Featured One Church, Many Campuses

My thoughts exactly!

A church is a local assembly - a "satellite" church, IMHO is an oxymoron. Hebrews 10:25 tells us "not the forsaking the assembling of ourselves together. Having someone on a big screen is NOT assembling together.

Again IMHO - I think it is just about the numbers.
A church can claim they had 18,000 in attendance - but that is with multiple services at one location and/or via satellite.
(yes, I have the same opinion of churches with multiple services)
When a church gets big enough to have two or more services - its big enough to start two or three mission churches with the goal of them becoming self-supporting.

 

Well, I can tell you our experiences here on Long Island.

We are a part of a larger church who had a vision of starting other churches on Long Island. My husband stepped up and said that he'd like to start one of the campuses and in time, we did. We are meeting about 25 miles from the home church. We have had independent messages with pastors coming from the home church (at one time we had 11 pastors) along with my husband who was the campus pastor. But then video church came in and we went through a really difficult time. Fortunately, it lasted only 6 weeks after which our senior pastor saw that it just doesn't work around here and we went back to having live pastors at the campuses (we have since started a third campus).

The benefit of not becoming an independent church are numerous but the biggest is resources. We are small, with only about 50 tops on a Sunday but we have a 2 million dollar budget behind us as well as over 750 people. We moved into a new building that needed work and we had the resources and personnel to help renovate what we needed. Additionally, we have the spiritual and moral support of our home church. We have our own worship team (although we do utilize worship teams from the larger church when we are able to because we still need help in this area), our own preaching 3/4 of the time (my husband, the other 1/4 being some of our other pastors) and our own small groups. We have VBS, special Bible studies and counseling at our own campus but then we have larger studies and groups available at the home campus if people wish to travel.

I'm not sure this is the best model but it's been working for us so far. I don't personally like the video idea and think that it is not the best we can offer our congregation.

 

Why couldn't the "home" church and other local churches help out - after becoming independent?

 

They could but I think there would be issues with the finances. We have a finance department that handles all of that stuff and we have no one who could handle that for an independent church. We've been finding a lot of benefits right now to having the larger church family with us and even today, we have a number of people who are coming to our church to visit - and they aren't going to another church but their own but just another campus.

We may someday become independent but at this time, it makes no sense to do so.

 

How is the pastor on the screen able to fellowship with those in "TV land"?

Why not just use the so called prasie band of the home church?

NO

Of course

 

Or more specifically Bishops and Cardinals

 

Actually, Scripture teaches house to house and in the synagogue. There is no directive in Scripture to keep the church only in small groups in homes. We see that larger churches existed in Bible times and they exist today and can do things that home churches could never do.