Dr. Michael Horton on Multi-site Churches
Popes, Populism, or Presbyteries? Evaluating the Multi-Site Church
With the rise of multi-site church planting even among the more discerning evangelical ministries, raising an objection at this point is a little like giving away Cinnabons at a health convention. A real party killer.
So I for one am really glad that Thabiti Anyabwile, a wise and godly pastor-and Council member of The Gospel Coalition-has expressed so clearly what many of us have been thinking for a while now. And hats off to The Gospel Coalition for providing a forum for this healthy conversation. (See Thabiti Anywabwile, “Multi-Site Churches are From the Devil”). It’s well worth the read, regardless of where you stand on the question.
Many are calling multi-site churches a revolution-not so surprising for a movement that prefers revolutions to reformations. As the authors of The Multi-Site Church Revolution (Zondervan, 2006) define it, “A multi-site church is one church meeting in multiple locations…A multi-site church shares a common vision, budget, leadership, and board” (p. 18). Sounds hierarchical, no? In fact, the book’s subtitle is One Church in Many Locations. It would be ridiculous to compare radical Protestantism to the Roman Catholic Church. However, at this point, there is at least a theoretical agreement. According to the latter, there is one supreme pastor and thus, one church, headquartered in Rome, with branch offices, as it were, throughout the world. This polity is explicitly and dogmatically committed to a hierarchical ministry, with a charismatically-gifted head who is accountable only to the Spirit who endows him with at least the potential for infallible interpretations of God’s Word.
One of the many things I appreciate about Pastor Anyabwile is that he is actually a Baptist-a Calvinistic Baptist, to be sure, but a Baptist. He is convinced that Scripture teaches congregational church government (i.e., the independence of local churches) as well as a “gathered church” model of membership that doesn’t admit covenant children through baptism. Personally, I wish he were not a Baptist or a congregationalist, but you know where he stands-it’s not within a movement but within a concrete ecclesiastical tradition. He didn’t invent these ideas, but is persuaded that they’re biblical. Furthermore, despite the age-old debates of significance between us, he and I would agree more with each other than either of us probably would with those in our own traditions who wanted to “go multi-site.”
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