Useful Multi-site Terms By Tom Cheyney

Useful Multi-site Terms There are a new set of multi-site terms you will need to become familiar with as you move into the multi-site ministry. Here is a brief list of helpful terms that will assist you as you navigate in these new waters:

Useful Multi-site Terms Expanded Demographic – When a church reaches out via a new style, targeted at a specific age group, while allowing inclusiveness for other ages to feel welcome.

Useful Multi-site Terms Expanded Geographic – A way for one church to meet in other areas within a target area. Today, this form is being stretched from the original three to five miles, to often as much as an hour or more away.

Useful Multi-site Terms Alternative Venues – Often, one site will offer alternative forms of worship in a single location. Example: Offering a classic worship service when the main one is contemporary. Others might include a blended form, or a service focusing on perhaps a cowboy theme. Some churches are finding success with an edgy, urban flavor, or emerging generation focus.

Useful Multi-site Terms Digital Church – Though it is still in infancy, the digital church concept is being experimented with today, via larger mega-churches desiring to do multi- site. This is when a church streams its video casting to another place in the area via a direct, committed line for transmission.

Useful Multi-site Terms Video Casting – One type of video casting: recording of a Saturday night service to deliver the next day to multiple sites throughout the ministry area.

Useful Multi-site Terms Video-café Congregations – Multiple congregations of one church, meeting at different times on the main campus, often with different worship formats, to watch the same preacher on recorded video or live link.

Useful Multi-site Terms Multiple Campuses – When one church meets in many locations.

Useful Multi-site Terms Staff Generalist – New churches usually begin with one church planter, a generalist, who oversees everything.

Useful Multi-site Terms Staff Specialist – The multi-site church allows you to start a new location with existing staff in place. Instead of hiring more generalists, you add specialists such as teaching pastors, technical arts, administrator, or director of creative arts for children.

Useful Multi-site Terms Spiritual Entrepreneurs – Those who would see this as a missional opportunity. You have to have a heart for developing other teachers, artists and leaders. You've got to love multiplying your team.

Useful Multi-site Terms Conjoined Congregations – There are multi-site churches that function as conjoined congregations. One church meets simultaneously in two or more locations. They usually share the preacher by one site live and the other video-linked.

Useful Multi-site Terms Multi-site Congregations – Multiple congregations, still controlled by the mother church but operating on remote campuses, watch recorded sermons of the preacher at the main campus. These expanded campuses add a fresh, innovative dimension to the concept of worship options.

Useful Multi-site Terms The Preacher-less church – An independent congregation that uses recorded sermons from another ministry, while providing its own worship, leadership, programming, and governing body.

Useful Multi-site Terms Campus Pastor – Similar to a church planter in most new starts. The pastor develops the core group, moving the new location towards the actual beginning of a new campus worship and ministry location. He also initially functions as primary gatherer and equipper of the new site’s leadership development.