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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’re honored to have Filipe Santos from South Bay Church in Silicon Valley on the episode! Listen in as he tells the story of his church … and learn from what they’re experiencing as a portable multisite church!
Episode Highlights
00:36 // Rich introduces Filipe to the show.
01:02 // Filipe talks about the history of the South Bay Church in Silicon Valley.
02:11 // Filipe talks about his role at South Bay and Sunnyvale.
03:43 // Filipe talks about the learnings and differences between South Bay and launching Sunnyvale as a portable church.
05:55 // Filipe outlines his goal: Through consistency to communicate, ‘one church, two campuses’.
07:38 // Filipe talks about the physical and cultural differences between the two campuses.
10:20 // Filipe talks about his primary role and how he creates an incredible volunteer experience at Sunnyvale.
12:18 // Filipe talks about the original set up process for the portable church and how it compares to the experience today.
14:21 // Filipe advises any church leader embarking on multisite to ‘simplify’ everything.
15:13 // Filipe states that he believes the most important process is to invest on leadership.
Episode Transcript
Rich – Alright well welcome to the Portable Multisite Church podcast, my name’s Rich Birch the host around these parts. I’m so glad that you’ve decided to take some time out today, to put us in your earbuds as we say. I’m so excited to have Filipe Santos with us today. He’s from South Bay Church from Silicon Valley. Are there churches in Silicon Valley, that’s crazy? Welcome to the show Filipe.
Filipe – Hey thanks for having me.
Rich – I’m so excited to have you on the show today, I’m excited to learn from you and hear more about your church’s experience and growth over these last number of years. Why don’t we start, why don’t you tell us a little bit about South Bay, give us a bit of a flavor of your church, a history of your church?
Filipe – Sounds good yeah. Lead pastor is Andy Wood, we actually knew each other from high school days and he went to seminary in Texas and had time with Jesus and felt him calling him to move to an unreached area in the country. So the prayer and a lot of research ended up sensing God calling him here to the San Francisco bay area. So he invited my wife and I to come. We came about five and a half years ago now. We started South Bay about five years ago and it’s been a crazy journey. This area has got people from all over the world. Silicon Valley as you know, is like the hub of technology in the world, so a lot of these techies and nerds and VCs and entrepreneurs all mix together in the Valley. So it’s been a fun journey.
So we’re about five years old as a church. We have two campuses now, about twenty minutes apart from one another. One of them is now a more permanent facility, one of them is still as well. But we were portable as a church generally speaking for the first three and a half years as well. It’s been fun.
Rich – What’s your role there at South Bay?
Filipe – I’m the executive pastor of ministries and also I am the campus pastor of our Sunnyvale campus, which is our newest campus which is portable right now.
Rich – Very cool. Now I would imagine Silicon Valley that whole region, the whole Bay area, it has a certain amount of mystique to it, is it true that it’s like packed with some super smart people? What is that like ministering in that context?
Filipe – There is a concentration of very smart people here but they’re smart in very narrow areas.
Rich – Interesting.
Filipe – So they’re like engineers and our church is full of people from the hi-tech companies, Facebook, Apple, Google and they’re kind of unique because they have specific talents. They’re pretty narrow but they’re very good in their narrow specific way. But yes it’s a very interesting place, not only because of the talent but because of the multiethnic nature of the region. So people from all over the world come here to work at these tech companies, which makes it a pretty interesting place to live.
Rich – Yeah that is really cool, nice. I’m looking forward to digging in more to that. Now you guys, if I understand your history, you were kind of portable for a while at your first location and then you went into a permanent campus and then you launched out this second location where you’re the campus pastor. So there probably wasn’t a ton of surprises, but when you got a chance to do it a second time as a church, you got to be portable again, what did you do differently or what did you learn from your first time round that you wanted to do better the second time?
Filipe – There are a lot of things. For us one of the things we actually missed when we went from portable to permanent is that entrepreneurial spirit of people, who would team up and work together and sweat together. We actually realized when we went to permanent, we kind of lost a little bit of that in our DNA, everybody working their butts off and the engagement of volunteers. So we wanted to do that again for the second campus, kind of reignite that part of our church and it’s exactly what happened. We form teams right away. I think the second round, what we did a little bit differently is, we started earlier on getting the right leaders in the right place. I think when you are in church planting mode, or starting a campus mode, you’re so desperate to fill positions, so you’re kind of like, “Yeah we need the nursery workers, show them in there.”
Rich – Right, you’re speaking truth now, now you’re speaking truth, that’s so true.
Filipe – That solves problems short term but it’s not the best long term. So this second round, we spent way more time on that specific part of leadership which is, who is specifically gifted for each unique role that we need for this campus and let’s get those people in place first and then really cast a vision that that’s how we want to build these teams. We don’t want to just shut people into filling slots, but really figure out what are people gifted to do and passionate about and from the beginning, be a little bit more intentional in putting them in specific areas they enjoy and they love, because for the long term that works way better. So that was one of the main differences between the first round and the second round of portable life for us.
Rich – That’s very cool. It’s unique that you guys have had the ability to take a run at that again. A lot of times churches, particularly if they are launching out from multisite for the first time, they’ve been permanent for so long, they can’t remember what it was like to be portable. So that’s cool that you are able to address that.
Now when you set out to try to replicate your experience, to try and take it and put it into two places, what were some of those things that you focused on to transfer that experience from one location to another?
Filipe – Yeah that’s a great question. I think one of the key things to consider and there are many different approaches to multisite. So there’s the one that’s like the big mother church and the little daughter site. We do not take that approach. Our goal with multisite is that all the campuses would have comparable experiences and sizes. So there is no mother campus and no mother church or no main campus necessarily and because of that we have to be very intentional on what you just said. We have to be consistent in a lot of the things that we do.
So we considered several things. Our signage, everything from the street into the auditorium is very similar. So the names of our kids’ ministries and our kids’ rooms, the colors that we chose, even from printing materials, our programs are the same. So when people walk in, even though its distinct communities and culture, there’s still that DNA South Bay Church and it communicates we’re one church, two campuses.
We also do similar music style, separate worship leaders and all that, but at this point we actually still do the same music set for both campuses. Some of the things that define our DNA is we make sure that they’re consistent in both. So for example, the guest experience is a huge deal to us. Our goal is to have incredibly welcoming experiences for our guests, we want to wow them. So both campuses have consistent styles of guest experience.
The little things from the way you check in your kids to your curriculum that you use for your children’s ministry, to the way that you do your student ministry at both locations. Everything is very consistent in that way.
Rich – Very cool. What’s the kind of distance between your two locations? What’s the physical drive time, what’s that like?
Filipe – It’s about 20 minutes’ drive time, but there are some physical barriers that you have to break through to go to both. It feels like two distinct cities. One is in Sunnyvale and one is in San Jose, so they don’t mix too much here locally. Silicon Valley is kind of a mixture of a bunch of cities but they each have their distinct little culture and downtowns and DNA. So it’s close by but it’s far enough that if feels like it makes sense for us.
Rich – So what have you done to acknowledge that? You’ve talked about consistency, what are some ways that you’ve tried to nuance that a little bit, I sense that that’s maybe been a part of your story?
Filipe – Yeah it has and honestly we’re still figuring that out. A lot of the stuff we kind of figure out as we go. There are definitely some cultural differences between our North San Jose campus and Sunnyvale campus. For example, North San Jose there’s a high concentration of Vietnamese and Asians, a lot of Chinese and a lot of Japanese and they’re a little bit more quiet, more reserved, very intellectual. They’re the engineers that work at Google and they’re like behind computers all day. Our Sunnyvale campus, there’s a little bit more of a fun culture. There’s a lot more South Americans, I myself am Brazilian, so I checked a lot of those South Americans there. A lot of Indians live in our region around Sunnyvale.
So naturally speaking, if you go to both of our campuses, you can tell a difference in the energy at both campuses, just based on the cultures that are there. So we have a little bit more of European, South American, they have a little bit more Asian there. So it kind of unfolds differently and part of that is also the leadership of the campuses. So my leadership team at Sunnyvale is basically the same DNA and demographics of our campus. We have a couple of guys that are Indian and European and a lot of South Americans and the same with San Jose. So it displays itself in the unique culture of both of the campuses. So it’s hard to define exactly what it looks like, but when you go them you can feel it.
Rich – Yeah absolutely, definitely I noticed that. The church I’m in, there’s four campuses and they’re all kind of similar distances apart but they all have a bit of a different flavor to them for sure, which is cool. I wonder, with a name like Filipe Santos, I thought you were British, just kidding obviously.
Now obviously providing a great volunteer experience is important for making multisite churches work. Obviously if we don’t have volunteers, we don’t have much of a church. What have you guys done to provide a great experience in your campuses?
Filipe – Let me speak of my campus specifically first. Sunnyvale campus, we’re pretty new, we’re about six months old and I see my role as a campus pastor, one of my primary roles is exactly what you said, it’s to create an incredible volunteer experience. If my team is not enjoying it and serving at their best, at their capacity, it’s not going to work well.
So one of my primary jobs is to create a volunteer experience that we wish we would have and so I spend a lot of time on that. In my perspective, it starts with leaders and so we really focus on that. If you want to have a great volunteer experience in our guest services or first impressions as we call it, the key to having that is having an awesome leader in charge of that department. So I spend a lot of time specifically on that, getting the right leaders in the right place.
It’s the same thing with small groups for us, you don’t have great life groups by just designing great life groups, you have great life groups if you have great leaders that lead the groups. It’s the same for every team. So having the right leaders in charge, competence, vision, getting the DNA that you want to reproduce, then create the systems that allow them to have a good experience. So how you schedule volunteers, having clarity around the process of that and the rotation of teams and what they’re supposed to do once they arrive. All those little details. Does that make sense?
Rich – Absolutely for sure, definitely. There’s a lot packed in there, I hope people are taking notes because there’s so much to caring for teams well, to make this work.
Kind of a totally different tack, almost the other end of the spectrum, when you think about their physical system, the physical stuff you roll in and roll out, tell us a little bit about that. What are you setting up and tearing down and are there any pieces of that gear, I know for me there’s some favorite gear that we have, are there any pieces of gear that stick out that you like?
Filipe – Yeah I’ll tell you this. The first time, when we started the church and we were portable, we had a huge Uhar truck with no cases. So everything was shoved in there.
Rich – Oh no a big pile.
Filipe – Big piles man, TVs and chairs and pipe and drape, just kind of all shoved in there. Rental boxes from Target and our equipment didn’t last very long. So by far my favorite thing right now is just the cases that PCI produce for us. They fit perfectly in our trailers, so we can wheel then in and out. We have three trailers, 24ft trailers, so we park them in front of our space and then in about 15 minutes, all three of them are unloaded and into the space.
Rich – That’s great.
Filipe – So our previous experience, when we didn’t do that, it took men an hour and it was less stuff and then the tear down is the same way, so by far the cases are my favorite. I love also the TVs. Back in our first round, we had to set up the TVs on the sides and we had to literally lift the TVs and screw them onto these stands and put bases on the stand. Now our stuff is awesome, you just kind of wheel it into place, press a button and the TVs kind of rise up from the case and then it’s done, like where do you go? So a lot of stuff like that has made it so much easier. To me it’s not just the fact that it’s easier now, it allows us to have more time to focus on people.
Rich – Absolutely.
Filipe – So we’re not like sweating so badly and running like crazy that we can’t focus on ministering to people. It’s just so much easier and the equipment lasts a lot longer now.
Rich – Absolutely, you can say to the people who work there, “You don’t know how easy you have it, this is amazing you press a button and…” That’s cool.
Filipe – Absolutely.
Rich – Alright well there’s a number of church leaders that are probably listening in and who are thinking about embarking on or are just embarking on their multisite journey, what would you say to those church leaders? What would you say to them as they’re kind of on that precipice?
Filipe – Here’s a thing, I heard this a million times before we launched the campus by our mentors and coaches and I tried my best to do it and then on this side now, I wish that I had tried harder to do this.
Rich – Oh nice.
Filipe – It is one simple word, ‘simplify’.
Rich – Okay yeah.
Filipe – I think when you go multisite, it creates a complexity that is unreal and I think the more you can simplify your systems, your processes, not only that but your approach to ministry, every little part of what you do, the better you’ll be long term. So taking the time to evaluate, put on paper, define how you are going to do your worship experience, raise up your band, every little part, the more they do that upfront, the better you’ll be long term.
Rich – Absolutely, everybody gives that advice but actually following it is hard right?
Filipe – Absolutely it’s very hard.
Rich – As a church leader on the other side of it, listen in because that’s well-worn advice there. Well Filipe, I really appreciate you being on the show today, is there anything else that you’d love to share with people, just as they’re listening in, before we wrap up?
Filipe – Yeah I’ve already said this but I would just say, I think investing in your leadership is so important in the process. Whoever is going to step up to say, “I will be your startup team, I will be part of your staff, I will be a key leader.” To take the time to make sure they are having a blast. To make sure that people’s hearts are connected. To tell stories more than statistics. To engage their hearts and to invest your heart out into that top leadership layer, because if they get it, everybody else will get it as well. So that to me has been the best words that I’ve received and what’s produced the most fruit in our environments.
Rich – Thank you so much Filipe. If people want to get in touch with your church, or even with you, how can they do that? How can they learn more about you guys?
Filipe – southbeachchurch.org is our website there. My lead past and I, we also have a coaching ministry for church planters called Frontline Coaching, more info on that is at frontlinecoaching.org. So we are investing in church-planters and that’s kind of our way in doing that.
Rich – Very cool. Well thanks very much for being on the show. I hope you have a great weekend and thanks for being here today.
Filipe – Alright, thanks I appreciate it.
