Since Eric challenged me in my comments section to read his other posts, I did…here is my response to his posts…

Eric,
It seems you are honestly willing to learn so I am going to give you some of the basic arguments against your thinking.

First is the "max hedrom" comment.  Why is it assumed that because a speaker is on video he is robotic, unfeeling and not able to connect with people?  Unless you are against all "Big" churches (over 500) I would assume that you do not have a problem with IMAG in these churches.  This is simply the speaker being on a screen so people in a larger auditorium can see them better.  What is the difference?  In our campuses people laugh as much, cry as much and respond as much as they do at the live venue.

2. Your second argument is one that has been made many times but that I still just can not understand. This is the idea that somehow the only "saint" that can care for and minister to a church is the speaking pastor.  As a church planter I do not just assume but know that you would agree with Ephesians that the goal is that the "Saints would do the work of the ministry".  Because of the multi-site model there are more people serving, more people doing ministry and far less reliance on one pastor to do all of the work of the ministry.  This it would seem is actually carrying out the Ephesians mandate better than a church of 400 where everyone looks to the speaking pastor to teach, care, guide and love for them.

3.  We are not starbucks.  If any of the people who have misperceptions about multi-site would ever actually visit one they would be able to speak intelligently.  We have regional flavor, different personalities in our campus pastors and overall each campus cares deeply about their communities and seeks to reach them.  We simply leverage a few DNA elements of a tried and true methodology and resources of a large organization to help these regional flavors taste even better.  We have very sharp leaders in our campus pastor positions who would not be satisfied just being puppets on a string for some wizard behind a curtain.

4.  Finally its Both and not one or the other.  For some reason everyone seems to think we have to decide whats better, multi-site of church planting.  Thats like asking, "whats better the arm or the leg", we need both to be an effective body. In the words of the great theologian Rodney King, "Can’t we all just get along".

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**I changed the title to this post from "multi-site haters" as that was a little strong and probably loose words…I am not sure that misperceptions is even a word…but it should be**

I stumbled across yet another multi-site hater blog full of misperceptions.  What bothers me as that these blogs are usually Pastors…something just seems weird about that…

Anyway, here is the link to the original post and the full comment that I left…

The Merge – A multi-site hating post

Shawn Wood said…

Eric, Although your friends argument here is nothing new when I stumbled across this post I just felt compelled to comment.

Its obvious that people who hold these views either have a wrong perception (probably never actually visited a multi-site church) or it comes from some type of spiritual envy…which is totally un-needed as every multi-site church I know of has planted many more churches than campuses (my church Seacoast has planted over 30 churches in the last 4 years and started 8 campuses)

Here are just a few brief thoughts I would hope you would consider…

1. The campus Pastors that bloggers like your friends make seem like blooming idiots just because they do not speak are tremendous leaders and spiritual men that deserve respect. If the fact that a leader does not speak minimizes them, then 99.9% of Christians are minimized.

2. The thousands upon thousands of people (about 4000 at Seacoast) who attend these new campuses outside of the original campuses got saved by a real Jesus and attend a Real church. Bloggers with loose words are talking about Churches that have changed people lives and introduced them to Jesus – they deserve respect.

3. Every multi-site church that I know loves, respects and helps church planters anyway that we can. We put a great deal of resources, give away anything we create (Seacoastallaccess.org and lifechurch’s open site) and want to help churches plant anyway we can. Seacoast is currently helping a church planter plant a church in Mount Pleasant – the same town as our original campus – because we believe we alone can not hold all of the lost people. I would ask bloggers such as your friend to ask this church planter about what an evil church Seacoast is.

I know blogs make people meaner and nastier than they would ever be in person, but I would just ask that all the multi-site haters our there remember that we as staff at multi-site churches are on your team, we are real people at real churches that love Jesus and want to help reach as many people as possible and hope that God uses you and us together to bring people to the real Jesus.

So what do you think?

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I have been so busy that posting has not made the radar recently. But I wanted to take just a minute to tell you about a church that should be making your radar.

I had the opportunity to meet with the team at elevation church and let me tell you – they are knocking it out of the park!  The team, led by my friend Steven Furtick, have a rabid staff and volunteers that just blew me away.

If you have not put them on your radar…check them out.

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We have been using a company for our short-run, needed very fast type stuff that is just killer.  Overnightprints.com has become a staple for what we do.  For anything near the 500 pieces mark (most of the time even the 250 piece mark) their prices are better than printing in-house on our copier and beat Kinkos et. al. by a ton!  And their quality is out of this world for the price!

There are a couple of caveats to be aware of…

1.  If you have to ship overnight they are very expensive.  However many times the cost to print is so cheap that it still beats Kinkos price.

2.  They are not for large-run customized size printing.  Make sure that you design your project around the sizes that they prefer.

3.  They are cheap, which means they don’t pay a ton of people to answer the phone.  Be prepared to sit on the phone if you need to talk to them.  But it’s web based so you should not have to talk to them.

It’s a lot easier if you have a communications team that can be the one contact with them because if you have multiple ministries ordering from them it can get confusing…

But after 6 months of using them I feel good about saying "I recommend Overnighprints.com"

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I am honored to work with and around such an awesome team.  A couple of months ago four of us sat in a lunch meeting with Greg and captured his vision for our upcoming series Life@Work.

Since then we have had an unbelievable promo video in this past weekends service and now an entire website/resource staging area that just rocks.

This is why it is so fun to work at Seacoast.  The Synergy is awesome.  And by the way for those that want to know why we keep growing – this is why! (yes super-spiritual people it is because of God, but if we are all idiots and had no synergy he might would use someone else)

Great Job Ashley, Marty, Karen, Lori and the rest of the Seacoast Team.  The four of you make me look so good!!! (and thats hard to do)

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Wow, the week is flying by and I am just getting to some posts! 

I read Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors by Lincioni on my trip to Granger Indiana.  This is a must read for anyone who works in any organization of any significant time.

The end result of the book is that a shared crisis (I would even say a shared major project or goal) makes teams work better across their departments and tear down silos.

Rob Wagner, one of the teaching Pastors at Granger Community Church has a great talk on how to bring people into God’s story…but I wrote this down in my notes as I processed his thoughts…

"Every weekend is the 9th inning 2 outs for someone in our church. If they do not get it today it might all be over – Thats a crisis!"

This took me back to why I do what I do.  Then in the way that God does things on Tuesday we had our monthly all-staff meeting with Greg.  He talked about passion and the fact that it is so easy to lose.  Then he shared a few things that we can do to get our fire burning again.  This one resonated:

Remember your calling.  I have to admit that I hate the word calling as I feel like it is so mystical, but then Greg made it real…remember when you chose to do what you do.  Remember when you were asked by God to do what you do.

I was 17 and I had a specific time when I knew that I would spend the rest of my life working for the local church.  I had just recently accepted Christ and he had changed everything about me…everything.  I knew about 3 months later that I would work in the local church vocationally my whole life.  Here is what motivated me:

People will spend eternity from God if we don’t introduce them to Christ.

That was it, seriously.  I never thought about any other reasons.  I did not care if people went deep, I did not care if they had better quiet times – I just knew that people would spend eternity in a real place called hell and that was not cool with God nor me.

As I have processed these two things I am asking myself if that is still my calling and my motivations.  I am a pretty passionate person, but I am not nearly as passionate about the lost as I was when I was 17.  Is it possible that I have become numb to the facts?  Is it possible that I don’t care?  Is it even possible that I just don’t believe the facts anymore? 

So God is shaking me up inside a little.  He is rattling my cage to care more.  I want to be that 17 year old again (less the Christian t-shirts and music boycotting) that loved people getting saved.  I have to – people are depending on it.

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Had a great small group tonight and I talked a little about turning up the heat on our group to act more like Jesus in our ordinary lives…

We framed it like this so we could really put some action to our goals…and I think God may have opened a door for me to be an accountability partner with a fellow dude in our group…

Accountability – you have to have someone in your life that can tell you that "you don’t look good in biker shorts" (great quote from Kem Meyer by the way)

Choices – our choices matter.  Its our choices that determine which way our feet are pointing so that when we move we are moving in the right direction.  When we have good accountability in place we will have someone to help us with good choices.

Time – I really challenged myself first and our group to get better and not being so busy.  We made group a priority and accountability (which takes time) a priority.

Now we are ready to ACT like Jesus more every day.

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“In an attention scarce economy, perception rules.” Tim Sanders

With so much stimuli coming our direction it sometimes feels like we are in some weird "Asteroids" game and avoiding stimuli becomes the objective rather than choosing our journey.

People are confronted everyday with so many options and choices every minute of everyday.  The fact is that the first glance or a first impression may be all that we have.

So if we indeed only have a glance to grab people for – or at that a initial perception that will define what they think about our organization then Tim Sanders is right – PERCEPTION RULES.

So, with that in mind I am walking the halls of our new Possibilities Center at Seacoast Church and looking for opportunities to make a first impression with a glance or even worse places where we are already making statements that do not match up with our message.

In that same vein – I saw this at Moe’s eating lunch with Geoff the other day…

"Dear Blue Chip and red Chip.  We can not go on living a lie, we have been seeing another chip.  the white chip. We’re so sorry. We never meant to hurt you.  The white chip simply gives us something you never could. Dye free snacking.  Hey we had lots of laughs.  We will always remember you with fondness.

Moe"

I have to say that this sign left me in a much better mood than a sign that would say, "We are no longer offering Blue chips and Red Chips", and left a much better perception than silence.

Good job Moe.  It makes me want to eat more "naked Joey’s"!  Wecome to Moes!!

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Take away #4:  "We (communications department) do not create the message, we protect and extend it" Kem Meyer

When I heard Kem say this it reminded me of the BASF ad…"We don’t make __________, we make___________better"

As the communications department our goal should be to make the message better received.  I love Kem’s words – protect and extend.

Protect the message:  It is very important that we have a clear understanding of what the message is so that we can protect the integrity and keep it from being diluted.  If you are a communications lead in your organization and have never had conversations with those who install the vision this should be your #1 priority.  How can we protect a message that we really do not understand.  It would be very easy to be communicating the wrong messages very well while the real message is being thwarted and attacked.

Extend the message: Like a virus we can see the message extend it’s scope to reach a larger and larger audience.  I think my take away from this is that there needs to be a shared message throughout the organization.  There needs to be an organizational sympathetic system that triggers to rush the message through all organization parts rather than the common silo system that shuts out viral messages.

Questions I am asking:

Is everyone on the staff team at Seacoast aware of the mission and message priority?  Am I?

Are there silo areas that have doorman posted to keep all non-silo interest’s and messages out?  Maybe even in my department?

Am I digging tunnels, a organization sympathetic system, throughout all of the silos through conversations and collaboration?

Am I protecting the real message or propping up the wrong message?

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One of my biggest pet peeves in the world is for there to be more than one source of music at once that I can hear.  It drives me absolutely crazy.  I love music.  I love all kinds of music.  But It can be two songs that I like – does not matter – it makes my skin crawl.

Recently I have been thinking about the amount of "noise" that we have going on from multiple communications sources at Seacoast.  There are so many voices (all good voices by the way) competing for the ears that it begins to feel like a melody of America’s Top 40 – ALL AT ONCE.

So I asking myself some questions about how to mute some of the noise.

Here are some parameters that I have that maybe some of you could use…

#1 – Just like a DJ, my role at Seacoast is not one that I get to decide what should and should not be going on.  My team will need to work with what the management team has decided are the ministry options at Seacoast.  I think we can have conversations about this – we are not a group of robot "yes" people, but we need to play nice with others and respect authority. 

#2 – Ignoring people and their concerns is not an option. If the management team has deemed these ministries "the stuff", then it would be a lack of respect for authority just to let ministries go unheard.  We need to set them up for success.

So what can we learn from top 40 here…

Move people to Response by telling a story.  When a new artist comes on the scene or a artist comes back with a new song, there is always a story.  There is not a story for every single song in the top 40.  Some of them can support themselves.  In fact very little attention is paid on the songs on the way out or the songs at the bottom.  The real meat is the up-and-coming.

Action: Never make announcements of need, tell stories of success.

Understanding of the audience.  Do you know why there are so many categories of Top 40 lists – because I hate country music!  Well sort of….it’s because there are so many categories of people.  As we communicate the story we need to make sure that we communicate to the right audience.  A mass e-mail to everyone in the church about a niche ministry opportunity is similar to a punk radio station for 18-25 year olds that throws in a wiggles song once a day just in case someone wants it.

Action: Be strategic with communication making sure that the questions we are answering is the question that has been asked

Trust the audience.  This is the hardest one.  Back in the day when I was a youth Pastor I started a few programs that I was sure were the thing that people needed.  I created slick marketing, talked it up and begged people to be a part – then the ultimate vote came – attendance.  Attendance is the best survey we can take.  If no one is coming to a ministry event or class it may be time to trust the audience.  Many a song has been propped up and said to be top 40 material, but ultimately the audience votes and we must trust them to know what they want to hear.  We must trust people.  For all the bloggifiles that hate mega-churches – THIS IS NOT IN THE AREA OF PREACHING I AM TALKING ABOUT SORTING GREAT STUFF OUT OF GOOD STUFF.

Action:  Have conversations with your management team about the things you are manufacturing buzz for and consider not doing them. (notice I did not say keep doing them just don’t market them – that is false kindness to the leaders in that area)

Encourage collaboration in message distribution.  This starts with calendar collaboration.  Wow that is a smart sentence.  Lets give a good example.  Since the month of November is a time when people typically give of their time to help the needy and our motivated a little more to serve why not…
-  Have a message series about serving people
-  Plan a youth trip to the soup kitchen
-  Have the church small group system do service projects as a group

See where this is going?  So many times there will be an event or vision that is a great idea but is not collaborated with the other messages in the church. 

Action:  This takes the hard work of calendaring and being willing to collaborate with each other.

Long post I know…hope it settles with you.

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