Going Multi, Part 2

Newfrontiers and Multi

Multiple ‘congregations’
Sidcup, Brighton and Vineyard (as Jubilee, Cape Town, was then known) certainly used this method in the late 1980s (and there may be others I am unaware of). Under this model, the church met in congregations that were geographically defined. In many ways what was happening at this time was very close to what many multi-siters are now doing. What was different from a Piper/Driscoll type model is that the individual congregations were led by elders who preached in their congregations, rather than having one preacher serving multiple locations. Also, as I recall, these preaching elders were not even necessarily preaching the same text/theme, but were free to set their own agenda, and in this sense were operating far more as autonomous churches.

The other distinguishing factor was that the model these churches were operating under was Cell-Congregation-Celebration. London’s Icthus church/churches were the most consistent advocates of this model in the UK, and for some time these ideas gained traction with us. Practically what this meant was that the whole church would gather together on a regular basis for a celebration meeting. At Brighton, that meant regular gatherings in the Dome, or Hove Town Hall. At Vineyard, it meant meeting in congregations in the morning, and as a whole church in the evening.

(Personally, the eight months I spent at Vineyard in 1989 was one of the happiest periods of church involvement I have experienced – part of a small group that was genuinely fun and spiritually nourishing, a Sunday morning congregation which offered some level of personal interaction (led by Francois Heunis), and a Sunday evening celebration which was just that, with the brilliant preaching of Graham Ingram holding it together.)

This model dropped from favour because of fears that the congregations were becoming too autonomous, and because of a fresh sense of being ‘more together than we are apart’ with the impact and influence a single, large congregation could have in a town. Also, in some cases congregations became autonomous churches.

Multiple services
Over the years a number of our churches have held more than one service on a Sunday. For some, especially those that were historically Baptist, this functioned as a morning and evening service which were different in content. However, there have also been numerous examples of churches doing two services at which the preaching was the same, and generally this has been due to limitations of venue size.

For example, when I took on the lead role at New Community Church we moved to a morning and evening service with the same sermon at each because we were doing a building project which meant we had to use part of our meeting space for storage. This was a period when the church saw its only really significant growth in the whole 13 years I was there. At the time I put this down to my dynamic new leadership of the team, but in retrospect I think it was simply that the axiom, “when you give people more options more people opt” proved true.

However, there have been those who have more intentionally gone for a multi-service model in response to, and in order to sustain, growth. For example, Steve Tibbert at King’s Church, Catford.