Bucking The Trend

Recently I was talking to a friend who attends an enormous church in another state. As we were discussing Friendship Church, he was trying to figure out why we would need more than one preacher on a Sunday. His church has multiple campuses as well, but only one Pastor speaks, and it is shown on video at the other campuses. He asked me why we didn’t do it that way at Friendship. “After all,” he asked, “wouldn’t it be less work for you if there was only one preacher needed each Sunday?”

My friend asks a good question. In a world where video preaching is becoming more and more common, why is Friendship the rare multi-site church that has live preaching on its campuses? Wouldn’t it be easier and more efficient to have one pastor preach each week and just broadcast their message to the other campus? Don’t all the really big churches do video preaching at their campuses? Why is Friendship committed to in-person preaching at its worship services?

Every church must make decisions about how they are going to function in their worship services, and they make those decisions based on their ministry values. It may be that playing the sermon on screens would be easier, more efficient, and perhaps even draw a bigger crowd, but we think the general pattern of in-person preaching is a wiser decision for helping our people grow as disciples of Jesus.

Let me give you a few reasons that Friendship is bucking the trend of video campuses and believes that disciples can best be made by in-person preaching.

#1 – We want to communicate the high value the gospel places on relationships. We live in a world that is increasingly taking place on video screens. Social interactions at stores, banks and businesses have been replaced by interactions with machines. The increased use of video preaching in churches has corresponded with growing calls among social scientists for people to spend less time on screens and more time interacting face to face with other human beings.

When the preacher only appears on the screen on Sunday, it depersonalizes Sunday morning worship and can communicate that observing the “show” is more important than being together. In a world that is increasingly depersonalized, the church needs to be doing all that it can to be counter cultural. Paul told the Thessalonians that he had such a deep affection for them that he couldn’t just share the Gospel with them, he needed to share his life with them as well (1 Thessalonians 2:8). The Gospel is about a relationship with God that is lived out in deep relationships with our fellow believers and the church needs to be expressing the high value of relationships in everything it does. This includes the in-person preaching of the Word of God by a Pastor who is in the flesh, can make eye contact with you during the message and can be asked a question after the service.

#2 – The Bible teaches that it is important to be able to personally interact with teachers so that we can follow their example of integrity. It is infuriating to watch one mega-church pastor after another be removed from ministry because of moral failure. It seems like every month there is another story about a pastor who didn’t stay faithful to his wife, was embezzling money from the church or was mistreating those under his authority. I have to wonder if part of the reason for this rash of moral failures is because we don’t look for the primary qualities in a Pastor that we used to in decades gone by, or that God calls us to look for in His Word. As we read through the qualifications of an overseer in 1 Timothy 3 or Titus 1, they heavily emphasize integrity and have very little to say about talent and charisma. Our leaders are to be selected primarily based on their character. It is only natural in a world in which many Pastors’ primary role is on a screen that Pastors are often chosen based on qualities like “how well they keep people’s attention”, “how interesting their speaking is” and “how dynamic they are.” When people’s primary relationship with the Pastor is on a screen it is only natural that their selection would de-emphasize character and emphasize their public communication abilities.

The integrity of our church leaders is of the utmost importance because people in the church are supposed to be able to look to them as a model of how to seek after Christ. The Pastor’s integrity, obedience, and repentance in failure is meant to serve as a pattern for others. Paul says repeatedly in the Epistles that he wants people to follow after him as he follows after Jesus  (1 Cor. 4:16; 11:1; Phil. 3:17; 1 Thess. 1:6; 2:14; 2 Thess. 3:7, 9). He can say this because he is living a life of integrity and he knows people can see his life of integrity since he interacts with them every time they gather for worship.

Unfortunately, in so many churches people only know the Pastor who is speaking to them as the giant talking head on the screen. They don’t have the opportunity to personally interact with the person who is speaking to them each Sunday and so that preacher can’t function as a model in the way that 1 Timothy 3 calls them to be.

In Hebrews 13:7 we read, “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.” We recognize that our Pastors are imperfect people, but God has given them the task of walking as models in the faith. A task that is best carried out in person rather than on a screen.  

#3 – We want to reproduce preachers. A key qualification for an overseer in the Bible is the ability to “give instruction in sound doctrine” to the church (Titus 1:9). We want to be a church that grows the number of healthy preachers for the sake of Kingdom expansion. Within the video model the number of preachers on multiple campuses is intentionally reduced for the sake of efficiency. But at Friendship, we want more opportunities for speakers to preach and learn the art of teaching the Word of God. The best way for future preachers to learn is to be given opportunities to preach, and with in-person preaching we are maximizing those opportunities.

#4 – We do not want to encourage the cult of personality. One of the unhealthiest trends in modern Christianity is the way some pastors function as idols to those in their congregation. Churches become known by the Pastor who preaches there rather than by the work of the Spirit among the congregation. It is unhealthy when people choose a church because of the celebrity Pastor rather than the criteria that the Scripture gives to us for congregational health. This can happen with any congregation and with any teaching model, but in a world where people are far too focused on a “big name” it probably isn’t wise to blow a Pastor’s face up and put them on a movie screen every week. We think the healthiest model is to have multiple main preachers genuinely sharing the preaching load so that no one person becomes the emphasis and winds up on a pedestal in a way that is unhealthy for them or for the people who come to worship.

Is in-person preaching the only way that God can work to make disciples? Of course not. When we talk about in-person preaching vs. video venues we are not talking about matters of right and wrong, but degrees of wisdom. Will there be times at Friendship that we use video to share a special speaker or special message at both campuses? Yes, we will, but our pattern will always be in-person preaching. We believe the wisest choice for the discipleship of people is in-person preaching and we are excited to bring the word of God on our campuses every week.