We began our first multisite three years ago. There have been a number of shifts since that launch. For the first several months we met in a movie theater with 100% video of the weekend service. For nearly two years we have met at at the RV/MV Hall of Fame - a multi-million dollar facility with spacious room and a kickin' live band.If you've been following along, you've caught that we're still experiencing shifts and new opportunities with our Elkhart site (read here and here). This fall we'll move to our new ministry outpost, occupying a fifty year old building that gives us unique opportunity in a densely populated residential part of the city.
How we process change matters. Understanding and embracing who we are matters. Culture, identity and expression of that identity as a church body really matters.
Recently my friend, Don Reynolds - our director of arts and community in Elkhart, responded to an email inquiry about multisite and the arts. Over the next week I'll run excerpts of his responses. He's a thinker with heart. A compassionate shepherd who gets strategy. I love Don. I love what he shares below.
I have been on staff at Granger for under a year. Before that I served as a volunteer in the arts area while the vision of multiple locations was cast. Within a year or so, I changed my volunteer role, leaving the Granger location to focus solely on our Elkhart site.This cultural shift was most noticeable at that time.
Granger is an amazing organization, and equally amazing church. For decades, the teams at Granger have produced worship experiences with awe-inspiring effectiveness and creativity. When I started in Elkhart, I was conceptually trying to produce the same experience as the Granger site. Quickly, we learned that our application of the Granger experience needed to be tweaked, adapted, and re-developed. "Who are we?" "What IS Granger Community Church?"
Our Senior Management Team developed a list of "Campus Constants" in order to begin the discussion about campus identity. Within a few months, my thinking shifted from trying to "reproduce" an experience, to being a "reflection" of an experience, then to being an "expression" of the Granger experience. Finding who we were as a site within a regional church was my biggest challenge. What does our experience look like in comparison to the Granger site? How can we morph our thinking from "us" and "them," from "Mom & Dad" and "red-headed step-child" (LOL) to expressions of the same identity?
What we discovered is that the missional impulse of our Senior Pastor Mark Beeson is still alive and beating in our site.The creative impulse that has so much been a part of our weekend arts experience on our Granger campus is alive and well on our site. What made the Granger experience, ultimately, was not the size of the room, haze, enormous screens, slides to the kids classrooms, and an awesome café: but it is the heart that made all those things possible, the heart that beat for those who don't yet know God loves them, excellence applied to every area of ministry, taking steps toward Christ…. THAT was, and is, Granger.That we could be. And THAT we are!
In a few months we'll move to a new location with a 24/7 presence as a ministry outpost. Buildings don't define culture necessarily, but we'll be tempted to rethink who we are. But who we are has already been determined. We are Granger Community Church. We are a people who care for people who don't know they matter to God. We are a people committed to taking our next step toward Christ...together. We are a people purposed to reach our community. We are agreed on our vision through 2016. Where we meet doesn't change that.
Don's right: Our effort is not to see how "identical" we can be to the Granger campus. Nor is it to work at being as different as we can be. The effort isn't really about finding or forming identity at all. We have identity. We will develop new expressions unique to our community there that help us accomplish our mission and vision. The same values will guide us. The same missional impulse with fuel us.
We're moving fast on this process to revitalize a vibrant ministry in northeast Elkhart. And we're moving in step as an entire church to only do what moves us closer to fulfilling our 2016 Vision and our 25-year mission.
