The New Threads Ministry started in 2010 after church members attended a talk presented by a missionary who spoke about seeing children in tattered clothing in parts of Central America. Following the lecture, Southside Baptist member Jean Snoddy launched the sewing ministry to make clothing for underserved youngsters. Five other women joined her, according to  fellow church member and current leader of New Threads, Jean Fortune. 

“They started sewing in her home, and that year they made 86 garments—little girl dresses and shorts for the little boys,” says Fortune. 

Eventually, one volunteer traveled to Central America several times with a mission team to distribute the clothing. 

After the church built a new fellowship hall, New Threads relocated to the old fellowship hall in 2013 in order to give the expanding ministry more room, Fortune adds. 

“The ladies got a group together to clean and work on [the fellowship hall]. They got help from the church and built a room over here,” she says.  

Today, as many as 10 volunteers meet each week in this room, which Fortune says is outfitted with sewing machines, sergers, cutting tables and cloth. Many of the materials are paid for with financial donations; other supplies are donated.

The volunteers create colorful jumpers as well as sun and peasant dresses for girls, and shorts for boys. The number of pieces they complete each month varies, but on average, the volunteers make between 15–20 garments a month, Fortune says. 

Once the outfits are complete, the seamstresses pack some of the clothing for a missionary to distribute in the Dominican Republic, and some into shoe boxes to send to Operation Christmas Child, a project of the humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse.

“[This ministry] makes people feel like they’re doing something for God,” adds Fortune. “We’re spreading God’s love, one dress at a time.”

The ministry, which is the brainchild of Lead Pastor Suresh Sammangi, targets the many international students attending universities in the Boston area, from Harvard University to Boston College to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

“Many of these students are intellectual people with no God,” he says. “It was on my heart to bring the gospel to every nation. I thought this ministry would be a good opportunity to share the good news of Jesus Christ with people from all over the world.”

Sammangi, a native of India, says he understands what these students are going through. He traveled to the United States where he earned both his undergraduate and seminary degrees. 

“From 2007 to 2014, I was a student, so I know these international students miss their families, their culture, their food. They miss home and feel homesick,” he says.

The outreach to international students, he says, is a first impression ministry, because international students who visit his church often encounter the gospel and a Christian church leader for the first time.  

The ministry meets on Saturday nights at the church. 

“We have games and we have conversations and we engage with them and share the gospel,” he says. 

To advertise the gatherings, Sammangi says church members ask contacts who work at the colleges and universities to send out emails to the students.

“And we go to the local international markets and stores, and we find them and we invite them,” he says.

He recalls one instance at a meeting when a young woman approached him with a question. 

“That night we did not open the Bible, and we didn’t preach, but I shared about what God was doing in my life and what God had done in the past.”

The student asked, “Does this ‘man’ come into my life and cleanse the sins and what I’ve done?”

This led to a longer conversation. And that night, says Sammangi, eight international students accepted Christ.

“Jesus calls himself the living water, and we believe church should be the most refreshing place on the planet,” says Lucas.

Roughly 5,000 people attend services weekly, more than half of whom have been baptized at Liquid. According to Lucas, both churched and unchurched individuals are thirsty for the same thing—a life-giving relationship with Christ and the community. This is why the church’s other saying is, “Teamwork makes God’s dream work.”

Liquid Church has both a global and a local signature mission. Their local mission is to serve families living with special needs. Their global mission is to bring clean water to families in Africa and Central America. To date, the church has donated $3 million to drill 360 wells, which equates to bringing clean drinking water to 130,000 people in nine different nations.

As for their local mission, New Jersey boasts robust educational and social services opportunities for kids with special needs, which entices people to move to the state to access these resources. Every week the church serves more than 100 children with autism, Asperger’s, Down syndrome, ADHD and other special needs. They have found, however, that as children age out of traditional learning environments, the supports that the teens had grown accustomed to fall away. Additionally, the majority of these young adults are unemployed, lacking the opportunity to land meaningful work. 

“We asked, ‘What can we do as a church to marry our two signature missions, special needs and clean water?’” says Lucas. 

The millennials in the congregation—whom Lucas refers to as the heartbeat of the church—recognized the importance of a one-on-one “buddy system” for the individuals with special needs. Therefore, they came up with an idea to open the Clean Water Café—a full-service coffee house located inside the church that would employ people with special needs and give all proceeds to help provide clean water for the world’s poorest. 

“It’s a win-win,” says Lucas. “It’s a not-for-profit, but it generates a social profit.”

When the idea for the café was pitched to the congregation in 2018, they were immediately on board, donating $400,000 to make this dream a reality. The café opened in October 2022 with 20 staff members who work as baristas, cashiers and waitstaff to serve breakfast, lunch and specialty drinks. 

“Customers pass by Dunkin’ and Starbucks to come to Clean Water Café because it’s coffee with a cause,” says Lucas. “[The purpose of] this business is not to earn money but to change lives.”

“We are so proud of our café staff, who have learned their responsibilities well and are so encouraging that they not only provide excellent service to each customer,” says Executive Pastor Dave Brooks, “but they are also working hard to make the café the happiest place on the planet.”

Sydney, who was born with developmental delays, says that when Pastor Lucas announced the café, she and her mom grabbed each other and started sobbing.

“I just hope to have a purpose every day, and to lead a normal life,” says Sydney. “I feel for individuals who are like me. This café will give them the chance to prove their self-worth. It’ll impact not only the families, but it’ll impact the customers because they may come in having a bad day and when they grab a cup of coffee, they may leave thinking, It wasn’t such a bad day.”

Jaxon, who is on the autism spectrum, graduated high school but doesn’t have the ability to enter mainstream employment. 

“He’s had verbal developmental delays and couldn’t make eye contact or talk to strangers,” explains Lucas. “But after just a few weeks behind the counter, he became one of the most outgoing of our baristas who now can make eye contact and speaks people’s names with confidence. He realizes that when he hands lattes to customers, they get so happy.”

It pleases Lucas to see these special-needs individuals grow by leaps and bounds in their relational skills as they fulfill their purpose and use their gifts for Christ. 

“It’s been a thrilling adventure,” he says.

BSC is a small congregation comprised mostly of first-generation immigrants from such Slavic countries as Belarus, Russia, Moldova, Armenia and Ukraine. The church had been doing missions work in Ukraine for decades.

“When the war started, all of us who are from Ukraine felt shocked as we watched the attack unfold on the news,” says Reznik, who had fled Ukraine with his parents when the country was part of the former Soviet Union. The family arrived in the United States in 1995.

Reznik called church contacts in Ukraine, asking how BSC could help. After consulting with their Ukrainian counterparts, the church began raising money. At first, they intended to raise $50,000 to pay for housing in Poland for refugees. In a week, however, they had reached that goal and realized they could expand their vision.

They ended up collecting more than $1 million, with help from the local community, to pay for food and care packages, too. Meanwhile, volunteers from the Ukrainian churches used the donations to buy food, assemble care packages and deliver them to people in some of Ukraine’s most war-torn regions. 

“It’s very risky what they’re doing, but it’s not something we ask them to do. It’s something they want to do,” Reznik says, adding that besides food and care packages, the volunteers are also delivering the gospel. 

“They’re evangelism-minded churches. So when they’re distributing food, they’re sharing the gospel at the same time,” he says. 

As a result, a few refugees have relocated to Ephrata and joined BSC. Reznik says many are not believers, but they are seeking community.

 “We feel it’s an amazing opportunity for the gospel,” says Reznik.

“Since 2003, we’ve led thousands of people across the Hong Kong/China border carrying Christian materials and taken in 50 tons of Bibles and Christian materials that have been distributed in almost every major city in China,” says Fischer, who has ministered in orphanages, homes for the elderly and leper colonies. When the new Chinese government began to crack down on religious activity in 2016, however, they blocked Bible downloads, closed underground churches and kicked Christian organizations out of the country.

Fischer then focused attention on their newly relaunched church, Faith Family Church in Hong Kong, and it began to grow. In fact, by the end of 2019, they had the largest Christmas outreach Sunday in their church’s history. Pleased that nearly 60 children regularly attended on Sundays, church leaders looked forward to continued growth in 2020. Then the Coronavirus outbreak hit, and the school closed where they held their portable church services.

“We considered cancelling our church services until this [outbreak] passed, but [then our staff] had a God idea,” says Fischer. On Feb. 2, the church hosted its first Faith Family online-only service, and over the course of the past several weeks, they’ve seen the children’s engagement climb. According to Fischer, now that children are at home in a semi-quarantine situation, their boredom makes them even more interested in watching the live Sunday kids service.

“Some are even inviting their school friends, who don’t have much to do and are willing to check out this new ‘church thing,’” says Fischer. In the 90-minute service, the 20-minute kids church segment is the highest-viewed portion.

They have now had five Sundays of online church and their online views have grown five- to tenfold. Fischer is pleased to see such a positive response given that many people in Hong Kong make themselves a slave to the constant pursuit of money, which can negatively affect the family unit.

“The one thing we’ve discovered the Hong Kong Chinese love more [than money] is their children,” says Fischer, noting that parents are eager for their children to receive the character building that comes with learning the gospel.

“The most fulfilling thing in our ministry is seeing someone who is steeped in the love of money, actively following Buddha or completely unfamiliar with Jesus come to know him and begin to grow spiritually,” says Fischer. “Hong Kong is the only religiously free city in China, so it’s like a lighthouse shining the gospel into China.”

Fischer imagines that people in Hong Kong are even thirstier for God’s voice now that they are faced with this scary outbreak.

“Our church members are finding great strength in the Scriptures and sharing their faith with others,” says Fischer. “There is much fear in the city, and understandably so when a person has no God to trust in. But the outbreak actually created a perfect opportunity to share hope and peace to those who are living in fear.”

To promote family togetherness, church leaders encourage parents to watch the kids church segment Bible Adventure episodes with their children. In addition, parents are given a challenge card every week to complete with their children. Both resources are from Life.Church Open Network, which equips pastors and church leaders with free resources, training and apps to grow their church and reach more people for Christ.

“Making the whole online service a family event brings parents and children together, which is comforting at a critical time like this,” says Fischer, who notes that such unity makes parents even more committed to bringing their children back to church once the outbreak ends.

For the latest ministry update regarding the Coronavirus situation, click here. 

Faith Family Church has established a Coronavirus Relief Fund to help those who have been the most negatively affected by the outbreak at FaithFamilyHK.com/relief/

But what happens when you have just one church that is worshipping across multiple languages? How do their leaders work together to truly function as “one church”? How do the various language groups share the facility and align around a central vision?

From One to Six—With a Few Bruises

In Kuala Lumpur, Damansara Utama Methodist Church, known locally as DUMC, draws 5,000 people on any given weekend—but it’s distributed across six congregations, each having a different language. English is widely spoken in this multicultural capital of Malaysia, and that language group makes up the largest congregation at just over 3,000 people. The next largest language groups in the church are Chinese and Burmese, each consisting of 700 to 800 people. The Bahasa (Malaysia’s official language) congregation has 150 to 200 members, in addition to 100 people in the Tamil and 70 people in the Nepali congregations.

But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. The emphasis at DUMC is more concerned with the cell level than the size of the public gatherings. The church has more people in cells than in attendance on the weekends. The Myanmar congregation has 133 percent—or 1,000 people—in cells, while for the English congregation, 50 percent—or 1,500—are in cell groups.

The church, founded in 1980, wasn’t always so multilingual. “We started as an English-speaking congregation,” says Bernard Lee, executive pastor. “We noticed that as people came to church, they’d bring their parents who often didn’t speak English. Interested in their spiritual well-being, we asked ourselves, ‘What could we do to cater to them?’”

By the launch of the church’s third congregation, leaders noticed that the outreach was exacting a toll. It took a lot of work to coordinate worship schedules, special events and finances. For example, the Myanmar congregation’s regular meeting hall is just right for the 700 to 800 people they currently draw. But when they do a major event, they go into the auditorium, needing different support people. That means there is a necessity to train volunteers from each congregation to use the sound system, general facilities and other equipment.

Transportation issues also vary among the congregations. The Myanmar congregation meets at midnight on Tuesdays, not because of scheduling challenges, but because many are employed at restaurants and get off work at 11 p.m. Being a lower economic group, few have cars. But public transportation is limited at that hour, so the church hires buses. Church leaders also challenge people from the more affluent English congregation to offer rides—not only for pickups around 11 p.m., but also for a return to their homes after worship in the wee hours of the morning.

Focusing on the “Why”

DUMC has one senior leader, plus the equivalent of a campus pastor for each congregation (language group). Therefore, it has one united vision, one message and—as much as possible across language groups and culture—one DNA.

“It is much easier to focus on outreach in only one language,” Lee observes, “but God’s call is bigger than that for us.”

Through teaching, preaching and firsthand experience, the congregation has learned that the mission has changed. People are coming right to the church’s neighborhood. “Our nation is a multiethnic society coming together,” says Lee. “What has helped us is trying to bring the church together, recognizing that God has given us a unique call. We pray, ‘God, give us your heart,’ since we know others need the gospel as much as English speakers.”

But the church doesn’t just pray that people will come. “Our prayer is that they’ll take the gospel back to their home countries,” says Lee. “The Myanmarese are often refugees, waiting to be moved. The Nepalese will spend a few years working here, and then they’ll go back home to their extended family. Likewise, many students come from other parts of the country, so the church’s challenge is that when they finish their studies, they’ll go back, taking Jesus with them.”

Leadership Challenges

Once a year, the entire congregation comes together for mixed-language worship, preaching and announcements.

That service is actually only a minor challenge. The bigger challenge, according to Lee, is trying to keep anyone from feeling marginalized. “This manifests itself in many different forms,” he says. “We spend a lot of time working on getting rid of the second-class mentality.”

One pathway that helps is that all the lead pastors meet four times a year. They look at overall metrics of the church, working on areas they can bring to alignment. They also tackle scheduling and concerns. “That helps everyone get on the same page,” Lee says. They also bring it down a level with a monthly operational meeting for Lee and his counterparts.

The Biggest Win: Intentional Outreach

Being one church across six congregations has heightened everyone’s awareness that there are people out there yet to be touched by the gospel. “All these people are at our doorsteps, if we would only open our eyes more and be more intentional in reaching out,” Lee says.

Thus, the challenge of how to be salt and light to the surrounding community is never ending. “That’s why we no doubt will have more congregations to come,” says Lee. He predicts the next one will start as a cell group with people from the Middle East. “Who knows what will happen as they start bringing their friends?” he muses.

Warren Bird, an Outreach magazine contributing editor, is research director for Leadership Network and author or co-author of 27 books for church leaders. Bird oversees Leadership Network’s list of global megachurches at LeadNet.org/world.

This multicultural vision starts with the church-planting team connecting with an indigenous third church in each chosen gateway city. Not only will this launch group be made up of people from more than one country or culture, but their training will require passports, with stops in three countries: the U.S. (at one of Grace Church’s intergenerational campuses), the U.K. (London, the first gateway city) and Kenya (Nairobi Chapel, for leadership development opportunities).

If this pathway sounds exceptional or extreme, think again. Global immersion might become the new normal as a growing number of churches form cross-continental partnerships to demonstrate the gospel to an increasingly urban and diverse world.

Global-Minded Internships

Church internship programs are on the rise, with 74 percent of large U.S. churches now offering a formal internship for training leaders. A Leadership Network study of these programs found that most churches offer at least two levels of training. One level might be an entry-point, “discover your calling” broad exposure to local church ministry. A second level might assume that the intern has a very specific calling plus prior training. This second level is more like a medical residency where doctors in final training hone their craft under the tutelage of seasoned physicians. Likewise, a pastoral or church-planting residency offers trained leaders a focused, final stint in an environment of strong role models.

Nairobi Chapel and Grace Church have offered internships for years, but they’re both taking their programs to new levels as they rise to the challenge of their partnership in church planting.

“We’ve retooled our internships to add ministry residency and pastoral residency levels,” says David Bell, pastor of leadership development at Grace Church. His responsibility is not only to assist in the integration of the global church-planting partnership at the staff level, but also to develop more pathways for lay leadership development. “Sometimes we need to hire more staff,” he says, “but more often the solution is to train and develop more lay leaders.”

Global Church-Planting Residency

These two churches are not alone. NewThing, a church-planting network created by Community Christian Church in Chicago, has been offering residencies since 2006.

“For us, residency is the chute before you launch a new church,” says NewThing Director Patrick O’Connell. “It’s the final step before you plant a new church.”

The goal of a NewThing residency is to train and equip apostolic leaders to reproduce movements of churches. It is an intensive experience in which the resident spends up to a year apprenticing with a campus pastor or lead pastor at a NewThing church, which can be found across five continents. During this one-year, self-funded apprenticeship, the resident learns and trains in the fundamentals of leader reproduction.

In 2016, NewThing added a new track: a global residency program designed to send church planters from all over planet Earth to be trained in various cultures and contexts in order to ultimately plant a reproducing church in one of the major gateway cities of the world.

“Our desire is to see movement-making men and women of faith raised up and equipped to plant churches anywhere in the world,” O’Connell says. “Our global residency program is designed for those who long to be a catalyst for the global expansion of the kingdom of God, helping people all over the globe find their way back to God.”

Each global resident spends multiple months in one, two or even three different cultures, being apprenticed in how to start and lead a missional church movement. The program is a combination of classroom-based training, hands-on leadership opportunities and firsthand cross-cultural experiences.

Cathleen Rotich, originally from Nairobi Chapel, is global residency champion for NewThing. Her goal is to work toward raising 40 global residents a year. “We are looking for catalytic leaders who will plant not one church, but multiple churches,” Rotich says, “those who will start a movement of churches, those willing to work with people from all over the world.”

“There are cities all over the world who would be responsive to a global mix of leadership reaching out to them with the gospel. But it is not enough to plant individual churches. NewThing’s dream is for one resident per site per year. That enables leadership teams to go to one place and plant pregnant with two or more churches.”

Indeed, the sooner this happens, the more heaven will be populated with people from every nation, tribe, people and language.

Warren Bird, an Outreach magazine contributing editor, is research director for Leadership Network and author or co-author of 27 books for church leaders. Bird oversees Leadership Network’s list of global megachurches at LeadNet.org/world.

Meanwhile, electronic communication has advanced and become so accessible to allow for real-time video meetings between Australia and other continents. With each advancement in technology, Australia has become less isolated and more able to influence the rest of the world.

This opportunity has not been lost on churches—like Australia-based Hillsong, which has put today’s innovations to work in ways that extend and expand their reach. Not only has Hillsong started additional campuses in Sydney and other cities across Australia, it has also expanded globally. From launching its first international campus in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1992, Hillsong campuses can now be found in more than a dozen countries around the world, with more to come, according to Lead Pastor Brian Houston.

Hillsong is not alone. A surprising number of large churches have started campuses in other countries. Even more intriguing is how many—including Hillsong—have started campuses in North America. To date, Hillsong has three: New York City, which opened in 2011, followed by Los Angeles and Phoenix, with more on the horizon.

When I first started Leadership Network’s list of global megachurches, I included a field to indicate whether each church had established a branch in the U.S. I am astonished at how many do!

Going full circle, many North American churches are doing likewise, opening campuses overseas. Here is a glimpse into the “why” behind these border-crossing endeavors.

Pathways for Going Global

Ever since the book of Acts, Christians committed to Jesus’ Great Commission have been planting new churches in faraway cities. What’s more recent is the idea of opening a multisite campus in a faraway city. If global church planting creates self-governing, self-sustaining, self-propagating congregations, an international multisite campus is typically “one church in more than one location united around core beliefs, values and strategy with some degree of central governance and central resourcing,” says Jim Tomberlin, founder of Multisite Solutions.

But why create a multisite campus rather than a separate congregation? The logic is largely the same, whether locally or globally:

1. A desire for strong relationships. As Tomberlin observes, “When calling, partnerships and relationships converge, local congregations emerge. Some are church plants, and increasingly, many are multisite campuses.”

More often than not, these relationships involve the migration of relatives and friends. One of the earliest megachurches in South Korea is called Young Nak Presbyterian. Across the world today, there are numerous Young Nak churches, including in the U.S. and Canada, where members from the original church campus have immigrated and brought their faith with them. These churches began initially as a campus of the sending church, just as European colonists of yesteryear brought their church names with them to North America.

Likewise, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, probably the fastest-growing denomination in Africa, has a goal to plant a “parish” (their term for campus or congregation) within a 15-minute walk or drive of every person on Earth. They already have parishes in more than 130 nations, including a 1992 launch in the U.S. They went first to pockets of Nigerian relatives and others from their Yoruba tribe—the top five Nigerian-populated areas in the U.S. are indeed the five places they planted first.

U.S. churches have also followed this relationship pattern. In 2013, Outreach magazine told the story of New Mexico’s Sagebrush Church starting a campus in Belize. A church member had relocated there with his business. He had started a small group in his home using videotapes of his senior pastor, Todd Cook. That gathering grew into a multisite campus.

2. A willingness to start small and be flexible. Mario Vega, pastor of Elim, El Salvador’s largest church, talks about how his church almost unintentionally planted new churches and campuses across El Salvador, North America and elsewhere. A civil war, followed by ongoing conditions of violence, caused many people to relocate. Wherever they moved, they took the model of evangelistic cell groups they had learned at their home church. Soon, new churches and campuses sprang up. Some wanted to be formally affiliated with their “mother” congregation, and others were more independent.

Likewise, Dave Browning leads Christ the King, a global network of churches based in greater Seattle. They welcome global campus partnerships with a low common denominator. As Tomberlin humorously describes it, “They follow the minimal amount of structure and control needed to keep their congregations from descending into chaos.” This approach translates into an empowering culture with a bias toward multiplication.

3. Responsiveness to opportunity. Hillsong has many ready-made opportunities for potential campus core groups, with millions of people worldwide singing Hillsong music and hundreds of Hillsong College graduates living around the world. These large groups of young adults who love Hillsong’s music give potential extension sites a huge step toward critical mass on their very first Sunday.

While all are guided by some level of “Macedonia call” (Acts 16:9) that presses them toward an unreached or underserved place, there is likewise usually a strategy that helps church leaders identify those locations.

Geoff Surratt, lead author of Multisite Church Revolution and an associate pastor at Southeast Christian Church in Parker, Colorado, served for a season on staff at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, helping frame their global campus launch. Saddleback currently has campuses in Germany, Argentina, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

“I think there are several reasons Saddleback’s non-U.S. campuses are seeing success,” Surratt says. First, with Rick Warren traveling around the world since the mid-1990s, “this contact has given Saddleback an understanding of the cultures where they are planting campuses.”

Second, the popularity of The Purpose Driven Church and The Purpose Driven Life gave Saddleback a community of friendly locals to draw upon.

Third, Saddleback chooses campus pastors from the local communities and continues to invest heavily in them. Saddleback brings its campus leaders to California at least once a year and spends time pouring into them, while also sending various teams from California to visit their international campuses. “This gives those campuses a stronger tie back to the original campus in Lake Forest,” Surratt says.

Finally, the selection of potential locations for international Saddleback campuses targets strategic cities that include displaced people. Saddleback works “from the assumption that it is more effective to share the gospel with members of an unreached people group who have relocated to a city than to try to get out to every remote village,” Surratt says.

In short, according to Surratt, “While the factors of migration, potential core, partnership and ‘call’ were strong, we also focused on strategy.”

More Ahead

My suspicion is that churches, especially larger and more innovative ones, will continue to experiment with global outreach through multisite campuses. Given today’s advancements in technology, there are increasing opportunities to extend and expand a church’s reach. And if that reach is designed to make more and better disciples of Jesus Christ, then these new global campus environments are a helpful step forward.

Warren Bird, an Outreach magazine contributing editor, is research director for Leadership Network and author or co-author of 27 books for church leaders. Bird oversees Leadership Network’s list of global megachurches at LeadNet.org/world.

“We debated with each other and we reasoned with God. We thought: We can’t even get our hands around this one city, so how can we go to 12 cities?”

This situation occurred in the early 2000s at a church called Doxa Deo, based in Pretoria, South Africa. The church had been founded in 1996 and was still in its infancy. “We sensed that God wanted us to focus as a multigenerational ministry that would find expression close enough to the people to care but big enough to count in our city,” explains Anton Venter, the church’s long-time chief strategy officer and international cluster facilitator.

But none of the leaders knew how that was going to happen. “We didn’t know there was such a thing as multisite,” he says. “That’s one of the ideas God had us stumble into.”

The church’s challenge to transform 12 cities came from a teaching on Mark 6 by Founding and Senior Pastor Alan Platt. “We knew God was speaking to us from this passage on Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000, giving us beacons into our future,” Venter explains. First beacon: The disciples were concerned, but they needed compassion, “just as we needed a passion for the multitudes in our city.” Second, just as Jesus said to break the people into groups of fifties and hundreds, “so we needed to approach our city in ways that we could monitor our impact.” Third, Jesus trusted for the supernatural to happen, “just as we must.” And the fourth beacon is symbolized by the 12 baskets carried out. “We understood it as a prophetic word to export our city transformation strategy to 12 cities,” says Venter.

Today, according to Platt, “Doxa Deo goes beyond having church on a Sunday to serving our cities in such a way that we are seeing the establishing of the lordship of Christ in every area of society. At Doxa Deo, people are not only concerned for the state of their cities; they take responsibility for their cities. In short, we are serving our cities into the kingdom of God,” he says.

First Steps

After its launch, the church’s initial growth led to a merger, which became Doxa Deo’s first campus. Soon enough that facility became full. The church had a few cell groups in the north of Pretoria, so it started another campus there. Then the same thing happened on the south of the city.

“At present we have 12 campuses in Pretoria, and are trusting God for even more,” Venter says.

Besides expanding across their own city, Doxa Deo’s leadership looked for opportunities and divine guidance in other strategic cities underrepresented by a gospel presence. Today Doxa Deo is a city-focused church that has campuses in nine cities across the world. Six are in South Africa: Pretoria, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town; and three are international: London, U.K.; Auckland, New Zealand; and Stuttgart, Germany.

Three are yet to come. “We don’t know where that will be, but as we journey, we believe God will show us,” Venter says.

Support Structure

Church leaders often use the phrase “the Doxa Deo family,” so it was natural to call the central support function the “family support team.” Likewise the approach to funding has been family-style with one overall budget parceled out to support the various campuses according to their need. The central support is limited to 7.5 percent of the total budget. An additional 6 percent is used to empower the global vision through a strategic leadership team.

“Being one church with one common income stream enables us to do the same quality of ministry in less-affluent areas,” explains Venter. “Some of our campuses have less than 50 percent of income being spent on that particular campus.”

Initially everything was centralized from one campus. Thus, when the multisite expansion first started, the church had one teaching team that rotated between the second and third campuses. When the church added its fourth campus, the leadership established teaching pastors and teaching teams at every campus. The church also moved its strategic leadership team and family support team to a neutral location to avoid the “head campus” or “mother church” idea. This way all campuses have the same standing.

But this structure doesn’t guarantee that everyone begins or stays on the same page. There is an intentional “traveling program to expose key people to each other, to bolt together that family culture,” says Venter. “We gather groups of leaders from our various campuses around the globe several times a year to keep the vision both fresh and aligned.”

Each new global city may start with a number of South African expatriates, as when the church first opened its London campus. But the strategy was to establish the church with South Africans, but not necessarily just for South Africans. It has subsequently transitioned into becoming a local British church.

The DNA of the church is that of a unified core vision with local contextualization. The leadership in, say, Stuttgart, does not represent Stuttgart at the Doxa Deo family, but the global Doxa Deo vision in Stuttgart. As such, it might be easier to find a German native and “Doxify” him by exposing him to the church’s DNA, which he then assimilates into the local German culture. “It is not a gathering of local visions coming together into one church, but various leaders are carrying Doxa Deo into their geographical space, to contextualize it and make it happen there,” says Anton. “If you co-design, you co-own. Creating local contextual ownership of the vision gives longevity to the process.”

Bigger Dreams

The current Doxa Deo family involves about 30,000 people globally each weekend, but already it seems that the 12-city dream is too small for the number of people that the church could impact who need Jesus. “We are trusting that during the five-year window of 2016 to 2020, God will do in five years what he did in our first 20,” says Venter. “That’s something only God can do. It’s an adventurous journey for us.”

Warren Bird, an Outreach magazine contributing editor, is research director for Leadership Network and author or co-author of 27 books for church leaders. Bird oversees Leadership Network’s list of global megachurches at LeadNet.org/world.

A New Zealand church named Arise started 14 years ago with seven people in a small dance and drama studio. Today it draws 5,500 people weekly at six different locations across the country. The church’s impact has gained so much attention that Arise rented both a 5,000-seat stadium and a 2,000-seat auditorium for a July 21-23 conference to train other churches.

Even more amazing than its rocket-level growth is that the church is heavily built on reaching university students. “Outreach to the universities is our No. 1 trait,” says founding pastor John Cameron. “Youth and young adults are a key driving force; the engine room behind the success of the church, with many Arise Church volunteers and interns being of this age group.”

John’s story of the church’s development follows a pathway that could readily apply to North American churches.

Step One: Follow Your Passion

John and his wife Gillian moved to the capital city of Wellington in 2002, and today go by the title of lead pastors. “We didn’t do a lot of strategic planning to land on Wellington,” John explains. “We simply felt it was where God wanted us to go.”

“I was just walking around the city, and suddenly everyone was young,” John recalls, as university students flooded the town for their next academic session. The town’s population is about 200,000 and the influx of college-level students swells it by as much as 20 percent.

“I was only 29, and our passion was to reach young adults,” John says.

Step Two: Use the Resources You Have

John went to the largest university and began to hand out flyers inviting people to church. “We aggressively marketed our church,” he explains, “and we still do—not to push our church, but as a door to find Christ.”

At the same time, his approach was highly relational. “We didn’t try to proclaim the gospel ahead of winning friends,” John says. In the years since, it’s become a mantra at Arise Church: connection first, commitment second. “If you don’t have a connection, people are just going to opt out,” he explains. “The degree we have a connection is the degree we can call for a commitment.” To him, a nonrelational approach is like saying, “I’ve just met you, and now will you give everything you have to the God I’ve known for years but you’ve not previously heard anything about?” The predictable answer is no!

In short, they used what they had. “We managed to reach a few students in those opening months,” he says. “They helped us limp along.”

Step Three: Disciple Converts

Of the earliest people willing to be discipled, four were new believers and one had been to Bible college. This is where they started, investing in helping people find victory and go to new levels of faith. Many of those initial contacts have traveled far. “I taught our first new Christians class with two people in it, and both are now in executive leadership of Arise Church,” John comments.

“We originally set out to build a church for lost people, not for the religious,” John says. That fundamental value has shaped the church’s message and is at the core of what they continually try to personify: a heart for people and for the lost. “It has always been about valuing every one person, people who want to go on the journey of finding Jesus and putting him first in their lives.”

Step Four: Empower People to Meet Needs

When the next school year started, John and Gillian gathered those five people and gave them a very modest budget to work with. By working with one of the university student unions, they identified lots of needs and asked permission to provide volunteers to serve them. Sometimes it was a beach trip for international students. Sometimes it was giving away coffee—and good coffee at that. “People say that our church is highly devoted to quality coffee,” John jokes. One legal requirement is that when alcohol is served at school-related assemblies, food must also be served. So the church would offer to provide the snacks at various gatherings. All of these initiatives led to direct and meaningful relationships with various residential halls, and especially the student leaders.

“As we started winning university students, we started growing as a church,” John says. That led to a church attendance of 400 in year two, and 800 in year three. “Now we have 70 staff, and 50 of them joined our church through our university outreach.”

Step Five: Create a Leadership Development Pathway

The church has a clear pathway for developing people until they are a mature life-group leader. After that, it becomes a lot more intuitive and tailored to the individual.

The typical process begins as someone finds Christ, gets relationally connected, joins a small group, becomes identified as a potential small-group leader, and gets invited to “D-squad,” which is the Arise Church term for a Christian development environment in which you’re taught the character traits of a godly leader and the skills you need to run a small group. Then, if you’re effective there, you get groomed for the next level of leadership, such as oversight of various groups within a geographic zone.

There is a second track, a more intensive one: an internship school that is purely for those who feel a call of God to serve in ministry. The internship school started modestly with one intern. But it has mushroomed in growth, graduating 300 people in the last 12 years. “That’s where most of our staff come from these days,” says John.

Among other benefits, the internship program helps the church “stay on the edge,” John says. “If we allow our reach or style to stay with the age of our staff, we’ll wane. If you’re not thinking about the next generation, then you’re out of touch. You’ve got to keep moving forward all the time.”

What’s next?

How does John feel about the church’s explosive growth rate that led to it becoming New Zealand’s largest church, with a multisite campus in almost every major city in New Zealand? He sees no reason to coast. “We are committed to moving forward every day to see New Zealand won for Christ. Our passion is to do everything within our grasp to reach this nation for Jesus.

“We want to touch homes, families, lives, universities, schools, prisons and hearts with a message of faith and hope. Our mandate is to rethink church norms, build on the foundations others have laid and see the church of New Zealand overflow with life. These are the days of revival, these are the moments of the harvest.”

Warren Bird, an Outreach magazine contributing editor, is research director for Leadership Network and author or co-author of 27 books for church leaders. Bird oversees Leadership Network’s list of global megachurches at LeadNet.org/world.