BAF Multi Site Challenge #1

Five campuses into a big Multi Site vision were still literally learning something new every single day. It’s so funny to see how something we were doing six months ago with 3 campuses that we thought was the cats meow of ideas, is dead now because it doesn’t work with five campuses.  Over the coming weeks I am going to write about some the challenges we’ve faced along the way in hopes it will help others.

Today I’m going to write about worship, not because its the #1 biggest challenge we have, but because it is a big challenge. Here’s a few things we’ve learned about MS worship five campuses in.

1. Don’t underestimate the challenge of reproducing GOOD worship over and over. You can have worship, but good worship is tough, and doing it over and over is really tough. Think through your worship challenges carefully before you move to more locations.

2. MS worship would be a mess if it wasn’t for Pastor Joey Davila who is the MS Worship Pastor. Pastor Joey is an amazing leader and musician and under his leadership, worship is doing very well. In some systems the original church worship leadership team oversees MS campus worship, and we started that way too, but it was overwhelming for them with one MS campus, it was impossible with five. Think about a worship leader/pastor before going to multiple campuses.

3. One of the toughest things a MS campus worship leader has to do, is say no to someone who thinks they’re better than they think they are. When they say yes when they should have said no, the entire campus pays the price. Think carefully before picking your campus worship director, because they need to be a leader as well as a musician.

4. Every time you add another campus it gets a little tougher. We’ve reached the point where sending is no longer an option because we’ve sent everyone who could be sent. This means you will have to raise up local musicians. This can take time so be prepared to be frustrated for a season.

5. Not many visitors will ever get past bad worship. That doesn’t mean you have to have perfect worship from day one, but no worship is better than bad worship. Thats where Pastor Joey comes in for us, he will spend eight weeks at a new campus putting a worship team together. What makes this work for us is he can do great worship great with just him and his guitar, which allows us some time to gather musicians together.

6. Good worship doesn’t necessarily mean a full blown band, it means what ever you do have is quality. Pastor Joey with a guitar and a mic, is great worship! Don’t move to fast in an attempt to get to much too soon only to have a mess on Sunday.

As you read this remember this comes from a MS vision that is reaching small town Texas with campuses running around 300 or so. Churches are starting large MS campuses with full staffs which usually include a full time worship director/pastor, which is awesome if you can do that, but many churches are doing things on a much smaller scale and thats who will hopefully get something out of this series of posts.

Hope this helps someone! I’m easy to contact is you have questions. johncatkinson on Twitter, and jccatkinson@gmail.com via email.