It would be easier to do this alone. This was the prevailing sentiment of Pastor Drew Hyun, the founding pastor of Hope Church NYC, when faced with the prospect of starting a multisite church.
Presently Hope consists of three locations across Manhattan, each of them growing and serving across the city in beautiful ways. But it wasn’t always that way. And it almost never happened.
Hope’s multisite origin story is an unusual one. More often than not, multisites happen because there is a clear plan in place, existing leadership and culture to bring into a new space, and organizational scaffolding to support this new structure. This was not the case with Hope though.
For many years, Hope had been active in planting churches across New York City and beyond. There was both an incredible need and an incredible opportunity for healthy, Christ-centered communities across the Five Boroughs. (Not that Pastor Drew would ever plant in Staten Island though….)
Over the course of 10 years, from 2012 to 2022, 14 Hope Churches or daughter churches had been planted around the city. These were all independent churches, but joined together through the Hope Church NYC Family of Churches and the New City Network (the church planting arm of Hope).
However, some significant shifts happened. Like many church planting networks, the dream did not match the reality. The Family of Churches grew distant relationally and the Network hosted less gatherings. Then the pandemic swept in, which was a hardship on every church, but especially on church plants, and especially in cities like New York, which saw a substantial exodus during that time.
Two of the Hope church plants closed. Additionally, the founding pastors of two longer-standing plants – Hope East Village and Hope West Side – decided to step down from their roles. These pastors approached Drew about these congregations coming under Drew’s leadership directly, rather than having the churches find a new Lead Pastor on their own.
Drew, who was now pastoring Hope Midtown, was left with a difficult decision – leave these two churches to an uncertain future during a very challenging time for churches, or adopt them back into Hope Midtown and essentially reverse-engineer a multisite model. It would have been easier to stay independent. Yet Drew and the rest of the Hope leadership ultimately determined that their love for these communities they had once birthed and the missional opportunities provided would make the challenge worth it. In 2022, Hope Church NYC became one church worshipping in three locations (while each of the remaining church plants remained independent, with some of them taking on different names).
Over the past three years there has been no shortage of complexity, confusion, and even conflict. But there has also been an abundance of laughter, joy, shared wins, transformation, new life, and more. Our multisite story has been one of messiness and movement. Here are three ways that we have navigated the former for the sake of the latter.
Getting Healthy Together
This new structure felt much more akin to a blended family than a traditional, cookie-cutter, or plug-and-play multisite model. There was excitement, but there were also significant expectations and assumptions that everyone was bringing to the table, many of which weren’t aligned, spoken, or even conscious. Differing ideas around where there would be uniformity, and where there would be uniqueness. Who was empowered to make what decisions. How staff and financial resources were distributed. The list could go on. In any bringing together of two (or three!) parties, there is going to be some level of conflict and confusion, and we were no different.
However, Hope also has a clear commitment to emotional and relational health. Rather than let these assumptions, misaligned expectations, and conflicts gradually erode our trust with one another, we have worked hard to create a culture that navigates conflict in a respectful, humble, and timely manner. We also strive for a culture of celebration and appreciation so that our staff and leaders know they are valued and that their contributions are meaningful. As it says in 1 Peter 4:8, “Love covers a multitude of sins.”
What matters most to us, before any of our thinking around systems and strategies and multisite dynamics, is that we become more loving, more Christ-like. If we are growing in that way, then we can wade into these messy waters without worrying that we’ll drown or take someone else down with us.
A central part in this culture-shaping process has been our investment in Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, in which Drew recently began serving as president. All of our pastors and many of our staff have participated in the School of Emotionally Healthy Leadership. This has given us a shared language for how to offer critical feedback, how to navigate conflict in healthy ways, how to avoid assumptions and clarify expectations, and how to love team members more than we love the work they do for the church. Even junior members of our staff team are equipped to initiate difficult conversations with more senior leaders, and those senior leaders are equipped to receive them non-defensively and non-reactively. These resources also provide a framework for how our entire team can practice Sabbath, lead out of our singleness or marriage, embrace our limits, and slow down for stillness and silence in an otherwise hurried and frenetic city.
It is very difficult for me to imagine how this multisite plan would have worked without utilizing these tools and practices. However, they have become a trellis that has allowed our culture and mission to grow in healthy, sustainable, and enjoyable ways.
Going Deeper Together
One of the challenges of reverse-engineering a multisite is that staff are often accustomed to focusing on their own area of influence. This can lead to silos, inflexibility, territoriality, and a lack of new ideas for how to innovate and improve. It was important to us to cultivate a culture where staff and leaders loved our shared mission more than they loved their particular part of it. We’ve worked towards that in a few ways.
First, we make it a point to celebrate testimonies and wins together as much as possible. Each Monday our staff team gathers, including staff from each location as well as staff who serve centrally. We begin each of those meetings by celebrating what we’ve seen God do over the course of the week across our gatherings. More often than not this would take up the whole meeting if we let it! And then we conclude our meetings by spending an hour in prayer together.
These rhythms and practices have created a shared sense of ownership over our communities and the neighbors they serve. We cheer for the stories of growth and transformation happening across our locations- marriages restored and strengthened, new small groups starting up, baptisms, physical healings, spiritually curious friends leaning in. And we mourn together for the stories of loss and pain we also see transpiring. It has helped us truly live as one church in three locations, not just three churches who share a name and website.
Second, we try to collaborate as much as possible. An obvious benefit of the multisite model is that we can punch above our weight by leveraging the people and resources of three locations while still offering our members more localized, personal relationships in their specific location. We try to ensure that our staff do as little redundant work as possible. We collaborate on shared resources for our small group leaders. Our All-Church Retreat is the highlight of the year for many families. We run a number of centralized courses and events throughout the year, such as Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and Relationships, marriage investment courses, family workshops, Biblical and theological development, spiritual practices, and more. Members from all locations participate in and are enriched by these. They allow them access to Hope members and staff from across the church so that our community knows they are a part of something bigger than what they might regularly see.
The pulpit is another prominent place where this happens. We have live preaching at each location. We have developed a team of preachers that collaborate on each sermon series, offer feedback to one another, and contribute unique perspectives and experiences. Even though we might primarily serve and preach at one location, we will also preach at other locations. This allows our community to get a healthy diet of diverse, but unified, voices across differing backgrounds, ethnicities, and gender.
It has not been easy, but as time has gone by we’ve reaped the benefits of these shared experiences and diverse leadership, and we celebrate the transformational impact they have had on our church.
Going Further Together
Growing in emotional and relational health and offering our church multiple discipleship pathways has allowed us to engage dynamically with the needs of our city as well. New York City is massive and its needs are similarly massive. Jesus calls us to love our neighbor, and we have millions of them. Many are under-resourced, and lacking adequate access to medical care, food, and affordable housing. Many are over-resourced, having become wildly successful but are losing their soul along the way. Having multiple locations across the city gives us the opportunity to serve these neighbors in diverse, holistic ways.
Hope partners with a number of organizations engaged in justice and mercy work around the city. Examples include St Paul’s House, which provides warm meals and an even warmer community to youth in Hell’s Kitchen. The New Life Community Health Center in Queens, where those with limited means are able to receive free dental and medical care. Do For One combats the isolation faced by many with social and emotional disabilities through community gatherings and mentorship relationships. Hope East Village operates a free store throughout the week to provide assistance to the migrant community in their neighborhood.
Members from Hope are invested in all of these ministries. Because we share and celebrate their stories together, not only does it give us a bigger sense of what God is doing across NYC, but it also gives our community members greater opportunities to serve out of their unique gifts and passions. Someone from Hope West Side who has a heart for the immigrant community can take the subway down to Hope East Village each week and serve at the free store alongside other Hope members. Likewise, a Hope East Village member studying medicine at NYU can connect with the Health Center in Queens. This kind of movement happens all the time, and it has created a web of service, fellowship, and mission all over the city.
We also host Alpha twice a year, which is a series of dinner parties and spiritual conversations designed to extend hospitality to the spiritually curious. A strength of our multisite structure is that we are able to host one large central Alpha gathering each semester. We have a dedicated staff to lead it, and a team of cooks, greeters, and table hosts that pull from each location. Many hands make light work, and this team hosts some truly special dinners for spiritually interested friends from up and down Manhattan and beyond. A recent Alpha guest commented, “Alpha has been a deeply meaningful experience for me…Through Alpha, I not only began to understand Christianity more personally, but I also experienced it through the people I encountered.”
Three years into this unexpected multisite adventure we have learned a lot. Some of these lessons were learned the hard way. At times there has been confusion, frustration, and conflict. There’s been plenty of messiness. Yet because of our commitment to cultivating a healthy culture, there’s been beautiful movement as well. We’ve gone deeper in discipleship, further in mission, and have seen God do amazing things in and through us. We’re all excited to see what the next three years hold. But ultimately our prayer is that we would partner with God to build a great city, not just a great church.
