Here at Conversatio Morum we’ve been talking about the Multi-Site model of church. One of the key things, when dealing with church growth is that once you pass 120 you’ve effectively moved past the point at which everyone in a room can know everyone else. This has become one of the milestones that “successful” churches must pass when planting. It’s the point that rules regarding economies of scale begin to come into effect. However, once you hit this point in growth, how do you maintain the ability to develop community involvement and keep people in real, life changing, intentional, relationships with each other?
One advantage with multi-site and multi-service is that those two things help bring a large church down to smaller and smaller levels. This helps maintain relational groups of people who, even though they are part of the same larger church (possibly of thousands), are familiar on a more relational level with a smaller group within the larger body. This is the same principle that people would use for small groups where Andy Stanley would say “Circles are better than rows.”
What do you think? As a church grows, does this help alleviate the tendency or people to hide in larger services? Does it help with mission by bringing people into greater community for the purpose of forming missional communities of smaller groups?