Technology and Multi-Site—The View from Pinelake Church

The following is a guest post from Jeff Redding, executive pastor of ministries at Pinelake Church. With multiple campuses across the state of Mississippi, Pinelake has grown from a church plant that began meeting in a mobile chapel in 1971 to a growing, healthy church that reaches over 9,000 people every Sunday. Today, Jeff shares how Church Community Builder has supported Pinelake’s multi-site strategy and helped them become more effective in reaching their communities.

Like many of today’s multi-site churches, Pinelake Church decided to become a church of multiple campuses largely in order to allow people driving over an hour to church on Sunday to become a local body rather than a traveling body. As we’ve worked to strategically launch campuses in places where people were already hungry to see God move in their community, Church Community Builder has afforded us the opportunity to avoid some of the challenges of launching a new campus by helping us equip lay leaders and volunteers to lead rather than having to hire full-time staff positions. Because of this, we’ve learned through firsthand experience that the local body becomes more evangelistic, serves more, and owns more ministry as they are given more opportunity.

Here are three ways Church Community Builder specifically has empowered our campus leaders and helped us become more effective in reaching communities:

1. It develops consistency among campuses.

As the leader for a multi-site model, I am able to look at measurements across campuses in real time to get a high-level analysis of the effectiveness of the ministries at any given campus. Numbers don’t drive us, but they do give us an indication of movement in many areas. With Church Community Builder, I am able to see the number of people engaging in group life, giving, serving, membership next steps, and baptism. This gives us a great indication of how we should pray as well as adjust at each campus.

Technology provides me with a better picture of the reality my campus pastors live in every day and enables me to lead them more effectively. We’re not having conversations about what we feel or think. Instead, we are talking about the reality before us.

2. It creates a process for guaranteeing effieciency in shepherding across our campuses.

As God’s Word has called each of us to shepherd our members, Church Community Builder has helped us track our efficiency in shepherding each local campus as a whole. As we see God move attenders toward membership and into covenant with Himself and this local body, our campus leaders are able to see in real time how those who have taken steps toward membership are proceeding in moving from members to disciples.

Our goal is not membership, but discipleship. As we shepherd people toward the next steps of becoming a disciple, Church Community Builder has helped us look at a large body of people and get personal at the local level within each of our campuses.

3. It allows each campus to effectively equip the saints to do the work of the ministry.

In the past three years, our campuses have made great strides in empowering local lay leaders to embrace the call to lead as God has gifted. Our small group leaders are not dependent upon staff to track, communicate, or shepherd their groups, because Church Community Builder has given each small group leader a very efficient communication and leadership tool for their group. They plan, communicate, keep a calendar, and do most everything a leader needs to do beyond leading the group, all from Church Community Builder. Our prayer teams are able to do the same thing, as are family ministry teams on every level.

1. 1. Ephesians 4:12 is a call our church takes seriously, and "...Church Community Builder has given each small group leader a very efficient communication and leadership tool for their group." Church Community Builder has been one of those tools that has made a tremendous difference in our ability to equip the saints to do the work. I could tell you several more areas and ways Church Community Builder has impacted us as a multi-site church. I could talk about the overall calendaring at the group and ministry level and the benefit of taking that public for everyone to see what’s happening at their campus. I could talk about the integration into our current website for ease of use. However, as any good pastor, I felt I should keep this to three points. (Sorry they didn’t start with the same letter and rhyme.)

   2. Multi-site Pastors: What would you add to Jeff’s list?

There's always a next step:

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