don't get stuck in the cement of a campus model...

okay - in my post "the first hit is always free" i whine a lot about how much time blogging takes to really do it like i want to be able to do it. one complaint was that i take pictures to blog about something then never seem to get around to posting them.

well, here's one, anyway. and i'm not just posting this one of me and geoff surratt because he practically begged me to post it. (i guess he thought my side of the picture made his side look better.)



this is at fellowship church's plano campus. we were there as part of a leadership network multi-site community gathering. geoff is a smart, big-hearted, obviously good-looking, God-loving genius - especially where it comes to multi-site church concepts. he's part of seacoast church and they've got like 497 campuses now (give or take a few).

he said something at the gathering that i really took to heart for how we do multi-site church at healing place church with our 12 or 13 services at 8 campuses (depending on how you count). here's the quote:

"don't ever get stuck in the cement of a model."

when it comes to doing multi-site church the way we do here at hpc, there's not a sliver of space for a mindset that isn't flexible to customize for particular situations. we have no two campuses that are alike. we've got a campus that is a video playback and is just around the corner from the main campus. we have one that is spanish-speaking only - a huge factor in planning. we have one that is predominantly african-american, planted in the middle of one of the poorest zip codes in the USA. we just started one in a rural area just north of town. we have a campus out in california that is a video venue. we have one in manaus, brazil that is planting more campuses of its own in the interior along the amazon. little mini-HPC's all along the river.

talk about a modeling nightmare. it would be a nightmare if we decided to get stuck in the cement of a model. by being able to employ what works from various models to build a setup for each new campus based on its own cultural factors and needs, we're going to be able to be more effective in a much shorter time than if we just bulled our way in and said, "this is how it has to be because it is our model."

sure, we have a DNA that we aren't going to change. but the expression of that DNA will become self-paralyzing if we refuse to pursue flexibility in how the DNA is expressed.

anyway - thanks geoff for the encouragement about that. and congrats on the new multi-site revolution blog. i'm looking forward to what we'll see (and hear?) there.