We believe that excellence honors God and inspires people. So as a multi-site church with more than 30 physical locations on a weekend, consistency and clarity must be the building blocks of excellence.
For the most part, every service at Life.Church flows almost exactly the same at each location with subtle differences in the content—the campus pastor and worship pastors at each campus choose songs for their location, and each campus pastor communicates something specific to their campus during their stage time. Because we sync every service at every campus to the same message via satellite, timing of every element in our experiences has to be consistent each weekend.
Any change to the regular flow of the service is carefully considered and communicated to the entire production team. Leaders from our campus operations team work with our senior pastor to finalize the details of how to make a change in our service flow, then communicate that change to the campus pastor and worship pastor at each location so they can lead through with clarity to their campus teams. Examples of subtle changes to a weekend service flow are adding a live worship song to the end of the main message or a child dedication in the middle of the worship set.
We try to never make last-minute changes to upcoming services, but there is, however, a constant feedback loop for improvements we can make over time. For example, we might change how we transition between service elements or what a campus pastor talks about during stage time.
What we've learned:
We've found that multi-campus works best when every campus feels like the main campus. We create this feeling by replicating the experience down to the second across locations and then being intentional about creating a local, personal atmosphere through stage time, friendly greeters & ushers and volunteers on our host teams and operations teams, local imagery in the lobby, and more. When a campus feels recognizable and personable, people will feel at home there.
