LifeChurch: One Church - Many Locations

Imagine this! One church, with centralized leadership and teaching, with 11 different locations where people gather with their own local campus pastor and staff, each having it's own worship leader and band. This is what God is doing through LifeChurch in Oklahoma City.

Tonight, Vanessa and I got to visit for over an hour with Brian Ahern, a staff member of LifeChurch. He gave us a tour of the Edmond campus, which is a pre-existing church building that now houses a local congregation in the network of LifeChurch locations. After the tour and conversation we traveled just 8 miles away and worshipped at the central, original campus in OKC. In a densely populated area like this, 8 miles can be a world away -- and it felt it. The Oklahoma City location is a completely different community than the Edmond location.

Tomorrow morning (Sunday), we'll attend yet another service in Stillwater (a college town -- Oklahoma State). They have locations in other cities in Oklahoma, in Florida, Arizona, Texas, and New York.

This weekend's teaching at all locations was completely video-delivered. I never missed seeing a live teacher! I think there are a number of factors:

• The heavy use of video screens throughout the building and in the auditorium cause you to constantly be looking at the screens throughout the service, so when the pastor appeared on the screen, it seemed "normal".
• The high quality of the video production. The message used multiple clips from the movie, "The Pursuit of Happyness" and there was a seamless video/audio transition from the movie clips to the teaching segments -- all the teaching was taped in outside locations (street tapings of the pastor sitting on a bus bench or walking down an alley).

This was my first time to be in a service where the message is delivered by video and I'll have to say I was surprised at how the delivery-mode was a non-issue for me. Clearly, if you didn't commit to technical and content excellence, the experience would be completely different. By the way, Vanessa's response to the use of video was the same as mine.

The music portion of the sermon was outstanding, though we didn't know the songs. It seemed more "worshipful" to us than Bay Area Fellowship's did. An interesting note -- the musicians in the band are paid. The explanation was that they are playing at 5 to 6 services per week, so it is a huge time commitment. Another factor -- it's easier to replace someone who is a problem if they're paid, as opposed to being a volunteer. Interesting approach.

The next time I post, I'll give more details about things I learned about this multi-site ministry while talking to Brian Ahern. He's a great guy who left a good job at a university to work with his home church.

More tomorrow or Monday. Have great worship tomorrow. We'll be praying for you!

Ken