Tim Keller has a recent blog post clarifying their use of a multi-site church model. He laid out their reasons for following this model, and how their model will be changing in the years to come as local staff grows and takes more ownership. Not all multi-site church models are the same or exist for the same reasons.
He briefly mentions the collegiate shift in the post.
We will then transition from a ‘multi-site’ to a ‘collegiate’ model. Though still under one unified board of elders, each church will have its own pastoral team, elder team, and set of lay leaders. Other collegiate models in our PCA denomination include Harbor Presbyterian in San Diego and Brooklyn Presbyterian here in New York City.
I’ve been able to witness on here in central Florida. Trinity Presbyterian Church in Lakeland has been functioning as a church planting center for close to a decade. Tim Rice planted the church in the mid-90’s. They have planted two churches in Lakeland and just planted one in Winter Haven.
The key difference with most church plants is the unified Session. The church plants are not pulling elders from a variety of churches. The idea is to have the same group of elders with the same priorities and the same ministry style. They have a higher commitment to the long-term health of the church and are used to working together.
Keller expands on this idea in the comments section.
The collegiate model is attractive to leaders who like team ministry and collegiality, and yet who want to be entrepreneurial as well. The collegiate model means the ‘lead pastors’ of each congregation will have to work closer together than they otherwise would. It means taking much more counsel before making moves. MattM asks ‘why not move right from multi-site to particularize’? The first answer is that the collegiate stage helps keep the congregations more on the same page in ministry vision for a longer time. While the churches will eventually particularize, by that time they will have had a number of years in which they have had to work together. This will make it more likely that the churches’ ‘DNA’ likeness to one another will last for generations. It makes long-term unity more likely. The second answer is that the collegiate model enables the pastors and leaders of each congregation to get much more help from me and from other senior leaders. They will be in a formal mentoring relationship with us for several years. It makes it more certain that the ministry wisdom of the founding generation of leaders is passed on.
These pastors, locally, meet weekly to talk about the sermon text. They younger, less experienced pastors are learning how to think about a text and how to preach it. They all help one another, and yet they are all responsible to prepare and preach their own sermons. It is a good balance of mentoring and personal ownership. The church planters really seem to benefit from the relationship, and the mother church is consistently challenged to think in terms of mission.
Cavman Considers 
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