The Craziness of Multi Site

Doing Multi Site in fun and will definitely expand your reach to the lost, but it’s also full of land mines that will make you a bit crazy at times. In my opinion, one of the greatest challenges you’ll continue to face no matter how long you do this, at least in a video venue setting, is media issues. Whether you’re playing a recorded message from the previous weekend, live streaming, or using a satellite, the challenges never cease. If you were to talk to different churches using all these different methods of getting a video to campuses, each would tell you about the struggles they’ve had.

Thats exactly what almost happened to me this last weekend. Three of our pastors at the original CC campus were out last weekend, so Pastor Paul (Exec Pastor) asked me if I would come in and be the campus pastor, of course I was glad to do it. My day to day role is the Director of Multi Site, but recently we moved the Padre Island Campus Pastor (Dave Cotham) back to the Corpus Christi Broadcast campus and promoted him to run all the small groups in the church. This happened fairly quickly so because we needed someone to fill his role at the campus, I took over the interim leadership on top of my other duties, and I pulled my son Cody (Multi Site Intern) out with me to help with day to day stuff and to cover for me when I’m out like last weekend!

So Sunday morning I’m headed to the CC campus and my son calls and says, “Dad, we have a melt down, projectors aren’t working.” So now I’m facing having to not go to the CC campus where I’m supposed to be, and going back to the Padre Island Campus and preaching on five minutes notice. To help you understand the full emotion I’m feeling at that moment, you have to know I’ve been doing nothing but starting seven campuses for the last five years. I haven’t preached in over four years because leading all those campuses and starting new ones has taken all my time. So I run home, open my computer to get an old sermon, and I mean old, and the file where they are supposed to be in, is gone! Seriously its gone, like not there, missing in action, disappeared, unaccounted for, well you get the point. Pastor Joey (MS Worship Pastor) and I recently switched computers, guess it got lost in the transition. So I go to my blog, print out the my last post, and head to the campus to preach on five minutes notice, not having preached in four years, with nothing but a blog post! :)lol

Seriously you can’t make this stuff up!!!

Its way funny now, but Sunday morning,  well not so much Thankfully I got five minutes from the campus and the team figured out the problem and we played the video, but the reason I’m writing about this is to let you know that Multi Site is crazy stuff and things will go wrong! We are starting our 9th campus right now and we still have problems all the time, I suspect we always will no matter how long we do this. Technology is great, but sometimes like everything else, it breaks! What we’ve learned to do is just laugh about this stuff and move on, because if you don’t it will drive you crazy. It’s also important when doing Multi Site to remember, God is bigger than any melt down or failure that could happen at a campus, and you just have to move on, fix the problem, and try to keep it from happening again.

Years ago when we started our second campus (BAF 5 Points) Pastor Jason and I had worked our tails off for four months getting ready for our launch Sunday, but we were very new at this and things didn’t go exactly as planned. We realized, on our big launch weekend, that we didn’t have enough AC in the worship area so it was 92 degrees in both services, and beyond miserable. The lead singers microphone quit in the middle of the first song, and the right speaker just decided to quit right along with it. Jason and I were devastated, sick to our stomachs! After the abysmal failure of a start, at least in our eyes, we went through the information cards and realized that 8 people had prayed to receive Jesus Christi into their lives! In spite of all that had happened, God blessed the effort we had put into His new Church over the last four moths and peoples lives were changed.

So heres the cliff notes if you will. Yes, there will be tons of melt downs if you do Multi Site, but there will also be tons of amazing life change, and what that has taught me is, God is big enough to handle any problems you will have, so He doesn’t need us to be perfect, He just needs us to be willing!

John

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