Creating Great Worship in Multiple Venues is One Seriously Tough Gig!
This is the last of the 6 Multi Site Pitfalls that we are unpacking. This should be short because frankly I know nothing about music, but what I do know as someone who oversees multiple campuses that have worship, it's tough to reproduce great worship over and over because great musicians are hard to find!
I believe good worship is a very important part of a successful multi site strategy. I think everyone would agree that bad music is uncomfortable for anyone who has ever sat through it, and if it's bad enough it can actually keep people from worshiping, or even worse from coming back.
The temptation when adding sites, is to either use some of the main campus musicians at other sites at a different time, or use the original campus leadership to build and manage a new band. We did both when we started our first campus which was fine for a while, but over time it began to take its toll on both leaders and musicians, and had we stuck to that plan, it would ultimately have begun to affect the worship at the original campus. We were wearing out our leaders and musicians because we were asking them to add too much to their already hectic schedules.
Last year we moved one of our worship leaders (Joey Davila) over from main campus to be the Director of Multi Site Worship. That was huge for the Multi Site ministry because Joey added a major skill set that was missing from the ministry, and that move has taken worship at the sites, as Ed Young would say, to a whole nutha level!
When looking at your long term vision for adding campuses, I would challenge you to think through this pitfall because reproducing great worship over and over is really tough. I know you probably can't add a Director of Multi Site Worship from day one, we didn't either, but part of the reason I've been writing these posts is to help others prepare for the things that caught us off guard, and this was one of those things. Thinking ahead about the person who might fill this role will really benefit the ministry especially if your vision is to start multiple sites.
As I write this we are 24 hours away from our first core group meeting at what will be our fourth multi site campus, and with this site, we are going into a town where very few people already attend BAF. This will be probably our toughest attempt at creating great worship because we don't already know a single musician in this town. As the Multi Site Pastor, I can't imagine taking on this task without Joey on my team! I'm writing this in hopes it will challenge you to start thinking about this position before you need it, not after it begins to overwhelm you like it did us.
John
As Multi-site worship director is he responsible then for making sure the worship teams at each site are staffed or is that at the campus level? Does Joey have "authority" over the various worship teams or is in more of a coaching role, helping and resourcing but not ultimately responsible?
Posted by: Doug | April 07, 2009 at 04:49 PM