The following is an interview between Chris Brown of Flamingo Road and me from October of 2008. These are Chris’ answers:
What did you do before becoming a Campus Pastor? I ran a residential Real Estate team.
What is your ministry background? 4 years at Clearwater Christian College but a Business Major. 10 years of volunteering for several churches. 6 months at Elevation Church as a Campus Pastor of their Union Campus and 8 months here at Flamingo.
If you were a pastor, do you still preach? 3-4 times per year.
If you were a pastor, do you miss preaching regularly? No, 3-6 times a year is fine for me.
How would you define the role of Campus Pastor? The local shepherd responsible for connecting/ministering people, campus execution, and an accurate relay of Global vision from Lead Pastor.
With your focus being on the role of a Campus Pastor and not preparing a weekly sermon, what do you get to do that you think a lot of pastors/preachers miss out on? More donor development, leader development, assimilation, team building, networking with community, and community outreach.
What are the advantages of your role? All the joys of being a lead pastor without weight of the vision being carried out, without the internalization feeling personally attacked when programming is disliked by small groups of attendees, without sleepless nights worrying about revenue, and without needing to sermon prep, etc…..
What are the unique challenges for a Campus Pastor at a multi-site church? Trying to get the attendees and volunteers to understand that I am not the lead pastor, separating local vision from global vision, keeping local vision under global umbrella, trying to keep attendees from traveling 20 minutes northwest to here the teaching live.
What is your communication like with your main campus or central support system? Very good. We have weekly Campus Pastor meetings where we all collaborate about weekly issues, 4/6 of us are on the Directional Team so we are well informed, and I am the Multi-site Director which provides one formal portal for information distribution to Campus Pastors. We have a very open environment where CP’s can feel comfortable sharing ideas to the DLT for review.
This is from DJ Chuang of Leadership Network: Do you have a backup plan? If technology fails you are you the one to preach that day? What is your backup plan? Great question. Because most multi-site churches have a very dynamic communicator, I never suggest trying to finish the teaching unless it is in the last 5 minutes. We know that I will immediately get on the mic and invite the band to come back up for a worship set that will conclude when system restores. If system can not be restored I come up after worship set to apologize and dismiss telling all that a DVD will be mailed to them along with a gift package that week for their inconvenience. I have a packaged statement that spins the occurrence in a relatively positive manner and does not stop campus momentum. Because we really do not like this strategy, we do a very good job at having several tech back ups to assure that this never happens. The only thing we are not prepared for is if all power goes out and that would be an issue if teaching was live as well……
Anything that you’d like to say, add, point out, etc.? I would like to hear what others think about video worship…….. I want to buy in but I am having a real hard time…
*** What do you guys and gals think? Anybody out there using video worship at a campus?