Be relevant in this generation to connect students to Christ, teach them to imitate Christ and influence the world. Church @ The Springs is committed to provide a students ministry at each campus regardless of geographic location, facility limitations, or number of attenders.
We are one student ministry, multiple locations. We want to see students begin a relationship with Jesus in order to imitate Christ and influence the world. The cultural landscape of students is always changing. We want to see a generation become lifelong Christ-followers. The millennial generation is one of the largest in history. They constitute 34% of the American population. 77% of people who come to know Jesus usually make that decision by the time they are 18 years old.
4 Words that shape my multisite student ministry:
1) Centrally Supported
The Student Ministry model should be sustainable, scaleable and reproducible that impacts each community we plant a campus. The most effective way to build a sustainable student ministry model at Church @ The Springs is centrally led and centrally supported.
Centrally led helps ensure quality teaching, consistency and excellence at each location. Central support helps free up the campus leaders to invest in people. We have a central team that provides the direction, training, and resources for all the campus. Central provides – the vision and direction of the ministry (including content), training for leaders, and resources they need to do ministry (messages, small group questions, graphics, videos, blurbs, etc...). We ask our campus leaders to do the following – Invest in leaders, love on students, and minister to the community.
- Training events are centralized to bring leaders together. We do this in order to encourage each other, build unity and vision.
- Yearly Leader Retreat provides a time to get away as a team and encourage one another.
2) Sustainable
Can we be effective with our staff and volunteers for long-term? Instead of multiple leaders writing messages, we have 1. It is easier to create a structure this way that can translate to other campuses. The key to success is to have team players who are unified. The student ministry is volunteer driven. Without leaders to help, we wouldn't be able to make multisite student ministry happen.
Contextualize:
With different sizes of the campuses it leads to trying to figure out how to contextualize it. At our Ocala campus, we have a main worship environment with 150-200 students. At our two other campuses, they weekend attendance fluctuates from 200-400 total people. The students at these campuses are considerably smaller. So we are moving students into homes on Wednesdays at the newer, smaller campuses. This way, we can funnel in our teaching video through vimeo. We will be learning the same teaching together at the same time. The exciting part is the "United" nights will bring all the students together for worship from all campuses each month!
3) Reproducible
We want to reproduce our core strategy of leading students to imitate Christ and influence the world. Here are the reasons we have student ministry mid-week on Wednesday nights.
- It helps students have time to serve fully on the weekends in all areas.
- It helps build a family night atmosphere on Wednesday nights.
- If it doesn't make sense for three campuses, then simplify to be reproducible.
- It helps build momentum to have a singular focus each week on student ministry.
4) Unified
Can we provide an effective student ministry across campuses how we are currently leading it? How do we encourage students across campuses to know that we are one church, many locations?
"Source United" Nights every 4-5 weeks.
- Build energy with all of the 6-12th grade students together from 3 campuses!
- Build excitement in the students from all campuses.
- Students from newer campuses will receive the DNA and passion of the original campus.
- Big push for students to invest and invite their friends to church.
- Create the greatest “after-parties” to help students build relationships.
What are your thoughts on multisite?
If you are possibly becoming multisite in the future or you are currently, please share in the comments below!