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Northridge Church, 125 years old, and still launching new campuses!
December 24, 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!

Nate Miller is a part of the leadership team at Northridge Church in Rochester, New York. In this interview, Nate talks about the lessons they’ve learned from launching campuses as a 125 year old church. He gives some great insights into what it’s really like living within a portable multisite church. Tune in for some inspiration and help!

Episode Highlights

00:25 // Rich introduces Nate and welcomes him to the show.

00:44 // Nate tells us the history of Northridge Church.

02:14 // Nate talks about their original location and the reasons behind going portable.

03:15 // Nate talks about the volunteers.

04:36 // Rich highlights the opportunities available to guys within a portable church.

05:24 // Nate talks about how they replicate look and feel across all locations.

07:03 // Nate talks about how rotating staff between campuses helps maintain consistency throughout.

08:00 // Nate tells us how the church ensures that the volunteers continue to receive a great experience.

09:55 // Nate talks about his favorite piece of equipment from Portable Church.

11:29 // Nate offers advice to church leaders considering going multisite.

13:09 // Nate offers contact information.

Episode Transcript

Rich – Well hey everybody, welcome to the Portable Multisite Church podcast. This is the podcast for church leaders who are looking to go portable or maybe already are with their multisite campuses and today we’re super privileged to have Nat Miller with us. He’s from Northridge a church in Rochester, New York. I’m so glad you’re with us today Nate.

Nate – Yeah glad to be here Rich, thanks for having me on.

Rich – It’s going to be fantastic, I’m really glad you’ve taken some time out. Why don’t we start with you telling us a little bit of the Northridge story?

Nate – Yeah sure. So our church is actually pretty old. We recently, just this last year, celebrated our 125th anniversary as a church and over the last like 12 to 14 years we’ve seen some pretty cool growth at our church. So about 12 or 14 years ago we were running about 275, one campus. Since our Lead Pastor David Whiting has come to our church we’ve seen some pretty incredible growth since then. So right now we’re running over 16 hundred on the weekends, we have 3 campuses right now and I’ve been in Northridge probably, I think it’s going on about 8 years, but I’ve actually been on staff a little over 3 years.

So I came on and kind of really took the reins in terms of multisite at our church. I launched our first campus, which is in Greece on one side of the town. I did that for 2 years and then we were getting ready to launch our next site, so I transitioned out of there to go and launch our newest location.

Our first one was in a movie theater and the one that I just launched 2 months ago is in a middle school. So I’m the campus pastor there over at our newest site over in Webster, York.

Rich – Nice, well this is great, we’re getting a great front row seat with a church leader who’s seen a lot.

Nate – That’s right.

Rich – So I’m excited to dive in a little bit. Now when you guys went multisite, so you were obviously in one location, what’s your kind of original location like, give us a sense of what that looks like?

Nate – Our original location, it’s more in the city, it is just your standard brick church and we’ve actually done quite a bit to it to try to make it feel more modern.

Rich – Okay, yeah.

Nate – Probably about 4 or 5 years ago we added on a brand new auditorium and we turned our old sanctuary into our lobby area. So actually it looks pretty sweet. We really didn’t have a lobby before then, so it’s freed up a large space for people to gather out there and the new auditorium has been great, it’s given us a lot of space as well. We kind of went landlocked at that location, so we added the auditorium, we added as much parking as we could and that’s when we began to start looking at multisite as a great option, because we couldn’t add any more space on our site.

Rich – You had as much space as you could take. Now what was some of your biggest surprises when you decided, “Okay we’re going to go multisite,” what were some of those things that the church found were, “Okay that was a little different,” or just a surprise along the way?

Nate – There’s been a lot of surprises. I think the biggest one was probably just the way volunteers responded. I think one of the first things you think about when you make that decision to go from a permanent location to launching a portable is, “Man that sounds like a lot of work and who’s going to do that and are people going to be excited to do that and continue to do that?” I think the thing that surprised me is the way our volunteers have responded and have been excited to have been a part of setting up and tearing down every week.

We have families that have come together; mum and dad and the kids and they serve and they’re moving road cases together and they love it and they have a blast. It’s an opportunity for them to all serve together as a family.

Rich – Very cool.

Nate – There’s guys, countless guys too that were kind of on the sidelines beforehand, they just didn’t feel like they have any gifts or any real ways they could plug in and serve on Sundays. So a portable campus provides incredible opportunities for guys who feel like, “Man there’s nothing for me to do.” They can drive a truck, they can move road cases and setup and they love it and enjoy it.

So seeing their ownership, seeing the opportunities that it presents for volunteers to get plugged in and the way they’ve responded, you hope for that but to actually see that, to see the way our volunteers respond is pretty sweet.

Rich – Yeah that’s amazing. One of the things I love about being a portable church is that, particularly with guys, I think a lot of churches have a hard time reaching guys. This provides an opportunity for guys, who frankly, they’re not going to work with kids, they don’t want to hand out programs, they probably may not even want to be a small group leader, but what they do want to do, they love to get in, get their hands dirty and help, which is fantastic. I just think that’s a great thing and it’s a great way for them to build community and ultimately take steps in their relationship with Jesus.

Now how did you replicate your look and feel? So you’ve got this permanent building, you’ve just put on this new fantastic space and then you went multisite, you were in a movie theater, or you’re in a movie theater and then in middle school. That’s a lot of variety. How have you tried to replicate look and feel across those locations?

Nate – One of the things that we try to keep in mind, especially when we’re thinking about our portable sites and what we’re doing on Sunday mornings, is we really just try to think through, “Okay is this something we can replicate across all of our campuses, from our middle school to our permanent site to the movie theater?” We try to keep a simple mindset so when we look at what we’re doing, what we’re providing on Sunday mornings, we just try to say, “Okay, can we replicate it?” If not, “Okay let’s shift it around or let’s drop it and say no and pursue another idea.”

So when it comes to, all sorts of things, to kid’s environments or kid’s spaces, we try to keep that in mind, to creative elements that we do in the service. Whether it’s a band playing under a video or just a creative song, “Can all of our bands pull this off?”

So that question has really helped us navigate different things and things that have come up like, how do we consider this? Do we just go and run with it? Well let’s collaborate, let’s get together, let’s pull all of our campus pastors together and our teams and say, “Okay can we do this or can’t we?” If we can’t, usually we’ll go in another direction so that we can maintain that consistency.

Rich – Absolutely, I think that’s a key question for people as they’re heading off into their multisite journey, to ask that question. Really shift from being a church with campuses to a church of campuses and that’s critical in that process, to think, “Okay this isn’t just some appendage.” It’s not just like there’s this thing happening in the movie theater, it’s like, “No that’s our church, that’s how we do ministry.”

What about, was there anything that you did with maybe your staff, as you made that transition as well, to ensure consistency?

Nate – One of the things that we’ve implemented since we launched, we started this right after we launched our first site, is we have staff from our original campus that we rotate, probably about 4 times a year. They’ll come and they’ll visit the other sites and that’s really helped us big time. When I’m off at a site, to have other staff coming in regularly saying, “Does this look and feel like Northridge? Are we replicating our DNA? Is this the level of excellence that we expect across all of our campuses?”

So to have staff from our original campuses, about 4 times a year just rotate around, has been huge in helping us evaluate, make changes, make sure we’re consistent across all of our campuses so that, “Okay this looks and feels like Northridge church.”

Rich – Now what about on the people side, there’s obviously a lot of volunteers that make all of that happen. So what are you doing to kind of ensure a great, kind of compelling volunteer experience?

Nate – I think the biggest thing, one of the things we do most consistently is every Sunday we hold a volunteer huddle at our portable sites. We do it about 35 minutes before the service…

Rich – Is that everybody, all the volunteers?

Nate – Yeah.

Rich – Oh wow.

Nate – We pull them all together. So band, tech, kid’s ministry, setup people and it’s 5 minutes long. We usually meet out in the lobby near our café. We try not to take up all the lobby because occasionally there’s new guests that are coming in. So we try to find a nice quiet spot in our central location where people can find us and then there’s a chance for me to share stories on what God is doing at our campus, just celebrating all the ways in which we see God working. I’ll plug a volunteer that’s gone over and above and just celebrate them and what they’ve done to announcements.

Right now, at our portable sites, we have one campus where we have one service and so that’s tough, when you only have one service and you have volunteers who are serving in kid’s ministries. So if they’re missing the service I just try to keep them up to date as, “Hey, here’s what’s happening, here’s what’s coming,” so they’re not missing out. But really try to focus it on just pumping up our volunteers, celebrating what God is doing and that’s been great and that’s worked out really well.

Beyond that I’ll do the ‘thank you’ cards regularly, send a gift card to volunteers and then every summer we throw a party. At each campus we throw a party for our volunteers. Usually it’s outdoors, we have a bounce house, lawn games, cook some food and give them a gift and again just thank them for serving in a huge way at our church.

Rich – Nice, very cool. Alright so changing direction a little bit, I know as a leader in a portable church, we deal with a lot of gear. There’s always a lot of stuff that we think about and a lot of times church leaders have a piece of gear that they just particularly love, they’re just like, “Man that’s a cool piece of gear.” What would that be in your systems?

Nate – Man there’s a ton of cool gear that we have but I think the thing that rises to the top would be the check-in road cases that Portable Church makes. Those are amazing, they are so sweet and they’re great for a couple of reasons. They look awesome, in Portable Church they think down to the finest detail, they put like this laminate countertop underneath so it looks like a countertop but it’s all integrated into this road case. There’s 2 touch screen computers in there. So it looks good but then it’s also super easy, you just pop open the cap, all the wiring is taken care of, you just plug it in and off you go.

Rich – Very cool.

Nate – It’s a great first impression too for families that are coming, especially for the first time, like “Wow this looks good, this looks great,” and it’s easy to use. But man their new check-in cases are pretty snazzy.

Rich – Is that like branded to your church, does that have some graphics on it that look like you guys or are they just standard color kind of thing?

Nate – Ours are standard color. We talked about that and we saw even some of what Portable Church is doing. Yeah you can hang Velcro signs or even I think they do like a hard style or sign on the front. You can jazz them up as much as you want. There’s a lot of great options. You can also use it for signage, not only just for kid’s check-in.

Rich – Cool. Alright so there’s leaders that are listening in that are just on the brink of going multisite, they’re still thinking it through. What would you say to them? What would you say to a leader who’s out there, and they’re maybe going from a permanent building and they’re going to launch in some portable location, maybe in a movie theater or a middle school, what would you say to them?

Nate – I would say go for it. I would say take that step of faith. I think if you’re passionate about the mission and the vision that God has given you as a church and that’s clear, multisite is a great way to replicate that mission and expand your walls to impact your community for Christ.

It also allows so many people to get in the game, as we were talking about earlier. It just allows opportunities for volunteers to get plugged in. Multisite allows people to do that, it allows churches to do that. Going portable, don’t let that scare you, it’s great, it’s awesome, we love it, it’s a lot of fun and I think you’ll be surprised at how your people respond and want to jump onboard and be a part of it.

So I would just say go for it. I think one of the things we learned too, the more people you can raise up, so if you’re the guy launching, or the girl leading that campus, try to raise up as many volunteers as you can to come alongside of you. The larger you can launch, typically the more healthy the launch and the start of that new location. But go for it, step out in faith.

Rich – Yeah definitely one of those axioms that I’ve bumped into over the years as well is the best time to recruit volunteers is before you launch. As soon as you launch it becomes a lot harder to find those volunteers. I know that sounds a little bit counterintuitive but if you do all of that work up front, part of it is once you start doing services, then you actually have to start doing services, so your time gets compressed. But yeah, building a large launch team from the beginning.

I really appreciate you being on the show today. If people want to get in touch with Northridge or with you, how can they do that?

Nate – You can go to northridgerochester.com if you want to check out our website, that’s always a great first place to go. If people want to reach out to me I’d be more than happy to interact with people. You can shoot me an email at nmiller@northridgerochester.com and I’d be glad to do whatever I can to be a resource and help others out for sure.

We’re still learning, we don’t have all the answers but I’d love to interact with others who might have questions, it would be great.

Rich – Very cool. I really appreciate that Nate. I thank you so much for being on the show today, for taking time, I know it’s a busy time of year, so thank you for taking some time away today.

Nate – Glad to be here, thanks Rich.