This past Saturday I continued my learning about multi-site churches with a visit to The Edge at North Coast Church in Vista. North Coast was the first church to attempt the video venue concept back in 1998. The church is located in an industrial business complex where they now own a majority of the space and have 5 different venues on site for their services.

This time, I didn’t visit quite so covertly. I contatcted one of the Senior Pastors, Chris Brown, before coming. He is the venue pastor for "The Edge" as well as one of the two teaching pastors, a duty he shares with Pastor Larry Osbourne.
I spent most of the service at this venue, which is their younger, more rockin venue. Loud music, thumpin bass, my style. I didn’t really get an accurate count, but I would guess there was probably about 300 or so people in there.

During much of the worship, Will and I took some time to check out each of the other venues happening simultaneously. First stop was Country Gospel. This service takes place in "Traditions", the venue that houses there hymn singing service on Sunday morning. It was pretty fun in there with a stand up bass, a fiddle, and some acoustic guitars.

As we left, Will commented that it was kind of like being at Disneyland visiting all the different lands – and we had just left the Bear Country Jamboree. From there we visited the Video Cafe. This venue had a lot of food at tables across the back, a little brighter lighting, and was a more casual and relaxed setting. Then there was the family room. This was the only venue without live worship and was for parents to bring their children into. Really it was more of a glorified overflow room than a venue. There were only 5 or 6 people there when we arrived.
The tour finished with a visit to North Coast Live where the teaching was actually going to happen…live. There was a much more intricate lobby to this building with chairs and TV’s of the service inside, as well as a little book store/coffee shop type of area. I was sort of expecting to walk into a huge mega church feel of a place (North Coast has an attendance overall of about 6500), but was surprised to find a much smaller building that only seats about 450 people. North Coast offers 23 services between Saturday night and Sunday morning, so none of the services feel like your at a mega church at all.
So I ended up back at the Edge for the announcements, message, and remainder of the service. All of the venues saw the same video advertising the Women’s retreat, and then at the tail end of Chris’ announcements, he was rushed off a bit by the live feed of the teaching coming in. Larry Osbourne was teaching that night. Again I was pleasantly surprised by how awkward it didn’t feel watching the message on the screen. This has always been my biggest hang up with video venues, but it seems at times as if he’s in the room. When he would ask people a question they would raise their hands in response, repeat verses back to him, and laugh at the appropriate times at jokes.
After the message, Chris came up and really wrapped things up, and the service finished with one final worship song and a prayer. Here’s a few other things I noticed:

• Good parking situation with visitor parking near the front
• I was greeted very kindly by the parking guy and then again at The Edge by some greeters
• There were greeters at each venue that were very friendly as we stood at the back of the room to observe
• After the service, we still didn’t have any regular attenders approach us to say hello, so it’s a good thing the greeters had at least made contact with us. I have been finding more and more, though, how rare it is to have people really greet and respond to a new person if it isn’t their "job"
• It was really nice to have someone at the venue who was up front and felt like a leader of sorts

After the service, Chris Brown was kind enough to give us like 90 minutes of his time to interview him and just hang. This was very enlightening and an amazing opportunity to hear more about the churches vision and philosophies. That’s where part 2 of this post comes in. By the end of the week, I will try to put up some notes from my interview with him. This is definitely enough for one post though.

Overall, my visit to this multi-site church was a great experience and a place that I would totally be excited to visit again, or even attend if I were in that area.

My current class that I’m attending for this five week period at Vanguard in "Research Methods for the Study of Christian Organizations." As part of our homework in qualitative research this week, we were to be a participant observer at a church service or meeting unfamiliar to us. Since I am taking this class to study the multisite movement in the church (which I’ll definitely share more about in the weeks to come) I wanted to try going to one for this assignment. I actually hope to visit several in the weeks to come, just to learn, and I’ll update y’all as it comes.

Being that I couldn’t do a Sunday, I decided to visit Saddleback’s onsite service called Ohana – "Get away to the islands for a time of worship, complete with hula and island-style music." As is the case with many mutisite venues, the message is video cast to the room and the worship is live.

Unfortunately, Rachel and I were about 25 minutes late after taking the wrong freeway, turning around, finding that the connection to our other freeway was closed and taking the detour, stopping to pay the toll we didn’t know we would pass through, taking the wrong exit, turning around and getting back on the freeway (and paying the toll again in the process) and then finally getting there. Here are some of the good and bad that I noticed once we got there:

It was a bit hard to park with no direction, but that is kinda understandable considering how late we arrived. This was my first time at the Saddleback campus – WOW! It’s pretty amazing. Huge campus, very clean, well lit, sweet architecture. My favorite building was definitely the Children’s ministry building complete with multiple saltwater fish tanks. Very cool!

It was very hard to find the service we were attending. There was one sign we saw that publicized it along with all their other services, but there was no signage to get us there. We aasked some youth who directed us to some mobile buildings off to the side. Once we entered, there was some fun stuff inside. It was decorated with a Hawaiian flare – grass on the lights, thatch style signs that said Ohana, etc.

The worship team all wore matching Hawaiian shirts. It was made up of 2 ukuleles, 2 acoustic guitars, a bass, congas, a djimbe and 2 additional singers. I love Ukes! I enjoyed the feel of the laid back music, but the people in the service didn’t seem into worship at all. Only a few people were singing, and the rest just kinda sat and watched.

Once the band finished they sat down on the stage and up came Rick Warren on the side walls where the lyrics had been. I have often wondered about this aspect of a multisite church. How can people really "connect" with a pastor that isn’t even there? Isn’t it weird to just watch a screen the whole time? Oddly enough, this seemed to be the most enjoyable part for the people there. They were very engaged in the message and laugh, clapped, and responded, as if he were in the room.

The message took a little over an hour with a song in the middle. I’m pretty sure the song we sang was different than the main service, and it didn’t seem to connect at all. All of a sudden the video turned off the band stepped up and sang, and back on came Rick. After the message there was one final worship song along with some hula dancers. That was actually pretty cool. Finally there were some announcements and the service was over.

At the end of the service, I probably spent 15 minutes standing there looking lost and no one acknowledged me at all. I was pretty surprised by this. Being a mega church some might expect that, but this particular service only had about 65 people in the room with the worship team included! They seemed to be a friendly community among each other, though. Many people stayed and talked and complimented the worship team and the dancers. As we walked out the door, there were two people standing right there who began talking to each other as we approached. Bummer.

So that was my first trip to Saddleback and my first trip to a multisite venue. It was a fun experience, but probably not a service I would want to attend regularly. The funny part is, none of the negatives for me had anything to do with the multisite part, ie. the video cast message. That part actually worked out better than I imagined it would. I look forward to seeing a few other examples in addition to reading some articles and doing some more research.