This morning I got up early to drive into Atlanta and visit Buckhead Church. Since being involved in multi-site churches, I’ve never experienced a video campus larger than 1000 people. So, I wanted to experience Buckhead Church, a multi-site video mega-church. I was hoping to see a video teaching experience in this large church setting as well as experience Kid Stuf, the family worship experience that North Point is known for.

Buckhead is amazing. If your ever in Atlanta, you’ll want to spend some time in Buckhead. It’s an amazing community/city. It’s a little north of downtown Atlanta, but it’s where all the good shopping and restaurants are. I’ve been told that it’s becoming a business/financial powerhouse. As you drive around the neighborhoods you’ll see that this is a very, VERY high dollar community. Well, the church is right in the middle of it all. All around the church are high rises, shopping centers and busy city life. The church uses several private parking lots and the police and host teams are out in force directing traffic. I was a little unsure how I would find where to go, but they made is very easy.

The church almost feels more like a really nice, big-city hotel. It’s beautiful. You come in and begin going up a couple of escalators to get to the main floor. The lobby is big and inviting and the auditorium is HUGE (I’m guessing that it seats 2500-3000). All the elements from pre-service video, introduction, worship and baptisms were incredibly smooth… they were working it. Then came the disappointment that wasn’t that much of a disappointment. I came to Buckhead to experience this video campus, but Andy Stanley was teaching live. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad to get to hear him live… but I wanted to see him on video (most campus pastors at video campuses would cry with joy to hear their attendees say that). I thoroughly enjoyed. Andy preached the absolute best sermon I’ve ever heard on faith. Hands down amazing. I’m sure you can get it off iTunes as some point. It’s the second message in the “Faith, Hope and Luck” message series.

After the service I attended Kid Stuf. I just had to see this family ministry stuff. I loved it. I laughed so hard, they did such a great job. The room was incredible. I can see how some would come in, see it and be discouraged, thinking there was no way they could pull that off. What comforts me is that Reggie talks about doing Kid Stuf in a school cafeteria when they were first getting started. Now that reThink publishes family ministry curriculum, you really just have to recruit and equip your teams.

So, Buckhead was great. So glad I got to see it. Now I’m really pumped for Orange to begin. I’ll be updating the blog throughout the conference. Oh, and if you’re at Orange, look me up… I’d love to meet you!

Okay, here is my favorite web app of all time right now. It it literally changing the way I prepare for church and even has some great application for personally use. The program is called Folder Share and it free. I think it used to be called file taxi or something, but Microsoft bought them out and they seem to be running the show (don’t let that scare you off yet, the application is really cool).

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  Sorry, I still have multi-site on the brain. I was thinking about my last two posts all weekend and felt that I needed to emphasize the last few sentences of my most recent post. This was the thing that I found so beautiful and so powerful about multi-site kids ministry. Continue reading »

Okay, my last post was getting too long and I hadn’t even gotten to my honest evaluation. So, I decided to add a separate post of my evaluation. I’ve been intimately involved in a multi-site church for about 18 months on various levels of leadership. In addition, our style of multi-site leadership has changed over the past 18 months. So, this evaluation is simply my honest opinion based on my experiences. Continue reading »

My new friend Dawn shot me an email asking me about what my church (being multi-site) is like. If you are closely involved in the multi-site movement, you would know that every one is differnt… kind of like snowflakes. My snowflake is Cross Timbers Community Church and it’s been a very cool ride for me, not without a few bumps along the way. I can say with complete confidence is that we are differnt from a lot of other multi-sites, but even more so, we’ve been evolving since this trip started. Let me explain my journey… Continue reading »