ABINGDON, Va. — If you are a member of Highlands Fellowship, you may have attended worship in Abingdon, Va., last Sunday. Or you could have been in Bristol, Va., or Marion, Va., or Johnson City, Tenn. Among its four campuses, Highlands Fellowship offers 16 opportunities for worship each Sunday.
A growing number of churches are reaching people and different people for Christ by extending themselves to more than one location — some across town, some across the state, and some literally around the world.
New churches tend to grow because there is more focus on vision. And with multisite churches “there is both the strength of a large church and the intimacy of a smaller church,” says Glenn Akin, associate executive director of the Virginia Baptist Mission Board. The quality of programs typically found at a larger church can also be offered in a small setting enabling members to get to know each other. And a multi-site church may be perceived by the community as more permanent because of its ties with a well-known church.
Two sites, one message
Fairview Baptist Church in downtown Fredericksburg, Va., was feeling the constraints of space and parking. Expansion was needed but enlarging existing buildings was not an option. There was a need for a multi-purpose facility to meet the needs of a growing congregation.
Cars fill the parking lot at Fairview River Club, a dual site campus of Fairview Baptist Church.
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Affordable land and the resources to build were two major hurdles. Pastor Bob Sizemore prophetically announced that if God wanted the expansion to become a reality that someone would donate the land. Church members prayers were answered when Tricord Companies donated five acres in the River Club area just four miles south of Fredericksburg. However the gift came with the stipulation that Sunday services be held at that location.
Fairview was then looking at becoming a dual-site church. Faced with huge construction costs, the project was almost out of reach until a member left half of her multi-million dollar estate to the church.
Ground was broken for Fairview at River Club in October 2006. Dee Whitten, a former pastor of Mount Ararat Baptist Church in Stafford, Va., was called as pastor in 2007, and the new campus opened in May 2008.
“Fairview’s multisite experience is unique in several ways,” says Bob Sizemore, pastor of Fairview Baptist Church at Charlotte Street for nearly 19 years. “We were a small church that had the faith to build a church much bigger than ourselves, and a traditional Baptist church that intentionally built a contemporary church.”
Many places, one people
“From the beginning, we knew God wanted Coastal to be a different sort of church,” says Hank Brooks, lead pastor of Coastal Community Church in Virginia Beach, Va. The congregation held its first service in 1999 at Ocean Lakes Elementary School with over 200 people attending. When it outgrew that space, it relocated to Corporate Landing Middle School in 2007.
Coastal Community’s summer services on the Boardwalk at Virginia Beach attracted visitors from around the U.S. and 11 countries last year.
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As the Coastal congregation continued to grow, Brooks received a call while on vacation that Glenwood Baptist Church, just a few miles away, was disbanding and the site was available. After receiving the commitment of the church and serious discussion about leasing or purchasing the facility, Coastal Community launched its Glenwood campus — expanding its ministry to a new location of equal size.
Brooks finds himself on the road a lot on Sunday mornings. Services at Corporate Landing and Glenwood are strategically timed to allow Brooks to preach at Glenwood at 9:30 a.m., Corporate Landing at 10:30 a.m. and Glenwood at 11:15 a.m.
Each venue has a pastor. Its FUSE young adult ministry has a coffeehouse on Sunday evening followed by a worship service.
From Memorial Day to Labor Day, Coastal Community offers worship at the Café on Boardwalk at 7th Street in Virginia Beach. Led by a team of volunteers, last summer its casual beach worship touched the lives of vacationers from around the Unied States and in 11 different countries.
One family of faith, multiple locations
“People on the grow,” that’s how the members of St. Paul’s Baptist Church in Richmond, Va., describe themselves. Each weekend during four celebrations between two campuses, more than 6,500 people hear the Word of God from senior pastor Lance Watson.
Its Belt Boulevard campus is located in facilities donated to St. Paul’s by Weatherford Memorial Baptist Church. Its Elm Street campus in Petersburg, Va., will be located in facilities donated by Elm Street Baptist Church. These congregations made the sacrificial gift of their facilities to St. Paul’s for the sake of the kingdom so another ministry chapter could be written in those communities.
The church has acquired property on East Marshall Street in Richmond for an additional campus as it continues to be a “congregation on the grow.”
Multisite, even abroad
Some 8,200 people attended the 15th anniversary celebration of Highlands Fellowship in 2010.
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As mentioned earlier, Highlands Fellowship in Abingdon has four campuses and averages over 3,000 in weekend worship with multiple venues and sites, including one in Afghanistan.
For its 15th anniversary in 2010 Highlands Fellowship combined all four locations at Viking Hall in Bristol and an estimated 8,200 people attended and forced the crowd to spill into overflow areas. Nearly 500 people accepted Christ, worshipping and celebrating the Resurrection.
In an interview with Herald editor Jim White following that Sunday, pastor Jimmie Davidson said: “I feel like a spectator just watching God work. God gave me the vision and I shared the vision with our church, but nobody could have believed it would be like this. … That’s how God is. Just so much more than we can hope or imagine.”
Extending your church
The multisite venture is changing the context of ministry for some churches. Christ’s command in Acts 1:8 to “be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” is effecively being accomplished by some churches through multiple locations.