Sojourn Elders Answer Questions About Multi-Campus, part one: Are We Giving Up On Church Planting?

Thanks to the many Sojourners who are asking questions about the reasoning and process behind our decision to open a second Sojourn campus in August.  We will answer all these questions here on Stories From The Road.  Each time we post an answer, we will announce the post in the “What Are Your Multi-Site Questions And Concerns” thread on our message board, connect.sojournchurch.com, as well as the Sojourn Twitter profile. You can also make sure you’re aware of new posts as soon as possible by subscribing to the TravelBlog RSS feed.

We realize that our answers to questions might bring new questions to mind.  So:

• At the end of this process we will hold an informational meeting for further discussion and clarification.
• Feel free to continue asking questions on our message board, including follow-up questions to blog responses.

We notice that a few questions are on many of your minds, so we will get to those first.  In this post we’ll tackle two of them, since one will only take a second:

Will St. Matthews utilize recorded sermons, filmed at The 930 campus and then shown on a big screen?

No.  We are blessed with several gifted teachers.  We’ll use a rotating schedule of teachers at both locations.  We won’t publish a teaching schedule in advance because we don’t want to build a “cult of personality” where people can pick and choose their choice of a service time or campus each week based on who will preach at a given location or time.

Okay, then why this talk of Sojourn “campuses?”  Why don’t we just plant another church?

Our decision between multi-site and church planting is not either/or.  It’s both/and.

Sojourn has raised up many church planters and we are actively planning to raise up many more.  This is in our church DNA; it’s reflected in our budget and in the amount of time we spend training planters, holding classes, accepting interns and mentoring future planters.  Former Sojourners are responsible for new and upcoming church plants everywhere from Ohio to Texas in the United States, along with communities in foreign countries. Locally, we are partnering with former Sojourn elder Todd Robertson as he plants Antioch Church in the south end of Louisville.  We have also trained six men as part of a church planter residency program over the last year.

We also support church plants through the Acts 29 church planting network, of which Pastor Daniel is the Director for the Southeast region of the United States.  We directly support The Oaks Community Church, a young plant in a struggling, blue collar city in Ohio.  We have planted three Louisville churches so far in our short existence, and we continue to work with our plant on the east end of Louisville, Crossing Community Church.

When we redesign sojournchurch.com later this summer we will create a webpage for our Church Planting Center, so this kind of activity is much more visible to all of you than it has ever been before.  Along with this, we will step up our efforts to train, equip, bless and send church planters in this city, country and the world – wherever the Spirit is calling.

On the other hand, we have thoroughly explored the multi-campus approach in the scriptures as well as in the experiences of sister churches who have pursued this model, like Mars Hill Church of Seattle and Summit Church of Durham, North Carolina.  We will not copy their models directly but their struggles and successes do inform us as we decide what this model should look like for us in Louisville.

More importantly, we have searched the Scriptures and prayed.  We searched the Scriptures  and prayed some more.  We researched, discussed as pastors, prayed some more, etc… Our main driving force was not practical wisdom.  This has been (and continues to be) a long, prayer-filled process.  This is where God is leading us as pastors.  We will soon publish a detailed paper that outlines the Biblical basis for a multi-campus approach so we won’t go into that extensively here.  As with all other blog posts in this series, we’ll let you know when we’ve published that paper.

Brothers and sisters, thanks in large part to the work of the Spirit in each and every one of you, the name “Sojourn” means something in Louisville.  Whether people are for us or against us, the name “Sojourn” stands for an unwavering commitment to the Bible, an uncompromising drive to work for the good of this city and the advancement of the coming Kingdom, a passion to celebrate and redeem the arts and culture, and a love for “the least of these.” (Matthew 25:40).  Because of this, many people want to be Sojourners – more people than can fit in one roof.

Unfortunately in these days, it’s hard to know what a person or a church mean by the term “Christian.” Besides the fact that current members of the Sojourn family live all over Louisville and Southern Indiana, we know that many more people in various parts of the region are “reachable” by Sojourn – a church that embodies the passions described in the paragraph above and that desires to contextualize the gospel in any neighborhood that it reaches.  This is a big reason to consider opening Sojourn campuses in different neighborhoods.  There will be no second-class Sojourn campus, and no “main campus.” People will know that when they step into a Sojourn campus, they are entering into the worship of a congregation that is Christian in the true, Biblical sense of the word.

We also know of many solid Christian churches in this city.  We’ll continue working with them, as we did in the recent Beauty For Ashes Conference – big and small churches, city and suburban churches, and churches of various ethnic and racial backgrounds.  We don’t want to put any of them “out of business.”  We believe that the rising tide of the gospel lifts all ships that are faithful to the proclamation of the gospel.  Just as we are the neighbor of our brothers and sisters in Immanuel Baptist down the road from The 930, we will work hard to be the neighbor of faithful churches near the St. Matthews campus.  These churches can reach some people that we can’t reach.  But Sojourn can reach people that they can’t and aren’t reaching, too.  The evidence of this is in how many people come to The 930 each week, and how fast we continue to grow – too much and too fast for The 930 building to contain everyone.

And this brings us to Question #3, “Why St. Matthews?” which we will answer later this week.  We ask, as always, that you pray for us.  Remember that the end goal is NOT to plant churches.  The end goal is NOT to launch new campuses.  The end goal is to see the gospel advance in Louisville and beyond.

The Sojourn Elders