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Welcome to The Portable Multisite Church Podcast! This is the show dedicated to helping church leaders with practical tips, helpful how-tos and inspirational stories from the front lines of some of more innovative churches in the church. We deliver fresh episodes every other Wednesday for leaders like you!
Stephen Trammell is a pastor and senior leader at Champion Forest Baptist Church. In this episode Stephen talks about what it was like for their church to launch a thriving multisite campus. Listen in for practical insights into what it’s like to lead within a multisite church!
Episode Highlights
00:30 // Rich welcomes Stephen to the show.
00:53 // Stephen tells us the history of Champion Forest Baptist Church.
02:31 // Stephen explain the meaning of a full service church and relates it to a ‘Super Walmart Experience’.
03:41 // Stephen talks about the reasons why Champion Forest Baptist Church decided to go multisite and establishing the North Campus.
05:15 // /Stephen talks about the location and the process of launching North Campus.
09:16 // Stephen talks about acquiring their third campus in Conroe Texas.
10:30 // Stephen talks about the volunteers at Champion Forest Baptist Church.
13:30 // Stephen talks about the Blue Crew.
15:33 // Rich and Stephen discuss the power of T-shirts.
16:48 // Stephen encourages other churches to go multisite and suggests steps to take.
20:05 // Rich offers some resources for mapping.
20:56 // Stephen shares some statistics relating to the growth of multisite.
Episode Transcript
Rich – Alright, well welcome to the Portable Multisite Church Podcast, my name’s Rich, the host around these parts. Super excited to have Pastor Stephen from Champion Forest Baptist Church in Houston Texas, always nice to talk to somebody from Texas, everything’s better in Texas. So glad to have you Stephen on the show today.
Stephen – It’s a delight to be here Rich and just praise God for you and your faithfulness.
Rich – Thank you so much. Why don’t you start by telling us, give us a sense of the flavor of Champion Forest? Tell us a little bit about your church and then your role there.
Stephen – Okay well Champion Forest Baptist Church was started about forty four years ago with a pastor and his family. He was here six years and our next pastor was here about twenty seven years and the church grew from three hundred to over three thousand. Then our senior pastor, David Flemming, came here seven and a half years ago and took us to the next level. We are a life group church, we are a full service church, we now run over six thousand on campus. We’re one church in three locations and four languages.
So now, we’re embracing diversity strategically and we’re just convinced that the best way to reach the community is to reflect the community. So we’re a very diverse church, committed to embracing our community.
Rich – That’s very cool, there’s a lot we could dig in there, that’s really amazing. Now when did you guys go multisite, when did you go from being one location to many? I’m assuming that’s been a part of your growth pattern over the last seven or so years.
Stephen – Well the unique thing is that this podcast is coming at a perfect time because this past Sunday we had our one year anniversary at our North Campus. So we’ve only been multisite one year.
Rich – Well congratulations, you survived, you made it, that’s fantastic. Now when you say full service, four languages, why don’t you tell us a little bit, what does that mean? Talk to me about how you’re doing kind of the multi-language thing, I think that’s an interesting thing. I know that’s a kind of sideline to what we’re talking about here today but I’d love to hear a little bit more about that.
Stephen – Well what I mean about full service is, if you came to Champion Forest Baptist Church, our main campus, our original campus, it’s fifty-five acres, our property and building’s about a hundred and ten million dollars, six hundred thousand square feet, we have multiple worship being used and as I said earlier, we are a life group church, so we built with life groups in mind. That just simply means on-campus bible studies, our commitment is to get families here, to get singles here, those who are single again, to get them on campus and while they’re here, we want them to experience a small group environment and a worship environment and full service meaning that every ministry that you can imagine, we have it.
Rich – Wow.
Stephen – From family life center to car care to divorce care to financial peace, every ministry you can imagine. Plus we’re a global, mission minded, local global missions and truly a full service church. So when you come here it is a ‘Super Walmart Experience’.
Rich – Wow that’s amazing. Now that must have been a big transition when you went multisite. How have you been able to transfer that idea to then this new campus that you launched just a year ago?
Stephen – Well you know, the theme we’ve used to really prepare our church family for multisite is, it’s time to extend our reach beyond the shadow of the steeple. Now we do local missions, we do global missions, we’re very intentional about that, but we thought about, what if we took church to the people and let’s extend the reach to get people connected to the church? So let’s take church to where the people are.
Really another thing that was really interesting in our preparation phase of this, is when you study Walmart Supercenters, there are three thousand, two hundred and seventy five Walmart’s in America. However, when you look at Walgreens and CBS combined, there are over fifteen thousand, eight hundred and seventy five.
So what that means is, for every one Walmart Supercenter there are five Walgreens or CBSs and so the concept is, what if we took our church to where the people are instead of expecting people, from so far away, to drive into the original campus, what if we took the Champion Forest DNA and experience and commitment to missions and evangelism and worship and discipleship and fellowship and excellence, what if we took that to where the people are?
So it’s kind of like the Walgreens, we’re going to birth a Walgreens north of here and so we established our North Campus one year ago.
Rich – Now tell us about the location you meet in and the North Campus, what’s that like?
Stephen – Well we are a portable church, which means every Sunday morning we set up for life group and worship and then teardown and then we vacate the premises. We are in, what’s called the Klein ISD Multipurpose Center. Our school district built a beautiful multimillion dollar complex for training and developing. It has a beautiful ballroom, where they have banquets, where we have rented out that space, we use the ballroom for our worship and then there’s beautiful rooms adjoining that area across the hall and that’s where we have our life groups.
Rich – Very cool. Now what was it like to try to transfer, you’ve got multiple acres, like you said, multiple millions of dollars, this incredible facility and then you’re trying to transfer some of the look and feel, the ministry to this other location? It sounds amazing, it sounds like a great location, but what was some of the lessons you learned as you tried to do that, in that new location?
Stephen – Well as we were preparing for it and we basically had a five month preparation stage, when we said, “Let’s launch a North Campus,” it was the Tuesday after Easter and then we launched on September 15th. So we literally had five months to prepare for a launch and there was a lot of work. In fact, when we dealt with Portable Church, they said for us to pull this off in five months, everything would have to fall right into place and it would really be a miracle to do it in such a short time frame. So that was one of the issues, was the logistics of can we pull this off.
Secondly, who will go, out of our, at that time five thousand all campus, who will go north? We were asking God to give us three hundred people, who would be willing to go north and God raised up three hundred people to go north and then this past Sunday we have five hundred and fifty two at our North Campus.
Rich – Fantastic, well let’s just pause a little bit on that because a critical piece of this is obviously finding volunteers and people to serve to go to a new location, what did that process look like for you guys? How did you actually go about asking people and then getting their commitments and then actually getting them plugged into the North Campus? Just give us a sense of what that experience was like.
Stephen – Well part of processing that vision and of course this starts with our senior pastor and then our executive team and processing that and then processing with our staff for buy-in and to help them see the big picture of going multisite, and we had to educate our team on the multisite strategy because it was new to us, we had not done it. It started there and then it went into the congregation, where we started just helping them dream about what if we went multisite? What if we launched a North Campus? We would have videos explaining the vision and the process and we would ask the question, “Is God calling you to go north?”
So that was just in worship and video form and personal connection with our church family. Then we had two meetings that anyone could come to that were just simply informational meetings about the North Campus, to enquire about, “What would it be like if my family made a commitment to go north? What would our lives look like? What would change? How would we stay connected to the main campus?”
So we worked through all of that and then we had an orientation, for those who were fully committed to go, we pulled them together to give them an orientation on here’s how we do multisite. Portable Church came in and had a training day, one week later Rich, we launched, we launched.
We did a soft launch and we did that for just a few weeks and then we had our public launch and we had it well-oiled and well-grooved and it was just a great experience, I was so thrilled to see how God worked through the launch of our North Campus.
Rich – That’s very cool, that’s exciting to hear. Are you guys thinking about more campuses down the road or is north it? Are you going to go east, west, south, what are you thinking?
Stephen – You know what, now that we’ve opened a door to multisite, we believe it is such a dynamic strategy, it’s got stewardship to reach people for Christ and we’re committed to continuing the process. What’s so amazing about this, once we said, “Yes Lord, we’re in,” and we prepared for launch and we launched, just a few months later God gave us another campus, north of our North Campus. So it’s the North, North Campus and it was primarily a Hispanic campus in Conroe Texas, which is about thirty minutes from our main campus. We actually acquired them and they’re now our third campus, so they are now us and now one church, as I said earlier, in three locations and four languages; English, Spanish, Portuguese and American Sign Language.
Rich – Nice, very cool. It’s always exciting to connect with churches where it seems like God’s on the move, He’s doing some incredible stuff and stepping in, that’s encouraging. Now a year into launch you’ve been portable, what have you learned about keeping volunteers engaged, fired-up, excited to be a part of the North Campus? Obviously people like being a part of the launch, but then a year out it’s a little different, what have you been learning?
Stephen – Well you know the beauty of a portable church is, number one: people that God raised up knew they were going to a portable church, they didn’t fully know what that meant but they knew this was going to be different, let’s stay flexible, we’re going to have to setup to have life group in church and teardown. So it created a culture of, ‘I’m here to serve’, so that was infused into the DNA of the launch. The beauty is that Champion Forest Baptist Church by nature is very service orientated, very others centered; ‘what can I do to benefit others’ so that DNA was very easy to infuse in our North Campus launch.
So as we’ve reached new people, when they come into that experience, it’s warm, it’s engaging, it’s inviting, it’s a happy place, it’s a happening place, because so many people are serving and fully engaged. So it has created a culture, where when you come to the North Campus, you know this is a serving church and we’re constantly asking, “If you would like to be on the Blue Crew, which is our setup and teardown team, if you’d like to be on the Blue Crew, if you want to be our first impressions, if you’d like to serve in worship care or in our life group ministry, there’s a place for you.” So we’re constantly reminding our people, “There are opportunities for you to serve.”
What really excites me about multisite, is what I have noticed, after twenty eight years of preaching, what I have noticed is, it raised up people to serve, in a church that’s established and everything’s ready to go when you walk in, don’t serve, it has brought people from the fringes and people who have not ever done anything to serve the local church, they would just slip in, get some good preaching and music and leave. It’s been amazing how many people have come from the stands, gotten onto the playing field and are serving. For me that’s probably been the most inspiring experience related to multisite.
Rich – Absolutely, do you have a sense of what percentage of the volunteers, at the North Campus, haven’t served before, is it like a third or is it two thirds? Is there a significant majority of those when you first started, hadn’t served with your guys before?
Stephen – I would say probably forty percent of our volunteers did not previously serve.
Rich – That’s amazing. When you think about that right, that’s an incredible fact that we see time and time again in multisite churches, it really is one of the best ways to engage new volunteers. You know and I know that a part of what we’re trying to do is create connecting experiences for people, where they feel like this just isn’t some place they go to, it’s their church. So multisite can be that, or a lot of times we see that pattern time and time again. That’s fantastic, so encouraging.
So changing gears a little bit, when you go to the North Campus, this is kind of a technical question, are there any pieces of gear or anything that you’re like, “Hey that’s kind of cool, I like how that sets up,” or looks pretty great, that kind of thing?
Stephen – Well you know, for me, my favorite part is the stage and lighting truss because I serve on the Blue Crew every Sunday.
Rich – Nice.
Stephen – We have a red team and a green team, so they alternate every other Sunday but our staff, who are serving at the North Campus, we all serve on the Blue Crew every Sunday. We have Blue Crew shirts, we are right in there at 6:00 am every Sunday morning when the trailer’s back in. We’re there to set the example and to set the pace for serving. For me it’s the stage and lighting truss, I’m on that team to help set it up and it’s just so fascinating to go into a ballroom Rich, that is just a ballroom; carpet and some neat little chandelier looking things and you transform that ballroom into a worship space. It’s a dynamic, cutting edge worship space, with state of the art sound, lighting and video, creating a very warm and intimate environment. For me, every time I’m in the worship space on Sunday mornings and knowing what it looked like at 6:00 am and what it turned into, for me it’s just so inspiring to know that you can leverage technology for God’s glory.
Rich – Absolutely, you know it’s encouraging. So you’ve mentioned the Blue Crew a couple of times, why is it called Blue Crew and is that just the setup team, how does that work?
Stephen – Well the Blue Crew, that’s a name that our pastor of pastoral care counselling, here at our main campus, he is over hospitality and setup and teardown at our North Campus, Louis Mirori and he and his wife Michelle have the gift of hospitality and so it was his vision to call it Blue Crew. He created these amazing blue shirts with (unclear 00:15:08), the writing on it says ‘Blue Crew Champion Forest Baptist Church’, and it was Louis’ idea and vision to establish this concept of Blue Crew and it’s ‘Blue Crew, what can we do for you?’
Rich – Nice, that’s cool.
Stephen – So they’re just setup and teardown and the hospitality team is separate, so it’s just for setup and teardown.
Rich – Very cool, that’s fantastic. You know, never underestimate the power of a good T-shirt, it’s amazing how much we’ve seen that in multiple interview, where people say, “You know, our setup guys, they’ve got these great T-shirts,” so definitely one of those tips you want to take and run with. I know it sound ridiculous but it’s true, it’s amazing what people will do for a great T-shirt.
Stephen – It’s a unifying factor.
Rich – It’s true, well it’s a uniform right? Exactly, you put that on and when you show up at 6:00 am you’re like, “Okay there’s some other crazy people that are here at 6:00 am ready to make this happen today.”
Stephen – We often say that, quoting John Maxwell; ‘teamwork makes the dream work’ and part of team is the T-shirts, it just really pulls us together and they’re so bright and if you stop and get coffee on the way or get to a donut shop or have to stop at Walmart on your way into church to setup, they know because something’s different about that person, that shirt is so bright, it’s illuminating the whole area and they ask, “What is Blue Crew?” and you get to tell them about the North Campus experience.
Rich – Very cool. Now what would you say to another church, that’s maybe on the brink of going multisite, they’re like where you were, they’ve got an established church, a lot of property and they’re thinking, “Maybe God’s leading us into this,” what would you say to a church like that?
Stephen – I would say go for it. I think it is one of the most efficient, effective strategies to fulfil the great commission. The beauty is, if your church is healthy, then you want to duplicate that, you want to reproduce that. Think about your healthy church environment, where your original campus is, what if you could take that experience to where people are, take it closer to their homes?
So if you could just infuse your DNA into another segment of your community, I would say step one is you need to do a geomap of your membership, you can do a very cheap one online, or you can pay for an expensive one. Nowadays you input the names and addresses of your members to see where they live in relation to your original campus; it’s called geomapping. Then it gives you a grid of where the people live. Then you want to go about a ten to fifteen minute drive from that original campus and look at pockets of where your current membership lives, because you don’t want to go too far beyond that circle, because then it’s hard to duplicate DNA.
So you want to be able to ask people who live in that region, or that area, in a ten to fifteen or twenty minute drive from the original campus, “Would you be willing to help us launch a new campus near you?” That’s kind of been in our marketing for our North Campus, here’s the phrase, ‘There’s a new campus near you’. Champion Forest Baptist Church, where people know about Champion Forest Baptist Church, they just didn’t know there was a new Champion Forest Baptist Church campus near them, they thought it was the one that they had to drive way into to get to.
So I would say to a church who’s contemplating, considering or even feeling led of God to go multisite, do that geomapping, it’s very important to see where your membership lives and then ask God to show you where you ought to launch that first site.
Step two: call Portable Church. It’s been so funny Rich, I have a new vision vocabulary that I didn’t have a year ago, related to multisite and that is when I meet other multisite pastors, guess what my first question is.
Rich – What’s that?
Stephen – How many trailers do you have? It’s so funny because I’ll meet multisite pastors who’ll say, “Oh we’re a three trailer church,” or “Look we’re just one trailer church,” or “Look we’re a six trailer church,” and it’s so much fun because I know what they mean by that.
So I would say to a person do geomapping, number two: connect with Portable Church and number three: explore the land, what’s available out there? Is there a school building, is there a vacant building? Where can we do churches, is there a theatre?
I also would read every book you can read on multisite and I have all of them, I’ve read all of them and I listen to podcasts on multisite, I still listen to podcast on multisite. There’s so many resources available to us, related to multisite.
Rich – Absolutely, fantastic. So how many trailers is your campus? That’s a good question.
Stephen – We are a six trailer church.
Rich – Gosh that’s a lot of trailers. That’s fantastic. A couple of tools on the mapping, there’s a free one out there called mapalist.com for listeners that are looking for that, it’s super straightforward to do, I’ve used it a bunch of times, it’s really easy to dump in a spreadsheet. Google actually, about a year ago, maybe six months ago, they released a Google Maps API, it’s five dollars a month to import as much data as you want, it’s really super straightforward.
We’ll have links in the show notes to those resources because that really is a great place to start and it’s eye opening. I think a lot of times church leaders will be like, “Oh we should launch a campus way over there,” and then when you actually dump your data in, you’re like, “Oh we have three people that live way over there, I know all three of them but there’s not anybody else that lives there.” So that is really a great start.
Well Stephen I really appreciate you being on the show today, is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners before we say goodbye?
Stephen – Let me give you some stats, I’ve just pulled these out. We had our staff retreat last week and I did a breakout session on multisite and this was very informative for those who are thinking, “You know what, we may want to consider going multisite.” I think these stats are just incredible and I want to share them with you real quickly and then I think we’ll inform the listeners and the viewers. Now let me pull that up, there are just so many wonderful resources related to multisite that will be beneficial, let me share those with you.
This was really for me, pretty insightful. In 1990 there were ten multisite churches in the United States. In 2005 there were more than fifteen hundred multisite churches. In 2014 there are now more than eight thousand multisite churches and the reality is multisite is not a new concept, when you read the Book of Acts, it’s multisite first.
So what I would say to the viewers and the listeners, is continue to walk closely with the Lord and in your daily intimacy with the Lord, God will show you what’s next. He will show you how to stand your reach or show you how to expand the vision of your current reality and God will raise up people within the church membership, who will have the same heart and same calling to go multisite. Not everyone will go with you, you don’t want everyone to go with you. The goal is to have a core group of people who will go with you and then focus on reaching new people for Christ.
So out of your daily intimacy with God, this multisite concept will grow and develop and God will give you vision. God will bring people into your life who will speak into your life as you read and read and read about multisite. God will confirm and affirm direction. But here’s the key, the senior pastor has to be fully onboard and fully committed to going multisite.
Rich – So true. Well I really appreciate this today pastor Stephen, thank you so much for your time. If people want to get in touch with your church or with you, how can they do that?
Stephen – It’s simply, championforest.org.
Rich – Great.
Stephen – championforest.org and you can locate me on my website as well, just championforest.org. Rich thank you for your ministry and thank you for educating us and growing us and stretching us and exposing us to such wonderful content and material and I appreciate your obedience to the Lord.
Rich – Thank you so much, have a great day.
Stephen – Thank you, God bless.
