It is abundantly clear that the early church employed the multi-congregation model. This does not prove anything or mean we have to change, but it is informative and may be significant. No less a scholar than John R. W. Stott has recognized this: "We notice [the form of pastoral oversight] was both local and pluralClocal in that the elders were chosen from within the congregation, not imposed from without, and plural in that the familiar modern pattern of >one pastor one church' was simply unknown" [emphasis added]. And again, "There is no biblical warrant for either the one man band (a single pastor playing all the instruments of the orchestra himself) or for a hierarchical or pyramidal structure in the local church (a single pastor perched at the apex of the pyramid)." It is the subject of the next chapter to look at this matter in detail, but before we do, let's define our terms.
In this chapter I will explain what is meant by the traditional model, the multi-service model, and the multi-congregation model. These are three different paradigms of church life. I like Joel Barker's definition of paradigm as "a set of rules and regulations (written or unwritten) that does two things: (1) it establishes or defines boundaries; and (2) it tells you how to behave inside the boundaries in order to be successful."3 Every church has certain rules that "good people" follow. If you don't follow the rules, you are excluded from the group. In the early seventies, hippies were coming to Christ by the thousands. But the rules of most churches said that you could not be a follower of Christ unless you had short hair, dressed conservatively, and liked organ music. This paradigm excluded hippies from all but a few of our churches. On the other hand, Chuck Smith's church (Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa) had a different paradigm, a less restrictive set of rules. Here you could have long hair, wear sandals (or no shoes at all), worship God with guitar music and, in general, act as if appearance and lifestyle did not necessarily reveal the depth of one's faith.
Just as paradigms change in the marketplace and other aspects of our culture, so also are "rules" subject to revision in the church. In fact, the vitality, if not the survival, of any institution demands flexibility.
In the early part of this century, the Santa Fe Railroad was a giant in the transportation business, and no one questioned its dominance. Then a new technology made it possible to fly from Dallas to New York in three hours instead of spending three days on a train, and the customer was willing to pay a premium to do that. The paradigm shiftedCand the Santa Fe was left behind because it could no longer satisfy the transportation "rules."
"Swiss-made" once spoke of the finest quality watches in the world. The Swiss dominated the international watch market for years. They had invented the minute hand and the second hand and were on the cutting edge of waterproofing. In 1968, they controlled more than 65 percent of the unit sales and 80 percent of the profits. Then the paradigm shifted. Precision gears, springs, and fine-tuned mechanical parts didn't help when the world went electronic. In 1968, Japan had about 1 percent of the world's watch market; today they control 33 percent. With its electronic quartz watches, Japan was able to capitalize on a change from the traditional idea of how watches should be made.
One paradigm of the church sees it as operating services on Sunday mornings; another model sees the church as confronting people whenever and wherever it can. One paradigm has rules that exclude the use of drums or guitars in worship; another says the church will adapt everything but its message, so long as that message gets through.
I believe that God is in the process of changing our ideas about his church. The evidence is all around us, and I will enumerate some of this evidence later. For now, we need to come to an understanding of three basic models of church life. Each of these paradigms has different rules about how many services should be held, who is allowed to preach, what musical styles are permissible, and how unity within the church is achieved. After exploring these three models, we will try to answer the question, "Do the differences matter?" To find an answer, we will take a brief look at systems analysis as it relates to churches.
"Tradition" means different things to different people at different times. What I mean by "traditional" in this context is this: One pastor preaching to one group, all together at the same time and place (usually Sunday morning at 11:00). But the most traditional people at our church do not worship at 11:00 a.m. on Sundays. They attend at 8:30 a.m. Radical? Perhaps. I hope the next generation of churches will regard the multi-congregational model as "traditional." For many churches today the multi-service model falls in that category. The church may have a multiple staff, but only one preaching pastor. There may be a Sunday-evening service, or a mid-week service, but there is one primary service when the "whole church" is together.
This model has the advantage of unity. Everyone feels like part of the same group because they are all together every week with the same leader. It is one big happy family, whether there are 30 or 3,000 members, although very few actually grow that large.
Communication is simple. Announce something on Sunday morning and everyone gets the news. If you want to talk to someone at church, you do not have to worry about what service that person attends. You do not have the embarrassing experience of shaking hands with someone, introducing yourself, and asking, "Are you visiting with us today?" and having him or her respond, "No, I have been a member for two years. I attend on Saturday night."
Let me say up front that this is not a bad model, and these are not bad churches. In many contexts it is the best way of doing things. My brother-in-law pastors a church in a rural area of Colorado that is sparsely populated. Construction of the building they enjoy was a community project, Christian and non-Christian alike. It was a grand barn-raising event that the whole community celebrated. For these people, the traditional model makes sense, but in an urban setting, with a more diverse population and cost of land and construction out of sight, it is a growth-limiting model. Consequently, most growing churches employ other alternatives.
John Vaughan conducted a study revealing that 85 percent of growing churches are in what can be called a multi-service model.4 This type of church has two or more primary services per week. Some of these churches do this by necessity and others because they prefer it that way. Even if they feel the church really ought to worship as one body, some may need to have multiple services temporarily, until larger facilities can be constructed. John Vaughan told me he would never recommend that a church construct another building until it was holding at least three primary services. (Services that people attend a second time in the week would not count as "primary.")
All these churches, however, will have a couple of other characteristics. First, they will have a secondary service, perhaps on Sunday evening or Wednesday evening, where "the whole church" meets together. I put that in quotes because it is not really the entire body, but only those people who wish to attend twice a week. This includes the leadership core of the church as well as the people who miss seeing each other on Sunday morning (because some come at 8:30 and others at 11:00). The secondary service is usually less formal and less seeker-orientedCit is a believers' service. This point of unity is very important to the multi-service church, but it also limits the number of times available for the primary serviceCbecause before long it will run out of space for this secondary service. If there are three Sunday-morning services needed, the Sunday-night or Wednesday-night service will soon be overcrowded.
The second characteristic that marks the multi-service church is that there will be only one preaching pastor. The stamina of this pastor will also limit the number of times the congregation can meet. How many times per week can you ask a pastor to preach? If you expect more than four times weekly, books on "burnout" will start to look really interesting, especially to the senior pastor. Our experience has confirmed what Bill Hybels recently told a New Community audience at Willow Creek (midweek believers' service): "It is no longer physically, emotionally, or spiritually possible for one individual to teach five times a week, every week, week in and week out. If he tries, it will destroy him."5 It just can't be done. The senior pastor may be able to do the preaching, but he will not have the energy for the broad-based leadership that every church needs. When Benno Schmidt, Jr., assumed the presidency of Yale University, he expressed this need for leisure thinking time: "If I can't put my feet on the desk and look out the window and think without an agenda, I may be managing Yale, but I won't be leading it."6 It is the same with pastors. They need uncluttered mental time and enough energy to dream. Requiring five services a week will rob the best of them of this. A pastor is the key to a myriad of nonpreaching church-related activities. If too much is expected of him, before long it will begin to wear. He will get up one Monday and say, "This is no longer rewarding work." The ministry will be a drag, so he will figure out something else to do. Lay church leaders should protect their pastor from this kind of discouragement. He loves you, he loves the Lord, and he loves to preach. But too much is like a bathtub full of strawberry shortcakeCit will destroy his appetite and may even ruin his health.
The multi-congregation model is now being explored by churches like Bear Valley in Denver, Willow Creek in Chicago, Dr. Cho's Central Church in Korea, and the church where I serve. Many of us feel intuitively that there is something very wasteful about using a building only once or twice a week, although we may not know exactly what it costs and cannot figure out anything different to do about it. Every other church we know is empty most of the time, too, but it does not seem quite right. Perhaps you have wandered into a deserted church building and thought, "What a shame for this space to go unused all week." You might even wonder whether a business could survive if its capital resources were used this little. This should cause you to reflect on the grace of God!
There is a better way. The multi-congregation church has a unique mind-set about itself. The big difference from the two other models is not schedule but self-perception. The question is not how many services a church has; it is how many services a church believes it ought to have. In the multi-congregation church, holding multiple services is not a necessity so much as a preference. And, because such a church wants more services than can be expected of one preacher, it enjoys the preaching ministries of more than one pastor. A multi-congregation church is one that endorses multiple services (both seekers' services and believers' services) and has more than one preaching pastor.
Some churches, like Bear Valley in Denver, also have multiple locations. Although most of the secondary locations are primarily ministry centers for street people, unwed mothers and other special-needs groups, preaching services are also held there. On a taped message, the pastor said he preached four times on Sunday, and none of these services was at the primary location. At that point in the life of his church, his presence was needed elsewhere. I once called Bear Valley and asked a spokesperson "How many preaching pastors do you have?" The pause told the whole story: "UhCsix, I think. Let's see, there is our senior pastor and. . . ." That is the multi-congregation church. I also talked to a student at Denver Seminary who is an intern at Bear Valley. He said that the senior pastor rotated preaching with one other pastor at his location every other week. When I commented, "So you do not know who is going to preach from one week to the next?" he replied, "If you attended last week, you do. Whoever did not preach last week will preach this week." That is the multi-congregation church.
I am told that Dr. Cho's church has a slightly different approach. There are seven services each Sunday. In addition, the church has several overflow rooms where people watch the main service via closed-circuit television. Here you do not know and cannot find out who will be preaching at which service on any particular day.
Another example of a church that followed the multi-congregation model is the Jerusalem church as described in the Book of Acts. This "church" had meetings every day and did not have buildings at all (more on this special example in chapter 3).
In a multi-congregation church, there is always the possibility of developing the Corinthian problem, wherein some say "I follow Paul," and others say, "I follow Apollos [or Cephas]" (see 1 Cor. 1:11B12). But if the preaching pastors are all equally competent and faithfully "follow" Christ, there is also a great advantage here. The body can benefit from the preaching gifts of more than one person.
I received my theological training from two different schools, one a very small school with three full-time professors in the religion department, and the other the world's largestCSouthwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Although I enjoyed them both, the learning experience was more diverse at the large school. In the smaller school, Wayland Baptist University, I soon felt that I had heard everything these men had to say. We students knew their jokes so well, we could mouth a punch line before it came out of a professor's mouth. And it was not just the jokes. We could predict a teacher's answer to almost any questionCand predictability is the great destroyer of learning.
Things were far different at Southwestern, where there were dozens and dozens of truly great teachers. It was a privilege to learn from these brilliant and godly men. What a richness was gained from the variety of their experience and knowledge! My only regret was that I could not take more classes with them.
For the same reason, I love listening to preaching tapes. Among my favorites are Bill Hybels, John MacArthur, Rick Warren, R. C. Sproul, Chuck Smith, Joel Gregory, and Chuck Swindoll. What a shame, what a bore, if I had to listen to only one of these men. One of the advantages of the multi-congregation approach is the opportunity to hear Paul and Cephas and Apollos.
"So what?" you might ask. What difference does it make? Is it not just a matter of personal preference on the part of a church as to which model it will adopt? Is this an issue of right and wrong or good and bad? Or is it just an "innocent" choice, just as some people like orange juice with breakfast and others prefer grapefruit? To answer this question, we need a brief primer on systems analysis.
Everything I know about systems, I learned from Peter Senge in the book, The Fifth Discipline.8 Fascinating reading. An analogy will make it clear why this approach sheds so much light on the wisdom of choosing one model over another.
Consider a booming new computer company that is enjoying what Senge calls self-reinforcing cycles. Sales are up, which motivates the sales force to sell more products. The company has a great reputation, which encourages the public to buy. Up and up production levels rise. As the product recognition of the company improves further, sales go up even more. On and on goes the cycle. You would think that at this rate of growth, the company will dominate the market in ten yearsCjust like a pastor who says, "We had four kids in our youth group three weeks ago, ten two weeks ago, and twenty last week. I predict that at this rate of growth we will have attracted all the city's young people in five years."
Then something else happens. A second cycle is driven by the first one, but it cannot keep up. Manufacturing output lags behind demand. Products that used to have a thirty-day delivery time now take twice as long or even longer. The pressures created by the high sales volume will eventually slow down the selling cycle, as disappointed customers lose confidence in the company's ability to fill their orders on time. Gross income falls, as may also the profit margin, since it is based on high volume.
The temptation at this point is to blame the sales force and not see that the system itself is flawed. Company executives try to pep up the sales people, but sales will never reach the projected goals until the manufacturing problem is solved and delivery time is thereby reduced. Of course, the problem will correct itself. Before long, sales will drop enough so that manufacturing can again match demand. Then we might expect that sales would begin to pick up again, but reputation is a company's most important asset: "A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold" (Prov. 22:1). On the other hand, Proverbs 25:10 warns that if you betray another man's confidence, "you will never lose your bad reputation." What does this have to do with selling computers? Just this: A reputation for too-long delivery time is hard to break. Even after the problem is fixed, the company may not be able to regain their market share. What is the solution?
Only a systems view can provide the answer. Strange as it seems, what the company should do is raise prices slightly. This will do two things. It will temporarily slow sales until manufacturing can keep up. It will also increase profitability so that expanded facilities can be built sooner than expected. This path will result in steady growth, provided it is taken before the company's good name is damaged beyond repair.
What does this have to do with growing churches? For one thing, reputation is at stake. Churches that raise money for a building that will be used only once a week will turn off many of the very people they are trying to reach. And churches that attempt bigger projects than they can reasonably accomplish will run into the same sort of thing, just as a weightlifter who attempts to lift too much weight may strain a muscle and then not be able to lift at all. Because muscles heal, that problem is self-correcting, if the athlete has learned his lesson. The outcome may be less favorable when a church is trying to lift too heavy a load. At the old rate of growth, the new building might be adequate, but the building process itself will kill the growth of the church. There will come a day when some will wonder if they needed the new building at all. I know of a pastor who, because of financial pressure from the lay leadership, was forced to make impassioned appeals for money during the Christmas Eve service. The church had a payment due on the first. The bad reputation earned during those days will be very hard to lose. The Bible tells me so.
It is not that people are not generous or that every building-fund promotion is ill-conceived or poorly executed. Sometimes we blame the sales force: People are not witnessing enough. Or we blame the CEO: The pastor is an ineffective motivator. But the system itself is flawed! Until the system is fixed, we tend to blame the wrong people. Discovering that it is no one's fault is what systems analysis is all about.
When parking space is limited, all the witnessing training in the world will not grow a church. When preschool facilities are shabby and dimly lit, or inadequate care is given, praying alone will not pull a church out of a membership slump. We will never reach people without prayer, but the delivery system has an impact on our results. When we share with nonbelievers and they receive Christ, will not the church grow despite its limited parking? Not necessarily, as the following example will show.
Peter Senge calls this the Beer Game, but I will call it the Chill Game. "Chill" is a fictional soda pop. Through computer simulation, three players enter a distribution chain. Player One owns Sleepy's, a convenience store in Riverfront, U.S.A. Player Two drives a truck and helps manage a warehouse for all kinds of soft drinks. Player Three runs the Chill Soda Company. Week in and week out, things down at Sleepy's are predictable. Joe Bob, the store owner, does not see any new faces, does not sell more than two cases of Chill, and does not take American Express. He has been ordering two cases a week for so long, he does not even remember the last time he counted the eight cases he keeps in stock. The ordering system works like this: Joe Bob fills out an order form and hands it to the truck driver, who attaches it to a stack of other orders on a clipboard. Joe's order arrives back at the warehouse at the end of the driver's weekly run. Two weeks are spent in processing this order, as the manager verifies Joe Bob's credit history and reconciles all the incoming orders with the distribution center's supply. Delivery takes another week. By the time Joe Bob gets his order, he is receiving cases of Chill that he actually ordered a month ago. There is a similar ordering system and time lag in delivery between the Chill plant and the distributor. This does not bother Joe Bob. In the sleepy town called Riverfront not much bothers anyone. If someone gets bothered, Joe Bob will hand him a soda and say, "Read the label." All is well at Riverfront.
Along comes an effective new ad that jumps sales volume on Chill from two cases a week to four cases a week. Watch the effect ripple through the system. Joe Bob does not notice the increase the first week because he has not been counting his stock. The second week he notices he has no cases in reserve, but he does not do anything until the third week, when he runs out of Chill. Although he doubles his order, he runs out of Chill again. The next week his usual order of two cases comes in. He sells them in two days and wonders if he should have ordered more than the four cases that won't be delivered for another three weeks. He steps his order up to six cases, just to be sure. The next week two cases arrive, as expected, but Joe Bob is getting a little ticked. He sells his two cases in two days again and orders ten more, just to be sure. When Joe Bob calculates the sales loss over the past three weeks due to his inability to meet the demand, he decides to take the bull by the horns and order sixteen cases. One more week of this and he is up to ordering twenty-four cases. Finally, the first order of four cases arrives. He barely gets through the week and continues to place large orders so he can build his stock back up to eight cases. Even when he has a surplus of two cases, he is still worried, so he orders twenty-four more.
Let me get to the point. Joe Bob eventually has nearly a hundred cases of Chill. At four cases a week, it will take him a year to sell it offCexcept that the ad campaign has been canceled, and sales are heading back toward two cases a week. When the bills for these extra hundred cases come in, it becomes difficult for Joe Bob to chill out! The same thing happens at the warehouse. They slowly start getting larger orders and then peak out with huge orders they cannot fill. They put them on back order, which explains why it took even longer than expected for the larger orders to be filled. Joe Bob did not cause the problem. Neither did the distributor. They were just part of the system. And the system was flawed. By the time the big shipments got to Joe Bob, he did not need them. By the time the big shipments came to the warehouse from the plant, the distributor did not need them anymore. Sales to retail outlets had begun to plummet. Depending on the way the computer simulation players react, the disaster reaches various proportions, but there is always a disaster when the system is flawed. Smart business minds can play this game and not do much better than novices. The system is at fault.
Several lessons can be learned from this systems analogy. Notice that the Chill delivery system included a delay, just as there was a delay before the new computer factory could be built. But by the time the expanded facility was built, the problem was irrevocable. The customer was lost. The system is flawed.
Our churches, too, need to reevaluate their delivery system. When Christian leaders have to stand before their people and berate them for not witnessing, it is evidence of a faulty system. Of course, Christians ought to witness. But when you have to nag people constantly about their moral obligation to do something that ought to be the most natural, obvious thing in the world to do, I say we should look carefully at the system. Some things ought to be obvious. Maybe then we can discover why the Good News is not being delivered efficiently by the modern church, and why there are so many "dissatisfied customers."
Early in this century, missionary thinker Roland Allen was making this very same point:
When we turn from the restless entreaties and exhortations which fill the pages of our modern missionary magazines to the pages of the New Testament, we are astonished at the change in the atmosphere. St. Paul does not repeatedly exhort his churches to subscribe money for the propagation of the Faith, he is far more concerned to explain to them what the Faith is, and how they ought to practice it and to keep it. The same is true of St. Peter and St. John, and of all the apostolic writers. They do not seem to feel any necessity to repeat the Great Commission and to urge that it is the duty of their converts to make disciples of all nations. What we do read in the New Testament is no anxious appeal to Christians to spread the gospel, but a note here and there which suggests how the gospel was being spread abroad: "the churches were established in the Faith, and increased in number daily."9
I am going to argue that part of the problem relates to our emphasis on buildings and related costs. There are too many delays in the system. It might not seem like the size of our buildings and the number of times we use them would have anything to do with whether we are motivated to share our faith. We tend not to see those factors as part of the "distribution chain," but they are.
If you place twenty four-year-olds in a room designed for ten, you are going to have discipline problems. You may characterize the kids as delinquent, rotten, and poorly behaved. You may blame the parents for being too lenient, or the teacher for being ill-prepared. (She may blame herself and quit.) The kids may not be angels, the parents may not be perfect, and the teacher could probably improve her skills. But, if you gave her a bigger room and a helper or two, or you divided the class, you would be surprised how much that would fix. The system needs to be improved.
If McDonald's built restaurants so large that only 10 percent of the capacity was ever filled, they would fail. Quality hamburgers, competitive prices, attractive facilities, friendly, trained personnel, and cutting-edge management techniques at Hamburger University could never overcome a system that invested ten times what was really necessary in capital expenditures.
Churches could cut their capital expenditures by 90 percent if they met ten times as often. This is the multi-congregation approach, and it does make a differenceCbecause it improves the system. It is not only less expensive, it works better because it allows a church to provide more choices. This is how the early church operated. It is our primary model of church life in the New Testament. It is not new and different; it returns to the original approach. O f course, the early churches did not have buildings, so there was a zero on that line of the budget. They didn't start building programs for 250 yearsCabout when their skyrocketing growth began to level off!
Some who read this will get the mistaken notion that with the proper systems we can do anythingCwith or without God. Those of us who have dabbled in marketing, business, and advertising have to constantly guard our hearts against this kind of thinking. We are tempted to believe in throwing big stacks of money toward advertising, having a slick music program, and perhaps taking a multi-media approach. So we include some Bill Hybels-style messages and make sure the music is contemporary and the whole style is "in." We learn our demographics, sharpen our marketing savvy, and expect that "Bingo!" the whole thing will be done. We also pray, of course. But I don't think there are many things more distasteful to God than people who try to do his work in the power of the flesh. God seeks first a relationship with us, to know us as sons and daughters. He wants us to abide in him on a daily basis. He wants us to follow him in what he is doing, not consult a carefully worked-out pro forma.
Good systems cannot produce repentance and faith. They do not cause people to pray well, love their families, and lead lives of holiness. They do not cause people to enjoy God. The best of systems will not guarantee a spiritual harvest. But a faulty system can work against the progress of the kingdom.
Examine your heart. Jesus said that apart from him we can produce nothing of true, lasting value (John 15:5). I would like to think I can do quite a bit, and somewhat better if I abide in Christ. But Jesus said that is not the case: Without him I can do nothing. Henry Blackaby rightly warns that churches are often guilty of a copy-cat mentality that only wants to mimic what another church has done.10 We do far better if we get alone with God and follow him in what he is doing in our place and time.
Even more important than the system is following God.