For The One Multi-Site FAQ

From a big picture perspective, every senior minister of a healthy church is an interim preacher. The elders have been planning for David’s eventual transition for many years. Best practices have been studied and applied throughout, and David has shared a target time frame for retirement, but he wants to finish strong with his ministry here. Any future successor will be supportive and a champion of our multi-site strategy.

Is this multi-site strategy driven by Whitewater’s (or my) ego? There are plenty of good churches that are worshipping God. We are trying to reach people (especially non-practicing Catholics) who have a religion, but not a relationship with Him. Opening a Whitewater campus in a new area enables people to serve and attend more regularly and also invite friends in their neighborhood who aren’t willing to drive 20 minutes or more to our Cleves campus.

As David Vaughan often says, ‘Our only competition is the Devil, not another church.’ There are more lost people without hope than we have churches to reach them. Some existing churches that are struggling may even reach out to us and desire to join Whitewater in impacting our area for the kingdom. Small towns/rural areas are actually the emerging new horizons for multi-site, and we are perfectly poised to seize that! Our church (and David) have some blue collar country in them!

Yes. After studying best practices of other multi-site churches, we believe this is the best (and easiest) way to go. Most people at our current campus watch the message on the screen already! Plus, it ensures everyone hears the same message regardless of location. We will occasionally utilize live teaching at a campus, but this approach allows our Community (Campus) pastors to focus their valuable time on leading/pastoring people and not 15-20 hours of sermon prep. One of our services will be done live/recorded at the Cleves campus, so if you really like live teaching all the time, you can attend that one. Each campus will have a host and a live band with our worship leaders rotating sites.

Construction of new locations will be funded by the generosity of folks in our church community, as well as dedicated gifts made by people who have a heart for this outreach strategy. Ongoing, all locations will be funded like any other ministry at Whitewater. We will budget according to the vision God’s given us, and then trust that he will provide the funds through his generous people.

Yes, and just like our Cleves campus, they will be part of the overall Whitewater staff team. We’ll start with one Community/Campus pastor dedicated to each new location, and then we’ll hire more people to meet identified mission critical needs such as worship, Harbortown KIDS, and small groups. Some additional part-time staff may be assigned to these locations because every zip code has a different opportunity and need. We already have begun making changes and reorganizing our current staff to anticipate/accommodate this move.

We have two different multi-site advance teams looking at this now, and we will share those as they become clear. We will be concentrating on places where a large amount of unchurched people already live and pockets of Whitewater people are already living/driving.

Yes, all locations will have the Whitewater feel, brand and voice. You can attend and be a part of the team regardless of where you live.

The MISSION is what is driving this. It brings us back to the WHY! The mission has a church and we must be loyal to the mission and its founder, Jesus Christ. Even though two years away from our first campus, we need to start dreaming/discussing now (not later).

We are hoping to avoid the multi-site issues that several of our sister churches in the area have struggled with. We are being coached by one of the premier church consulting group in the country (Tony Morgan) and are addressing the major issues that might affect us.

Absolutely. Our current attendance (although the highest in our history) has been flat on Sundays and we are continuing to do all we can to fix that. We will continue to passionately invest resources here at our Cleves campus, but also move out in faith to further Jesus Great Commission in other regions of the Tri State.

We are working to successfully transition from The Promise and Ripple campaigns to resourcing ‘For The One.’ As we continue to pay down debt, monies can be allocated to this and other church initiatives.