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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!
Sandra Nicholas is a part of the leadership team of The Meeting House a 14 campus portable multisite church! 85% of all multisite churches don’t get beyond 3 locations … this church is trying to figure out how to do 50! Listen in as Sandra talks about how they are able to structure their ministry in a way to expand so far and wide as a ministry.
Episode Highlights
00:42 // Rich welcomes Sandra to the show.
00:58 // Sandra talks about The Meeting House and the fourteen locations.
02:18 // Sandra talks about her roles at The Meeting House.
03:12 // Sandra talks about The Meeting House becoming a multisite.
05:30 // Sandra talks about the campuses, how they keep them consistent, simple and lean.
07:52 // Sandra compares the simplicity of the campuses with other multisites.
08:48 // Sandra talks about the structure of the organization.
10:52 // Sandra talks about how they use the dotted line and solid line within their organization.
12:51 // Sandra talks about the importance of building relationships with the volunteers.
15:02 // Sandra talks about the equipment and working with Portable Church on solutions.
17:00 // Sandra gives advice to other churches thinking of going multisite.
Episode Transcript
Rich – Well hey everybody and welcome to the Portable Multisite Church podcast. So excited to have you here today, listening in today. We have a real treat, we have Sandra Nicholas from The Meeting House in Ontario Canada, actually in and around Toronto. Sandra welcome to the show today.
Sandra – Thank Rich.
Rich – It’s fun to have you. Why don’t we start, we’re going to declare right up front, I actually used to work for The Meeting House so I know a little bit about The Meeting House but it’s always fun to learn. So Sandra why don’t you tell us a little bit about The Meeting House and tell us about your church?
Sandra – Sure we’re a multisite church, we have 14 different locations, about to launch…
Rich – 14 ? That’s crazy.
Sandra – One of those locations is about five hours away, we’ve got another location that’s about two and a half hours away, but then the majority of the rest of them are all within about an hour’s drive of the original campus. We’re about 5000 people across those locations, so our sites range in size from just a little bit over 100 to about 500, some of them are up to 750 before we multiply them or launch another site out of them. Then our original campus sits at about 2000 people a week.
We share the teaching, so we have one teaching message for all the locations and then we meet in home churches across, about a 180 home churches. All of our campuses, other than the original campus are in portable locations, most of them are movie theatres. One is… well actually two, there’s about to be a second one, one is going to be in the high school, so we’ve had experience on both sides of that. We setup and teardown every week, we actually also setup and teardown in our original campus and use portable systems for that as well.
Rich – Wow a wide variety of experience. Why don’t you tell us about your role? You have a super unique role, there’s not a lot of parallels to you and churches out there.
Sandra – I’m the site support pastor at The Meeting House and what I do is I oversee the ministries that support all of our locations. So I oversee kids, youth, weekend service, music, welcome, setup, takedown. I oversee compassion, global and local stuff right now as well. I oversee communications right now and also site launching and I’m sure I’m missing something but I think that’s the gist of it.
Rich – So not much, it’s a fairly small portfolio.
Sandra – Yeah just one or two things.
Rich – That’s amazing. Sandra’s an incredible leader and you’re going to hear more about that obviously as we go through. She knows a lot about this whole portable deal and what it’s like to be a multisite church.
Now if you can remember back, what was it like when The Meeting House first went portable or what were some of those early surprises, if you remember back those many years ago?
Sandra – In those days Rich was my boss. When we first went multisite we were a bit of a Gong Show, I think that’s probably fair to say. There wasn’t a lot of other multisite churches at the time to learn from and we really launched multisite reluctantly actually, so that probably plays into the amount of research we did before we did it. We were not organized at all on our setup and takedown stuff, it was just shoved into a trailer. Our systems that were supporting our sites were virtually non-existent and there was a lot of tension I think, between our original campus and our first campus around who was getting the resources, didn’t real care about the campuses that we launched and that kind of thing.
So over the next couple of campuses we learned a lot through that. The first one was pretty bumpy, the second one was notably different because at that time we hired a resource team to resource all of our campuses from those different ministry areas. Then we also started using Portable Church at our second campus. Then we went back, re-launched it, at Portable Church of our original campus which helped them with their setup and takedown each week and then went from there.
We continued to morph, we structured, we changed our structure maybe three times since I’ve been here. I think they weren’t bad structures that we had before the one we have right now, but they were necessary structures as we continued to morph and grow, from a staff organization perspective and those types of things. We have learned a lot and we definitely made a lot of mistakes. The way we launch sites is much more clarified now than how we did back then.
Rich – Definitely you’ll notice there, Sandra was involved with that one, you know the first one was bad and then Sandra came and got involved with the second one and everything got cleaned up since then. So they’ve ended up with the other 13 locations because of that, which is fantastic.
Let’s talk about the look and feel of your campuses. You said most of them are in movie theatres, so what are you doing to try to replicate some of that same look and feel for the experience across your locations?
Sandra – One of the things that we’ve done, I’ll start with this, our original campus we have said that generally speaking, if it can’t be done at our multisite or our (unclear 00:05:39) campuses, we don’t want to do it in our original campus. So we’ve tried to… we had, I guess, the luxury or it just happened, that we built our original campus facility after we had already gone multisite, so we weren’t one of those sites that had a church building and then went multisite and then had to figure out how to do it. So that puts us in a slightly different category and I think an advantage for trying to be simple.
In our building we don’t have murals on the wall in kids, and in our campuses, they’re maybe in black movie theatres, we’ll bring in colorful play panels and stuff like that. I would still say among multisite churches we have a lot more environmental setup than a lot of other multisite churches. We’re leaner, we’re a one trailer campus. I know that a lot of other multisites may use more than that and our largest campus, we have two trailers, but for the most port we’re one. Basically that’s also one of our values, just simplicity and so we try to keep it lean.
We try to have gear that can be used everywhere, wherever possible because if we have like one soundboard for all of our sites, and it’s got to be the exact same soundboard, because when we get calls for tech help we want to make sure it’s the exact same answer, we’ll give it to everybody. We know we’re turning three knobs to the right, that kind of thing, wherever possible. Obviously there’s other things that come and go, like speakers because they’re hard to keep consistent, but we just made the decision to keep everything as consistent as possible and as simple as possible.
So our environment, like I said, is much simpler. We have the same blue carpets in every single site. We have the same chairs, except the chairs have changed a little bit over time, but some of those types of things we just try to be as consistent as possible and as lean as possible. So that’s what we’ve done.
Rich – Nice, you know one of the things that I think is really unique about The Meeting House is the fact that you have 14 campuses and looking to do more. What do you think the relationship between the fact that you do have a real high value on simplicity and that’s not just like a theoretical thing, it’s actual, like we’re going to have as little gear as possible. Is there a connection between those two, the fact that you have so many campuses and simplicity?
Sandra – I think for sure. One of the things for us when we launch a campus, is our capital startup gear is significantly less than a lot of other churches. So our ability, from a capital perspective to launch more locations, is much simpler, in the case that we can possibly launch a campus, maybe three campuses, where another church only launches one with the same amount of capital and startup costs, so that helps us. Our staffing costs may be more similar to other places, but that does help us continue to launch things a lot faster. So for sure that’s been a huge thing for us.
Rich – Interesting. Can you talk a little bit about your structure? Most multisites, 85% of multisite churches don’t get beyond three locations. You’ve got 14 which puts you in a very rare area, maybe 1% of all multisite churches have anywhere near 10 or more. So give us a sense of how you’re structured organizationally.
Sandra – Yeah sure. We have a teaching pastor and senior pastor. Our senior pastor is who all the staff report to. I know every church uses different language for the exact same positions, it’s really tough to try to clarify that. But teaching pastor and senior pastor, they report to a board, the board is over them, they’re a volunteer board. Then under our teaching pastor and senior pastor we have a directors’ team. The directors’ team oversee; one category will be communications, they’ll be one called site support. I’m currently doing two of those, but they could potentially be two different hires, ideally. Then we have another director position that’s called site leadership, all of our campus pastors report to that person. Then we have another one called operations, so it’s like HR, IT, facilities, finance, all that kind of stuff. Then under those we have the lead pastor and the site support… the campus pastor, sorry that’s how multi-churches call them.
The campus pastors and the site support teachers, let’s say for example our kids and their campus pastor, they would have a local person on the ground who would report to both, let’s say the central or the site support person for kids, as well as the campus pastor at their location.
We’ve flipped it, it used to be dotted solid in one direction and we flipped it and made it dotted and solid in the other direction, we change it every couple of years and I think that’s a good idea just for balancing things out. So that’s kind of our structure.
We’ve had different structures at times, where we had those ministry leaders, or even campus pastors at times sitting at the highest director’s level but we realized that in order to go multisite and continue to grow, you can’t have all your campus pastors as that senior leadership team level, then you won’t have 14 locations or 50 locations or 100 locations one day.
Rich – Very cool, that’s fantastic. So how are currently using the dotted line, solid line? For people that know what we’re talking about, which some people will, the kind of direct reporting relationships, are they going to the campus pastor or to the central person?
Sandra – Right now the solid line is going to the campus pastor and the dotted line is going to the support person. I know that sometimes churches struggle a little with their ability to manage the dotted line. A lot of churches I’ve talked to said, “We have dotted lines but how do you manage that, how are you able to actually get them to listen or do whatever?” We don’t really have that problem and maybe it’s because I’m an A-type leader and I manage those dotted lines. I think it might also be, we’ve really clearly defined those lines, about what decisions are made through that solid line and what decisions are made through the dotted line.
So for example, the solid line in our context because it’s the campus pastor, it doesn’t make the decision for let’s say what the dotted line does, which is they don’t decide what curriculum is being used, what the kids are using etc. They don’t decide the structure of how the programs are done, that is for the campus support person. There’s a bunch of decisions that are just defined within that dotted line, so it’s not really unclear about who’s making what decision. We can talk about whether it’s a solid or dotted line, it doesn’t really matter, but they’re both true lines, they just are responsible for two different things.
So I think that part has serves us well. Since we clarified we actually have a new org chart. The dotted line means this and the solid line means this, these are the decisions they make. That’s been a big deal for us and I think that’s helped us be more successful.
Sometimes people also ask us, “Who makes the final decision on hiring though?” The answer is they both do. Neither one can hire without the other one’s green light. So either one could stop it or veto the hire.
Rich – Very good, I appreciate you diving into that because I think that’s one of the unique things as churches get beyond 3/4 that can really hold them back if they’re not super clear on how they’re structured, definitely.
Now you’ve got a lot of volunteers in all of those locations, that’s a lot of people to have out on the road every weekend, making a difference in your locations. What are you guys doing to kind of create a great volunteer experience for your people?
Sandra – Well one of the things that we experience here is that, because we’re in Canada, people in Canada are a little more like skeptical of the big exciting sort of things that we do, maybe the Disney version sometimes, are what people more expect in the United States. I grew up in Texas, so I kind of understand American church culture is a little different. So when we get sort of big and excited or whatever, we have different reactions.
One of the things that we’ve been doing is just throwing parties, trying to have… I don’t know if we’ve done anything really radical. Have people over, have our core leadership and volunteers over for things that are simple and things that often at times people don’t do anymore, at least in our context, which is like potlucks, just relationship building time that feels truly authentic.
We’ve done this before but like two thousand people, kick after service, “Come we’re celebrating years of volunteer,” and it was like, “It’s just cake and there’s two thousand of us, I don’t know anybody.” We try to make it a little bit more relationship, because in our context because it’s incredibly (unclear 00:14:01). Actually having relationships and spending time with people is something that isn’t really done that much. So just trying to spend more time with those guys, we typically encourage, be authentic with our encouragement and those types of things.
I don’t know if we’ve done anything super radical on that. I know a lot of people do T-shirts and all kinds of other exciting things, we don’t even have that, we’re just maybe more simple or something, but we’re also still learning that.
Rich – Very cool, so changing direction a little bit, this is a bit of a geeky questions. Some people listening to the show, they really love to hear about gear, the actual physical gear. Now is there a piece of gear or a couple of things that you just love. When you see them in your campuses you’re like, “That a really cool piece of gear,” what would that be?
Sandra – Well there’s definitely pieces of gear but I love but I don’t know if they would make other people really excited.
Rich – Come on what would they be?
Sandra – I’ll tell you some of those types of thing. Probably, some of the stuff I wouldn’t be able to explain what they are because I’m not a total tech geek and those guys are on my team, but they’re not here right now to run and explain it. Some of the stuff if the stuff that we’ve worked with Portable Church to customize to work for our context and that they’ve been able to turn around and give to other churches as well, as a solution for them.
Most recently they created something… I’m going to do a terrible job at explaining this, but a way that helped us reduce a lot of the cables that we have at the front of our stages, for our music team to plug into. So they have consolidated, they’ve created this box, there were cables everywhere, it’s incredibly reduced so our team is like super excited because they got to work with Portable Church on designing that.
Rich – Nice.
Sandra – Some of our cases. The TV case is like the most exciting thing ever because you can just plug it in and turn it on, it’s the least amount of setup ever and then you’ve got this big flat screen TV, people are always blown away when they see that for the first time.
Rich – Yeah this case, for people who don’t know, it’s a case, a big rolling case, a big black case, and all you have to do is flip the lid down on the front of it and there’s a flat screen TV in it, it’s a pretty sweet piece of…
Sandra – It’s pretty fun. Then the other things are like just the things I spent so long, working with Portable Church on, finding the right solution, which is literally our blue carpets and the right chairs that actually stack into a (unclear 00:16:18) and that kind of stuff, because I’ve also been overseeing the logistics for quite a few years at The Meeting House and just those little details, the more I can shove into a case, that stuff makes me pretty excited.
I really have a high value for efficiency, it’s probably a downfall of mine, but it also helps us be a lot more efficient and (unclear 00:16:38).
Rich – Absolutely, when you think about, some churches if they have one campus, they’re not really thinking about that thing, but when you think, “Okay, we’re going to try to roll something out to 14 locations,” you take any problem and times it by 14, that’s significant for sure.
Well a couple of last questions. What would you say to a church leader who’s just considering going multisite now, they’re just kind of thinking about doing the multisite thing, what would you say to them?
Sandra – I have a couple of biases on this and I know people disagree but I’ll tell you mine thoughts, because you asked for it. One of the things that I feel strongly about is I think it’s very challenging when you go multisite, if your original campus, the ministry leaders are overseeing the people at campuses, at the new campuses they launch. I know that’s really challenging when you launch one campus to have somebody else that oversees those people.
So for example again, we’ll use kids as an example. If the kid’s person who runs your kid’s ministry at your original campus is still overseeing the people at your second campus or your third campus, usually because their context is so different, it’s very hard for them to feel that they’re getting served well and if those people are running ministries, they’re so focused on running their own ministries, it’s very hard for them to give equal and valuable attention to the additional campuses.
So for me that’s been a big bias of mine. At times we have had people who were in one campus overseeing other campuses, and I think it’s always created a bit of a secondary focus for them, so it’s hard to keep that front center for people. So that for me is one big piece.
Obviously the other piece for me is, when you think about going multisite, thinking about what’s really replicatable. If your vision is really to think about reaching lots and lots of people, I always work with my team and say stuff like, “If it doesn’t work at 50 campuses or 100 campuses, we’re not doing it at this campus, we’re not launching this new thing or whatever.” We have to figure out how it does work in 100 campuses before we start rolling it out to 14 because in church, with relationships and we love everybody, it’s very hard sometimes to undo systems or undo the way we do ministry, without creating a lot of conversations. Sometimes that can be distracting, especially while we’re talking about just details and it’s not about our core message. So we try to be really careful when we create details, create systems, so that we don’t have to spend an equal time un-creating them two years later.
Rich – That sounds like that comes from experience, that sounds like there’s a voice of experience speaking there Sandra.
Sandra – Yeah definitely some experience of undoing some stuff that we’ve done and also with recognizing that in some of those early days, when we made some mistakes, some people really locked in on their own ability to troubleshoot the answers for those. So when you came in with a system that served all the sites, in a way that everyone kind of knew to get on the same page, it was hard for the people who had originally created ownership over their solution, to then sort of want to get on board with the thing that we all needed to move forward in order to be able to serve everybody well. So those pieces for sure for us were learnings.
Rich – Right absolutely. Anything else you’d love to share with people who are listening in today before you let us know how people can get in touch with The Meeting House?
Sandra – One of the things for us, I’ll just talk a little bit about the efficiency piece one more time, because that’s a big part of us, we have our logistics, all that kind of stuff here. I think the (unclear 00:20:21) is a really important piece for people. Again as we think about going multisite, if you say to me you want to launch a kid’s classrooms, I can give you a spreadsheet and it’s like, this is what we have in every single of our two year olds classrooms and this is what we have in every single three year olds and we don’t divert from that, so coming up with those systems.
Many times I run into people who are in the multisite church launching phase, they have a lot of visions and they have a lot of pastoral experience and that’s why they’re rolling and they’re amazing, but sometimes they don’t bring it on themselves or they don’t have already in their staff team, a really strong administrator. Somebody like me, you don’t need to give me a microphone and have me go and teach a message on Sunday morning, but from the logistics and the administrative detail, having that so that things go really well. I notice in many churches, when I talk to people and they ask me questions about how best to proceed, many times they’re missing someone like that on their team.
So I think when people are thinking about going multisite, think about having someone who has… I’m an admirer of ESTJ, someone who has an STJ personality type that they can bring onto their team to help them be successful as they build systems into the future. It’s not me, I’m not saying I’m the answer to our multisite, I’ve created a whole bunch of issues too, but I just recognize that seems to be missing in a lot of churches that consider going multisite.
Rich you had a lot of that, you brought that to the team. I know a lot of our sites of 14, also brings those types of things to the team. So I think, thinking through the types of leaders that you need as you go multisite is important.
Rich – Absolutely. Well that’s fantastic Sandra, I really appreciate you sharing all of that, all kinds of wisdom stuffed in there. If people want to get in touch with The Meeting House, how can they do that, how can they learn more about your ministry?
Sandra – Obviously they can go to our Meeting House website, meetinghouse.com. If you want to email me, you can email me at sandra.nicholas@themeetinghouse.com and I’ll put you in touch with someone who can answer your questions.
