Wowee! The folks at 9Marks know how to stir up a crowd. Jonathan Leeman, editor of the 9Marks ejournal, just published a post on the 9Marks blog speculating about the state of the church in 100 years if the multi-campus phenomenon continues to grow and spread.
While I appreciate Leeman’s concerns, I believe they are a bit over-stated. I am sympathetic to those with concerns about the idea of a multi-campus church, though I am still sorting through my exact approach to the issue, but don’t think it will lead to the kind of destruction Leeman theorizes about in his post.
Here is an excerpt:
Few anticipated how quickly these pragmatic, seemingly inconsequential shifts of polity would corrupt the churches throughout an entire nation. Ninety-six percent of evangelical Christians in America belonged to approximately one hundred multi-campus “churches” by 2030—the franchises swallowing up the mom-and-pop shops. Some of these franchises were originally orthodox. Yet many of them were not, which meant that the wolves now had a mechanism for multiplying their influence exponentially. Furthermore, the orthodox bishops were often replaced within a generation or two by less orthodox successors, in a way that unorthodox bishops are seldom, if ever, replaced by faithful men, simply by virtue of the kinds of trees the unorthodox pastor plants. The cumulative trajectory was downward, then, away from orthodoxy.