After a few minutes, you forget you’re watching a video,” the cheerful, thirtyish woman at the welcome desk says. In fact, everybody says that. In the Chicago suburbs. In Atlanta. In Minneapolis. In San Diego and Los Angeles. Everybody says you forget that the preacher is not right in the room with you.
“The test,” says Larry Osborne, “is how do they respond when the preacher asks a question. Do they raise their hands when asked? Do they applaud a videotape?”
They do.
“Do they laugh in all the right places? That’s what I wanted to know,” Andy Stanley says. “And they do. Sometimes when we have a guest speaker, I go into our other sanctuary to see how the video is received. They laugh. They cry. And when asked to stand or to make a commitment, they respond just as well as when the speaker is in person.”
Both Stanley and Osborne are pioneering the use of video sermons. Both preach live in one worship service and via video in other venues. Both declare the experiment a success. And both plan to expand their churches by video. Another church has chosen to go entirely without a live preacher, relying instead on recorded sermons from the big boys.
Today’s special
It was Larry Osborne at North Coast Church in Vista, California (near San Diego), who named the concept the “video café.” It started in 1998 as an overflow room that was “a reward and not a punishment,” in Osborne’s words. He contracted with Starbucks to provide coffee, and with tables and greenery, tried to create an atmosphere like a café. The café became a worship service of choice.
The room soon grew so crowded that the tables were removed to make room for more chairs, and when that arrangement was packed out, a second café was added. Now worshipers can choose from five worship styles at 13 services.
The service in the main sanctuary is what you’d expect in Southern California, casual with an up-tempo rock beat, just right for “an old hippie,” as Osborne calls himself. In the outlying rooms, the worship flavor is varied: edgy alternative, acoustical, lush praise and worship, traditional. Each venue is more intimate than the main worship center, 100 to 300 people.
“Leaders like it bigger, but the people like it smaller,” Osborne summarizes. When the music (live) ends, the sermon video is played. “We don’t try to hide that it’s on tape.”
Many churches are studying the North Coast model. In a 2003 Christianity Today article, Saddleback Community Church pastor Rick Warren said his church’s future is in the Cineplex concept, multiple venues and worship styles, where attenders are never late because a service, with its videotaped sermon, is always about to start somewhere.
Warren plans to double Saddle-back’s attendance to 30,000 per weekend, without adding any arena larger than its present 3,000 seat auditorium.
In two places at once
The Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California, founded by Jack Hayford, is pioneering a live, fully interactive, two-way connection between two worship centers a block apart. When a minister leads prayer in the East sanctuary, worshipers at the West sanctuary are watching and praying, and visa versa. The worship band plays at one site, and people at both sites sing.
But most churches using video are limiting it to the sermon, and few are regularly doing that live.
Andy Stanley’s solution to overcrowding at North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia, is what he calls “Siamese sanctuaries,” two worship centers built back to back. That was simpler than tearing down one auditorium to build a larger one. With enough musicians on hand to staff separate but simultaneous services, the only question left was “How can Andy be in two places at once?”
The answer: a live video feed from one sanctuary to the other. At an appointed time, a center screen is lowered to the platform, and a static shot of the pulpit from next door appears, “a foot taller than life-size,” Stanley notes. Close-up and PowerPoint images appear on the side screens at both the “live” and “video” venues.
John Piper had a similar problem. Maxed out at Bethlehem Baptist’s location in downtown Minneapolis, and with much of the congregation living in the suburbs, the church started two additional services on the campus of Northwestern College, where 40 percent of the church now attends. Piper preaches live to packed houses at both locations, alternating his presence between the sites so he can mingle with people afterward.
Why not add preachers?
Driving these examples is the demand to hear a popular preacher who can’t take on yet another service. Ed Young, Sr., pastor of Second Baptist Church of Houston uses video and relatives. After preaching to two sites linked by video, Young drives to the remote site for a second service while son Ben takes over back home. But without the luxury of staff genetically predisposed to good preaching, most popular pastors are not likely to share their pulpits and risk their ministries.
When proposing the video solution, Piper’s staff addressed the question head-on. FAQ 24 and 25 at the website: “Won’t this hinder the multiplication of preachers?” and more bluntly, “Are we promoting a ‘fan club mentality’?”
“There is a tension between saying, ‘We don’t want to put John Piper on a pedestal’ and recognizing that God has given him remarkable gifts and taking advantage of that,” executive pastor Sam Crabtree says. Planning multi-site congregations featuring one preacher also means preparing for the loss of that preacher. “The day will come when John retires, and we don’t want the whole enterprise to be torpedoed by that.”
Megachurches often suffer great attendance losses when trying to replace a retiring pastor. Bethlehem noted in its proposal to the church Tim Keller’s solution at Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan. At his retirement, Keller plans for each of the four sites where he preaches to call their own pastors and become separate churches.
That’s not Willow Creek’s plan.
What’s good for Willow
Willow Creek Community Church aims to create the same worship experience at its regional centers as at the main campus. From the orange-jacketed parking attendants outside, to the fully staffed welcome center just inside the front door, this place feels like Willow Creek in South Barrington, Illinois. Only this is in Wheaton, 20 miles south.
Browsing past the Seeds bookstore with a warm cinna-bun in hand, heading into the high school auditorium where Willow Wheaton worships, it doesn’t seem to matter that Bill Hybels is on tape. You’ve got Willow Creek, and you didn’t have to drive an hour to get there.
That’s the plan behind Willow’s three regional centers: provide a seeker-sensitive weekend worship and believer-maturing “New Community” services mid-week at multiple sites more than 30 minutes driving distance from the main campus—and do it all with characteristic excellence. These local congregations will program their small groups, children’s and youth ministries on the Willow model with staff who report to the main campus leadership team, while receiving Hybels and John Ortberg and the teaching pastors on tape.
After six months of core groups meetings and practice worship services, Willow Wheaton opened with some 300 attenders. Now, a year after opening, attendance averages almost 1,000.
Willow Creek’s Jim Tomberlin acknowledges the opposition some local pastors might have, competing with Bill Hybels on their own turf. “We expected a negative reaction from local churches, but we didn’t get that.” Tomberlin has made extra efforts to form ministry partnerships with local pastors on behalf of Willow Creek to address community needs. If polls can assuage fears, the numbers show that few of Willow Wheaton’s attenders are transfers from existing local congregations.
A survey taken in October showed that 74 percent had regularly attended the South Barrington campus; 11 percent had been driving to the main campus but quit. Only 14 percent had never attended at the main campus, a number leaders expect to grow as the regional center extends its reach into the local community. While 23 percent are new Christians, reporting they came to Christ after attending Willow Wheaton, 12 percent say they are not Christians. Making “fully devoted disciples” from “irreligious people” marks the DNA of the daughter as much as the mother.
Most surprising is that the first regional center is self-supporting. Willow Wheaton met a $1.2-million budget in its first year. “We expected it would take two years to be self-sufficient,” Tomberlin says, “but it happened in six months.” The regional campus supports a staff of 12, including its own campus pastor.
A second regional campus in Chicago’s North Shore community, after six months of preparation and with 300 attending mid-week services, will start weekend video services in April. A third site in far west suburban McHenry starts prep work in August.
“Our biggest challenge is in moving from one campus to multi-campus,” Tomberlin said. “We thought video would be the biggest issue, but it’s become the biggest non-issue.”
“I’m still not completely used to the video,” attender Chris Lutes says. “But I’m adjusting to it. And they’re getting better at not saying ‘tonight’ in a service shown on Sunday morning, and Bill Hybels sometimes refers to the regional campuses by name.”
Lutes’s occasional discomfort with the sermon delivery system is minor. “The sermons connect with me and what I need. And Bill lets us look into his life and struggles and see that they are like our own. He is transparent.”
Even on tape.
Lutes is a participating member (Willow’s term for active) at the regional campus, coaching several leaders of small groups for youth. His wife and teenage son are active in the children’s ministry. Lutes has a long history in traditional church settings. When asked, “Is Willow Wheaton, with its rented locale and sermons on video, a real church?” Lutes says yes.
“I feel more connected with this church and with these people than I have others in a long time,” he said.
Everybody’s watching Rockford
Sixty miles from Willow Creek, in Rockford, Illinois, Hybels is drawing big crowds every weekend, about 2,000 people. What’s unusual about that? Well, it isn’t Willow Creek or a Willow Creek regional center. This is an autonomous, local congregation, Heartland Community Church, that happens to use Hybels on video to deliver their sermons.
It’s an experiment that many are watching—a church without its own preacher. If it fails, local preachers everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief. If it succeeds, local preachers may start cataloging their other marketable skills.
So far, it’s working.
The atrium at Heartland smells like French Vanilla café. With this $2 million addition to a former restaurant, the building resembles the Cadillac dealership next door. That’s the idea. When the church relocates to 74 acres it purchased near the interstate, this building will be sold to a car dealer and the atrium will become a showroom. But today, it’s a coffee shop and gathering place for a good cross-section of Rockford.
The people standing at chest-high pub tables are mostly between 25 and 45. Above the buzz you can hear answers to questions you’re thinking: “almost five years now,” “a woman I work with told me,” “not like my old church at all,” “you get used to the video,” “I don’t even think about it anymore,” “very cool.”
The buzz quiets when “the countdown” comes on screens over the coffee bar. The crowd moves into the worship area while announcements are shown on the large screens beside the platform—lots of faces, quick cuts, and a drive beat MTV-style, while a clock counts the seconds to worship. At 00:00, the live band kicks in, and worship begins, a smooth mix of contemporary songs from the standard charts, prayer, on this Sunday the monthly serving of communion, and the offering. The man in the middle, playing the keyboard and guiding the service, is Doug Thiesen. He is warm and the atmosphere is like most upbeat, contemporary services.
Until the sermon.
After a short explanation, Bill Hybels appears on the side screens and delivers a sermon on “telling the truth.” It is part three of a series Willow Wheaton saw five months earlier.
“We have access to the Willow Creek sermon library, and we can choose what we feel our congregation needs,” explains Thiesen.
“When we first started, some people said, ‘When are we going to get a pastor?’ They meant ‘a preacher.’ We have a pastor,” Mark Bankord says, pointing to Thiesen. Bankord, a full-time assets manager, also serves as directional leader for the congregation that he and Thiesen started in 1998 with 113 people.
Thiesen was worship pastor at a traditional church in Rockford. After an attempt at a seeker-sensitive contemporary service was shelved, the men decided to try it in a different setting. With the worship and leadership elements in place, only a dynamic preacher was missing.
Bankord recalls a conversation between himself and his wife. “‘How can we have consistently great teaching—like this?’ she said to me. We had some tapes of Bill sitting on the TV in our bedroom.” Bankord, a friend of Hybels, called and asked for permission to use some sermon tapes. After discussions about the church’s mission and theology, Hybels consented.
“We share much the same DNA as Willow Creek,” Bankord says, so Willow preachers speak well to the church’s needs.
Will other autonomous congregations be allowed to use recorded Willow Creek sermons for their teaching?
“We’re open to it,” Jim Tomberlin says, “if it can be done in a way that monitors the integrity of our content. We need another year to determine whether it’s feasible.”
If not Willow Creek’s, other preachers may be available for syndication. Andy Stanley has been approached by a store owner in a city outside Atlanta who is showing Stanley’s sermons to friends during lunch breaks. He’s thinking about the possibilities.
“People listen to John MacArthur and Chuck Swindoll and my dad,” Stanley says. “So they know what good teaching is. I would love to take this into small towns where they’ll never keep a strong communicator, to partner with those guys and say, ‘We will give you what you can’t do if you will create the environment that you know will draw the unchurched people in your community.'”
The technology is in place to deliver “consistently great teaching” every week via video. Now the issue is, will our theology allow it?
The Incarnation and other minutia
Church expert Lyle Schaller has hailed the multi-site church as a means of expanding ministry while stewarding resources, doing more with less staff.
But the video element adds a new kink. If syndicated preaching becomes the norm, who will serve, in Craig Barnes’s words, as “the crucible where the needs of this congregation and the Word of God meet.”
Barnes was for ten years pastor of National Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C., and is now professor of pastoral ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He doesn’t want to rule out the work of the Holy Spirit through whatever means he chooses, but Barnes asks, “Who can stand and say ‘The Word of the Lord’ to a particular congregation, unless that pastor lives with them, loves them, and is called specifically to shepherd them?”
And there are the pastors of local churches who face a new challenge from the megachurches. “The answer for small church pastors is reaching a niche,” Larry Osborne says. It’s the same advice given to Mom and Pop shops when Wal-Mart moves to town. Specialize. Know your customers.
“A church’s niche can be its relationships or its denominational flavor. And they can create a great, smaller church atmosphere.”
Of course, that’s what Osborne is trying to do with his video cafés. “We don’t talk about how big we are. We have a sense of family.” A family whose hearth and altar, as at home, is the video screen.
Eric Reed is managing editor of Leadership.
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