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The Story of 167 Year Old Church That Goes Multisite!
October 15, 2014

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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!

Today we have a 167 year old church that has shown new signs of life as it’s gone multisite! Listen in as Jason Swiggart from Houston’s First Baptist Church as he tells the story of why and how they got into being a portable multisite church. This episode is perfect for churches considering going multisite … regardless of how old your church is!

Episode Highlights

00:52 // Rich welcome Jason to the show.

01:09 // Jason talks about Houston’s First Baptist Church.

02:12 // Jason talks about Houston’s First Baptist Church in the 1980s and Gregg Matte’s vision for the church.

03:25 // Jason talks about Mission 1:8.

04:39 // Jason talks about the beginnings of the Cypress campus, the programs and the aspects of being portable.

08:15 // Jason talks about the volunteer structure on Sundays.

09:35 // Rich summarizes it takes about 2 hours for the campus to setup.

10:34 // Jason shares how he encourages volunteers and gives an example.

12:06 // Rich talks about why he thinks some churches miss out on a particular segment of volunteers.

12:55 // Jason agreed with Rich and offers an example.

14:19 // Jason talks about PCI and some of the equipment.

15:28 // Jason offers advice to church leaders thinking of going multisite.

Episode Transcript

Rich – Alright well welcome to the Portable Multisite Church podcast, my name’s Rich Birch the host around these parts.  Super excited to have Jason Swiggart today from Houston’s First Baptist Church.  A great church, 167 years old.  I think this, of all the multisite churches we talked to, I think this is the oldest church we’ve talked to, so I’m looking forward to diving in and hearing a bit of their story.  Jason welcome to the show.

Jason – Thanks man, it’s great to be here.

Rich – I’m so glad to have you today.  Why don’t we start with, tell us a little bit about your church and then a little bit about your role and how you connect to this whole deal.

Jason – Okay.  We are part of Houston’s First Baptist Church.  It’s a 167 plus year old church like you said.  So a little unique in this whole multisite thing because we’ve got this long heritage in DNA that is part of who we are.  We are four sites, we had two until Easter 2013 and then we launched two more including Cypress campus which is where I am.  Cypress is a suburb about 25 miles from Northwest downtown Houston, so that’s where we are.

Rich – Houston’s real spread out.

Jason – Very spread out.

Rich – For people that haven’t been there, it feels like it goes on for days, so that obviously bodes well for a multisite church because there’s a lot of communities that you could draw into.  Why don’t you give us a bit of the flavor of Houston’s First, tell us, for people who don’t know the church, give us a sense of what your church is like?

Jason – Well I think when people think Baptist, they think tradition, white pews, brass chandeliers and red carpet.  So First Baptist is unique because back in about 1980 our pastor then had this incredible vision of moving out to the suburb and relocated the downtown church that had been there a little over 130 years.  It’s always been pretty innovative in that sense.

So about ten years ago, actually ten years ago this week, we had a new pastor come on board, his name is Gregg Matte and he lead a college ministry at Texas A&M, a really big college ministry.  He came, kind of with whole new fresh eyes, a whole new set of ideas of what the church could be.  So we’ve kind of seen this resurgence of First Baptist in our community and in the city.  We started a campus downtown, back downtown literally on the same soil that we came from back in 1980, in the basement of a high-rise office building.  So First Baptist is kind of again, not your typical First Baptist church.  It’s always kind of been out there as far as being innovative and getting these things, including multisite.

So two and a half years ago, Pastor Gregg and our leadership at that time, I was on the leadership team, I have been on staff for about 19 years in several different roles, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to reach our city, not build a kingdom but do something for the kingdom.  So we looked at planting churches in Houston, in the nation and in the world.  So this is part of a bigger mission called Mission 1:8.  So the two of them in the city are multisite campuses.  We meet in a school, all different ones in a basement.  One’s in a school, one’s a megachurch, our Loop campus and then Sienna Plantation is in an office building, it was a merger.  So literally all very different.

Rich – That’s really cool.  What a varied experience and lots of different flavors to what’s happening in your ministry there.  That’s cool.

So when you guys were stepping out, I would imagine the kind of megachurches where you launched from, there were probably some surprises when you stepped out to go portable.  What were some of those surprises, some of that stuff that kind of popped up?

Jason – You know what Rich, I was part of the strategy of multisite but I never dreamed that I was going to be the one doing it.

Rich – Somebody else is going to have to do all this!

Jason – We identified a site, as far as living in Cypress and then one day our pastor came, actually he text me and said, “Can you come and talk to me?”  He said, “I think you’re they guy.”  So my family, I have three boys, my wife who prayed about it, decided that’s what we’re going to do.  So we didn’t know exactly what we were jumping into.  We met the PCI guys, they had already come onboard, there had been some planting going on.  So really, really gung-ho.

So probably the biggest surprise is, what I thought would be transferrable, is not necessarily transferrable in our context of being portable.  So we really tried to, the callback to being simple, in a lot of ways.  So we have again megachurch, we’ve got programs upon programs for everybody.  So how do we break that down to be who we are in Cypress, in a school setting?  We do have a ministry center, we have about a 93 hundred square feet office in an industry center, a strip center.

Rich – Oh that’s cool.

Jason – So we have weekday programming for women, children, youths, 18 and under men, all that kind of stuff that happens all week long, so it really gives us a sense of being a church in the community, not just a venue on Sundays.  So probably that’s one of the things, the transportability, for lack of a better word, of what happens at the Loop and then also just literally the grueling nature of the job.  It’s not just the pastoral role of Sunday and the people and the emotion and that, it is the physical aspect of six 23ft trailers and 1 hundred volunteers and that kind of thing.

Rich – Alright so there’s a lot to dig in there.  What were some of those things that you didn’t transfer over or haven’t transferred to your portable campuses or specifically to your campus, that were maybe a bit of a surprise.  Like, “Ah I’m kind of surprised we’re not doing that here.”  What were a couple of those and why didn’t they kind of transfer in?

Jason – I think one of them is, we’re video driven.  So our pastor’s on a screen 80% of the time.  I preach live 20% of the time.

Rich – Okay cool.

Jason – So I think some of that transferability was what happens in a service.  So they might do something during worship that includes a video, with live music interacting, that kind of thing and that just didn’t work out here in a cafeteria with a band and a stage.  So it’s those kinds of things we really had to think back on.

Part of our DNA is that we have, it’s called Life Bible Study or people call it Sunday School but we’re kind of hip, so we call it Bible Study.

Rich – It can’t be just Sunday School, it’s got to be hipper than that.

Jason – For all ages, so on Sunday morning we have adult groups that we meet with.  So some of the concepts there, most of the principles are the same but it has to look a little different on Sunday mornings with pipe and drape and that kind of thing.

Rich – Okay very cool.

Jason – Programming, some of those things, again we had to drop off because of being simple and it’s more of that aspect at this point.

Rich – Alright, well I’m sure there’s some people that were listening when you just rolled past that, ‘six trailers, 23ft…’ they just about fell off their chair.  That’s a lot of gear to move in and out on a Sunday or on a weekend.  Why don’t you tell us what your volunteer structure looks like, from that kind of setup/teardown point, how are you doing that, what does that look like?

Jason – Oh man.  We have a team of about eleven men that have really big trucks.  We’re in Texas, so a lot of people have trucks.

Rich – Big trucks.

Jason – So at five o’clock they show up at a storage unit and pick up our trailers.  Sometimes they have flats, so they chain their flats in the dark.  They drive about four miles over to the school where we meet and then at six o’clock we have a team of about thirty people at meet.  They are unbelievable, the most gifted OCD guys in the world.  Everything is so perfectly organized and created.  All these black rolling boxes come out and literally we walk into an empty school on Sunday mornings, from a piece of paper to a jug of water to a truss, everything comes out.

Rich – Amazing.

Jason – We have our team broken up, kind of in areas, there’s about five different sub-teams.  The people that lead our two main teams, the teardown and setup, they are not on our staff, they are all volunteers, they have a gift of shepherding, they keep up the guys and the ladies on their team, they encourage them and that kind of stuff.  So we get it all setup by eight o’clock and then the band rehearses.  Then we have, Live Bible starts at 9:30 and then Worship at 11:00.

Rich – Wow, so that’s amazing.  So you’re starting, just to go over that again, around six, so you’re around two hour of setup, two and a bit right?

Jason – Yeah.

Rich – From the moment you arrive to when, more or less you can start turning it over to your various ministries.  That’s incredible, that’s impressive.

Jason – We finish really probably a little bit before that but it’s just kind of the finishing details.  I’m pretty OCD too, so we’re going around and making sure everything’s right.

Rich – Right, there’s no doubt, I think a number of the team members at PCI have honed their OCD and are using it for good rather than for evil.  That’s amazing.  So what do you do to keep those volunteers encouraged?  You guys have been launched for quite a while now and I can imagine, getting people to show up for the first weekend is easy, because people love launches.  But how do you get them to keep coming back time and time, middle of the summertime when it’s a cajillion degrees in Houston and the middle of the wintertime when it’s cold, how are you doing that?

Jason – You know, even when enlisting, we just kind of pray, it sounds super spiritual, but we just pray that people were so excited and they kind of came on board.  We’ve really lost very few of those volunteers and we’ve picked up volunteers on the way.  So tons of encouragement, we do a big volunteer kind of appreciation thing, we’ve done that for them, we’re planning that now actually again.  This sounds silly too, but they get a t-shirt that says, ‘Cypress Roadies’ but really the biggest thing that keeps them coming I think, is the camaraderie they feel and the impact they feel of what they’re doing.

Rich – Right.

Jason – I have a guy that came from the Loop, he told me one day he had no intention really of coming to Cypress.  He came to an info meeting and then he decided to check it out and all of a sudden he’s on a setup team.  He’s in charge of setting up our left gym which is our preschool.  So literally we setup about eight pods with all kinds of stuff, as you can imagine and he told me one day he said, “You know what, when I sat at the Loop, the main campus and someone was baptized, I thought that’s great, someone’s being baptized.  Now when a child gets baptized, baptized in a trough at Cypress campus, I feel like I had something to do with that kid getting baptized, the impact from setting up.”

So I think it’s that sense of ownership and that community and sense of impact that keeps them busy and keeps them involved.

Rich – Absolutely, I think one of the things I’ve learned about being portable is, I think there’s particularly a group of guys who, they are disengaged in our churches, they have a hard time finding a place to plugin.  But when you’re multisite and you’re portable, all of a sudden these guys get an amazing role and it’s mission critical.  Some of us will freak out when you say, “Oh my goodness, we’ve got to set up six trailers of stuff every Sunday morning and we’ve got to do it in less than two hours or two hours and a bit,” we’d freak out.  But those guys, they rise to the challenge and they’re like, “Man I’m looking forward to that, I’m going to jump onboard.”

I think a lot of churches are actually missing an opportunity there, to reach particularly a segment of guys on that front.  Have you found a similar kind of thing?  Like some of those guys you’re like, “I’m not sure where they plugin.”

Jason – You’re spot on man.  That’s exactly what we found.  Our team leader for our setup team, I’ve known him for years from our main campus, our Loop campus.  He was basically an attender and to see him come alive, he’s a gift of helps kind of guy.  So to watch him do that is unbelievable.  These guys are so excited when something breaks, they’re going down to get the cable to get it fixed, they’re all about making sure it happens.

We do a BBQ kind of thing and a cleanup day we call, Shake, Rattle and Roll, each semester where we take out everything and clean it.  They get all fired up about that too.

Rich – Very cool.

Jason – In fact one thing we’re concerned about is moving into a building, we’re in a building process right now, is what happens to this group of people.  We don’t want to lose them to going back to just being attenders.  What is it that they can do with their hands and they can feel committed and be a part of?  So that’s one of our concerns.

Rich – Absolutely, I’ve seen that experience, that’s really cool to hear.  Okay so a bit of a different question, out of all those six trailers, there’s a lot of gear.  That’s probably thousands of pieces but is there any one of them that kinds of sticks out that you’re kind of like, “That’s kind of a cool thing,” or maybe when you first saw it you were like, “Wow that’s really neat, I had never thought of that before.”

Jason – So much of it because I remember when PCI came and we had a loading day and they taught us how to set everything up.  All these black cases, they all look the same coming out and then you open them up and it was like Christmas, it was amazing.  So probably one of the things, this sounds silly but one of the things that’s so cool is how creative they are.  You open one of these cases in an infant area and there’s a changing table that pops up.  So that’s a pretty fun thing and how some of the AV and the flat screens, the way they use those on the boxes as well.  It’s a lot of stuff but it’s all pretty cool.  Everybody who comes on, we enlist new people all the time, they can’t believe how it works and it’s like Christmas for them too.

Rich – Nice.  Alright so what would you say to a church leader who’s kind of just on the brink of going multisite, they’re thinking about it, what would you say to them?  They might be in your role, where they were thinking they were part of the central leadership team and now they find themselves, “Oh gosh, now I’ve got to be the person who’s actually got to do this thing.”  What would you say to that person?

Jason – Get ready for the ride of your life.  Me personally I think, I feel like this is what I was created to do, to be in a situation where I get to use my skills as a campus pastor and particularly of loving and shepherding people.  But the energy is grueling and I think that’s the biggest surprise.  So just hang on for the long haul, don’t get caught up in numbers, get caught up in the people and loving the people and seeing God do incredible things through that, through the situation.

Rich – Well Jason we’ve really appreciated you being on the show today.  Is there anything else you’d love to share with our listeners before we wrap up?

Jason – You know, it’s just been an awesome experience and with PCI they’re a great group, in fact they’re coming to our Shake, Rattle and Roll in November where we’ve got somebody to check with them.  So it’s a great thing, a great plug for them.  Multisite is a great thing and I think God’s really, really using it so I’m glad to be a part of it.

Rich – Cool.  If people want to get in touch with you or Houston’s First, they want to contact your church how can they do that?

Jason – Probably the website is the easiest.  It’s www.houstonsfirst.org and you can go to locations and go to Cypress and you can find me, it’s all over the website, it’s pretty navigable.

Rich – Great, well thanks so much, I appreciate you being on the show today.

Jason – Yeah you bet.  Thank you Rich.