing in several locations, dedicated to serving the people of that community, what on earth would motivate that one church to create a new campus in another city already served by hundreds of congregations? You see, such a plant, such as a Birmingham church overseen by a Tuscaloosa leadership — runs entirely contrary to the purpose and mission of the unified Tuscaloosa churches. They might plant a church in an under-served area in Birmingham, but that new church would be part of the church in Birmingham, working with that leadership. And it would be unthinkable to plant such a church other than in consultation with and with the blessings of the Birmingham leadership, who know their city best.

Again, show me an example of a multi-city church that planted in a new city only after speaking with and receiving the blessings of the Christian leadership in that city.

You asked how I define “city” or “community.” Well, I think that’s a pragmatic decision. Often a given community is divided into multiple politic divisions. The Tuscaloosa community has at least two municipalities in it, but it functions as a single community in terms of most things that matter.

To me, there are no hard rules, and it depends as much as anything on how the local churches choose to organize themselves. In a large, metropolitan area, the churches may choose to organize along more workable lines than the entire area. It’s a pragmatic question that may well change over time.

Fifty years ago, Tuscaloosa and Northport were two very distinct communities separated by a draw bridge. Now Tuscaloosa exists on both sides of the river, there are four bridges, and anyone new to town couldn’t tell you where the lines are.

My own congregation has close ties to other churches in both cities, because it’s all own community for missional purposes.