Worth, Texas, and Temple Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan
By most standards, J. Frank Norris (1877-1952) was an enigmatic figure.42 His life was replete with challenges, and his ministry was embroiled in controversy from his early years until his death. C. Allyn Russell provides insight into Norris’ background:
It is difficult to comprehend the turmoil that engulfed the man who claimed to serve the largest churches in the world. It began early in his life. J. Frank Norris was shot at the age of fifteen. During his years in college (Baylor), he led a student uprising that contributed to the resignation of the president of the institution. In the midst of his ministry, he was indicted and tried of arson, perjury, and murder.
Nourished in the free-church, autonomous tradition of the ‘denominational machine’
both before and after his successive expulsions from a local pastors conference, the county association of which his church was a member, and the Baptist General Convention of Texas. The churches that Norris served suffered major splits, one of them losing six hundred members in a single year. Beset by enemies without and harassed, it would appear, by psychological problems within, he was a hardworking pastor-evangelist, publisher-editor, radio preacher, world traveler, and perennial politician. He became the leader simultaneously of two huge congregations, twelve hundred miles apart, as well as the head of a ‘seminary’ and the found of his own Fellowship of churches. A self-appointed foe of political communism, Norris toured the nation and the world. In his wake he left, in addition to thousands of converts, a record of acrimony, strife, and division. Ironically, his public ministry began in a place called Mount Calm, Texas. That was the closest J. Frank Norris ever came to serenity.43
Even facing such numerous obstacles, Norris was able to accomplish a significant feat in multi-site (or multi-church) ministry. Over a period of sixteen years (1935-1951), Norris concurrently pastored two large churches. To best understand this arrangement, it would be most fruitful to consider Norris’ personal account of his
42See introduction of God’s Rascal by Barry Hankins for a more detailed look synopsis of Norris’ life. Barry Hankins, God's Rascal: J. Frank Norris & the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
43C. Allyn Russell, Voices of American Fundamentalism: Seven Biographical Studies (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), 20-22.
ministry:
If the denominational leaders had kept their hands out and not interfered with the will of an independent local church, I never would have gotten to Detroit, but once I put my hand to the plow, and that meeting was launched there was no turning back.
Both churches by a silent vote unanimously agreed for me to divide my time between the two, and for two years both have enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and growth. The Forth Worth church decreased its indebtedness over $120,000 during this time, and has had the greatest spiritual experience of its whole history, and going today as never before, averaging twenty to thirty additions every Sunday.
The Temple Baptist Church has increased its property [by] more than a quarter of a million dollars in these two years, and increased its membership four-fold, and these two churches now have the largest membership in the South and North, respectively, and not only the membership of the church, but the two largest Sunday Schools, with combined average attendance of around 6,000.
Therefore, here are two New Testament witnesses 1300 miles apart that are giving a concrete demonstration of the truth of the Word of God plus nothing and minus nothing, giving an unanswerable credential to the power of the gospel to save multitudes of hardened sinners in this day of twentieth century materialism.
Hundreds of churches and pastors all over America have taken new heart by the example so these two witnesses are throwing off the grave clothes of ecclesiasticism and going forth witnessing for their risen and coming Lord.44
In his day, criticism abounded for Norris and his dual pastorate concept. His
44J. Frank Norris, “How Dual Pastorate Was Brought About,” in Inside History of First Baptist Church, Fort Worth, and Temple Baptist Church, Detroit: Life Story of Dr. J. Frank Norris, ed. Joel A.
Carpenter (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), 270-71. Russell corroborates both the growth of Norris’
ministry and the gusto used to achieve it: “There was no question about the increase in numbers. Norris’
church at Fort Worth grew from 1,200 members in 1909 with an average attendance of 500 on Sunday mornings to over 12,000 in 1928 with an average attendance of 5,200. At Detroit, he began with 800 members late in 1934 and counted 8,597 in 1943. When Dallas Billington’s mammoth Akron Baptist Temple finally surpassed the First Baptist Church at Fort Worth in the 1940’s as the ‘largest church in the world’ with 21,000 persons, Norris worked a little harder and by 1946 boasted that his two congregations totaled a membership of 25,000 persons, “the largest combined membership under one minister in the world.” Russell, Voices of American Fundamentalism, 30-31.
It would be spurious, however, to assume that Norris was primarily responsible for the growth of his dual pastorate. Key to Norris’ success both in Fort Worth and Detroit churches was the
organizational prowess of Louis Entzminger (1876-1958). Towns explicates, “In 1913 [Entzminger]
became the full-time Sunday school superintendent for J. Frank Norris (First Baptist Church, Fort Worth, Texas). Just two years earlier in 1911 an estimated 600 of the 1,200 members had left the church.
Entzminger organized the Sunday school into groups, classes, and departments. The visitation efforts under his leadership with his pastor frequently reported 1,000 calls weekly. By 1928, First Baptist Church had developed the world’s largest Sunday school with 12,000 members and an average attendance of 5,200.” Elmer Towns, John Vaughan, and David Seifert, The Complete Book of Church Growth, 2nd ed.
(Wheaton: Tyndale, 1990), 92-93. In reality, Entzminger’s methods benefited several of the largest Sunday
regular 1200 plus mile voyage between the two locations was a questionable investment of resources, and when considered more fully, the entire arrangement borders on the absurd. Nevertheless, that Frank Norris pastored two churches for 16 years with such great distance between them is noteworthy. Norris’ example is instructive for
understanding two realities germane to the current multi-site church concept.45 First, Norris’ leadership and ministry demonstrate that one person can simultaneously lead two (large) churches over a significant distance for a significant time. No argument will be made here that this arrangement was healthy, but in practice, the model was functional. Second, throughout Norris’ dual pastorate, a clear utilization of innovation was apparent. When Norris assumed the pastorate of Temple Baptist, he traveled to and from Fort Worth by train, and he later flew between the two places.
Traversing such distances is more common today, but it remains outside the norm for a pastor to travel so far and so frequently between two churches that he pastors.
Precarious as it was, the Norris’ paradigm demonstrates that societal and technological advancements can (and do) alter the landscape of church ministry and church models. Understanding and embracing innovation allowed Norris to do ministry in a novel way. In that sense, Norris was a forerunner of the multi-site church movement, and thus serves as an important component in the historic development of the multi-site church framework.
________________________
school programs of the era. See Louis Entzminger, How to Organize and Administer a Great Sunday School (Fort Worth: The Manning Company, 1949), for a list of the churches who employed his methods.
45While his work is intriguing, the primary commonality that Norris’ dual pastorate ministry has with multi-site churches of today is that one individual was doing ministry in two distant locations over an extended period. Though they may have shared much in common in terms of their principles and practice (cf. Sunday school methods of Louis Entzminger), First Baptist Church, Fort Worth, TX, and Temple Baptist Church, Detroit, MI were two autonomous churches operating in two different locations.
Lee Roberson’s Highland Park Baptist Church, Chattanooga, Tennessee
When Lee Roberson (1909-2007) assumed the pastorate of Highland Park Baptist Church in 1942, the church had planted only one chapel, Central Avenue Mission, which launched in 1939. By 1984, the number of chapels had swelled to sixty. In his book The Ten Largest Sunday Schools and What Makes Them Grow (1969), Elmer Towns documents the role Roberson played in the expansion of the church satellite program and of the church ministry as a whole:
Highland Park Baptist Church is known as the Church of the green light. The church stationery has a printed traffic signal with a green light and the word GO.
Under the leadership of Dr. Lee Roberson, this church has taken seriously the words of Jesus, “Go ye therefore into all the world and preach the gospel to every
creature.” This church is going in many ways: going through a daily half hour radio broadcast; going through The Evangelist, the weekly church paper with a circulation of 23,000; going through Camp Joy, a mission outreach project that gives free camping experiences to more than three thousand each summer; going through the fleet of 15 buses charged with visitation and evangelism of the greater Chattanooga area; [and] going through 43 mission outreach chapels.46
Much in the vein of Mark Matthews, Roberson sought to reach the entire Chattanooga region through the chapel framework. He mobilized his people and their resources, and then Roberson created a leadership development system to facilitate better the increase of the chapels. John Vaughan elaborates on the specifics of Highland Park’s chapel system:
The church now [in 1984] operates sixty chapels located as far as seventy miles from the main church. Many chapels average one hundred in attendance. The two largest have 250 to 300 attending each week. The chapels are led by students and faculty from Tennessee Temple University. Many chapels are owned and operated by Highland Park Baptist Church. During the first thirty years of the chapel
46Towns, The Ten Largest Sunday Schools, 27.
ministry, approximately fifteen have become self-supporting, autonomous congregations.47
Consistent with the above discussion of Seattle’s First Presbyterian Church, Highland Park faced (and continues to face) the same challenge concerning the mission chapel or branch church system. Both churches reveal that mission or branch churches display, by design, a strong proclivity to shift one of two directions. These semi- autonomous churches either gravitate away from the mother church to become fully autonomous, or they gravitate toward deeper reliance upon the mother church and thus they become permanently dependent.48
No category exists in the mission or branch system for churches to be
somewhere in the middle of these positions. While it is conceivable that a branch church could become a multi-site church, within the historic branch church system, daughter churches do not alter their structure to become part of a single church expressing itself in two locations. Therefore, while satellite, branch, or mission churches may demonstrate multi-site tendencies, these churches historically have not made the necessary
adjustments to actualize a multi-site church.49
47John N. Vaughan, The World’s Twenty Largest Churches: Church Growth Principles in Action (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 110-11. One year later, Vaughan would write, “The foremost example of satellite ministry in the United States is the Highland Park Baptist Church [with its] 57,000-member congregation.” Vaughan, The Large Church, 30.
48In an interview with Towns, Lee Roberson validates this viewpoint: “These chapels have never supported themselves. If we were to cut them off and make them local missions, they would have to give up for financial reasons. The mother church underwrites them financially, supplies musical programs, and supplies preachers from Tennessee Temple Schools. Many of the chapel buildings have been purchased by the Highland Baptist Church and if the local congregation, which is usually in a very poor area, had to pay for the building, the work would never have begun. If a church is able to support itself full-time, it will be cut off and become indigenous.” Towns, Ten Largest Sunday Schools, 32-33.
49Consider the response of Highland Park pastor, David E. Bouler [1991-2008], about his church’s being multi-site: “We started developing multiple ministries in 1942, and by 1970, had 70 off- campus sites. But in the past 14 years, [we have] let go of 37 satellite churches. We were so large that the
The Key Church Strategy
In the foreword to One Church, Many Congregations: The Key Church Strategy, Lyle Schaller heralds, “This book has been written to share what I believe is one of the most innovative, practical, and effective approaches to outreach ministry I have encountered in nearly four decades of working with congregations . . . . In simple terms, it boils down to the discovery that one congregation can meet in two different locations.”50 Schaller’s words are direct and unequivocal. He esteems the Key Church Strategy as one of the most significant ministry models of his long tenure as a researcher and, more importantly, he credits J. Timothy Allen and J. V. Thomas with “discovering”
that (repetition intended) “one congregation can meet in two different locations.”51 With this statement, Schaller suggests that the authors’ Key Church Strategy brought about the first multi-site church. In order to consider this possibility, an explanation of the strategy and a tracing of its development are in order.
Ahlen and Thomas maintain that the Key Church Strategy began in 1979, but the process for developing the concept came two years earlier in 1977.52 At that time, ________________________
people would go to the chapel service, but there was no sense of responsibility for their local church or their local community, and as we evaluated it, we noticed if we gave them responsibility along with owning the church and the property and accountability for it, there was a greater interest in evangelizing that local community in which that chapel was located.” Jennifer Ludden, “Big Churches Use Technology to Branch Out,” National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, 7 August 2005. At the time of writing, there is no evidence on the Highland Park Baptist Church website to suggest that the church supports mission chapels.
50Lyle Schaller, foreword to One Church, Many Congregations (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 13.
51In the paragraph preceding this claim, Schaller states, “These two Texans have spent most of the last twenty years inventing, practicing, reflecting on, refining, testing, teaching, propagating,
documenting, in building the philosophical, theological, and organizational framework for an exciting and effective strategy for evangelism.” Ibid.
52Schaller places a strong connection between First Baptist Church, Dallas, TX, and the Key Church strategy: “The history of this particular strategy for plan that change can be traced back to the ministry of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, TX. For several decades that historic downtown church has sponsored a couple of dozen off-campus ministries directed at people who could not or would not come to
under the leadership of Joel Gregory, Gambrell Street Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, had experienced measurable growth. That growth, however, came from a strong influx of transfer membership from other congregations (83 percent being from new members). While pleased with the increase, the Gambrell Street congregation was concerned about their inability to reach the changing populations surrounding the church building.53 As the church looked for solutions to their problem, they encountered J. V.
Thomas, who had recently assumed the Director of Project Development position with the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
As Thomas and the church together appraised their situation, Thomas
recommended that Gambrell Street should “become an anchor, or key [emphasis original]
church in the community, through which multiple new congregations would be started.
The plan called for these new congregations to reflect the multiple cultures making up the neighborhood.”54 The immediate result was positive. Schaller recounts, “The
congregation and the State Convention cooperated in a pioneering venture . . . to establish a series of indigenous satellite churches and missions in that section of Fort Worth.”55 ________________________
the building that was housing this congregation. From the earliest days, this congregation had been engaged in starting and maintaining new ministries in the Dallas area. These efforts include satellite Sunday schools and home Bible groups. These ministries were and are designated to reach a wide range of ethnic minority residents of Dallas as well as people in jails and prisons, people who are hearing impaired, and residents of large apartment structures.” Lyle E. Schaller, Innovations in Ministry: Models for the 21st Century (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 70.
53J. Timothy Ahlen and J. V. Thomas, One Church, Many Congregations: The Key Church Strategy (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 21.
54Ibid., 22.
55Schaller, Innovations in Ministry, 71. Schaller comments further, “It should be noted that that the term Key Church [emphasis original] was first used as part of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Home Mission Board strategy called Bold Mission Thrust.” Ibid., 71. The Bold Mission Thrust challenge was presented to the 1976 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) by the Missions Challenge Committee in response to “Bold Mission” goals established by the Foreign Mission Board [now International Mission Board (IMB) and Home Mission Board [now North American Mission Board (NAMB)] for the year 2000 AD. This resolution called for members, churches, and institutions of the SBC
The long-term impact was also positive. “As of 1997,” Ahlen reports, “300 Southern Baptist churches located in 27 different states have adopted the Key Church Strategy.
The total Bible study attendance of these churches is 172,152 people!”56
Explaining the concept in its most basic form, The Key Church Strategy calls for a commitment from a single key church to reach its neighboring community through developing a series of outpost congregations.57 The key church, through its own
leadership and membership base, initiates these new congregations for the explicit purpose of reaching unreached or underserved niche populations in order to evangelize and congregationalize them.58 According to Ahlen and Thomas, in the case of Gambrell ________________________
to create "aggressive, sacrificial, and bold promotional programs" in order to foster stronger obedience to the Great Commission. “Resolution on Mission Challenge,” June 1976, Southern Baptist Conventions Resolutions [on-line]; accessed 20 June 2010; available from www.sbc.net/resolutions/
amResolution.asp?ID=767; Internet. For an assessment of the Bold Mission Thrust, see Mike Clingenpeel,
“Bold Mission Thrust after 25 years,” Biblical Recorder, 20 April 2001.
56Ahlen and Thomas, One Church, Many Congregations, 19. Two years earlier, a detailed survey was administered to evaluate the national success of the Key Church Strategy. Here are the findings: “In 1995, a questionnaire was mailed to Key Churches. A report was received from 212 churches, only 40 of which had been using the Key Church Strategy for more than three years. The Bible study attendance and those 40 key churches’ satellite congregations totaled 33,807 that year. They baptized 6616 new converts. Take this as an average over a three-year period: 19,848 persons were converted to Christ and baptized into the mission congregations. Nearly 59 percent of the Bible study attenders were newly baptized believers. Taken together, all 212 Key Churches reported 20,123 baptisms in 1995. This is an average of 95 persons won to Christ and baptized per Key Church in addition to churches planted, these Key Churches also started 398 new community ministries. The 212 Key Churches are currently sponsoring 887 new mission churches. In 1995, the last year for which complete records are available, these churches started 262 new congregations. The average Key Church is sponsoring four congregations; two-thirds of these churches have been using the Key Church Strategy fewer than three years.” Ibid., 63-64.
57According to Schaller, “The Baptist General Convention of Texas defines a Key Church as one that meets these six criteria: (1) makes a long-term commitment to make missions outreach a top priority; (2) prioritizes missions to the level of the church’s religious education and music programs; (3) establishes a Missions Development council; (4) elects a director/minister of missions to lead missions expansion; (5) begins five mission/ministry units each year; and (6) sponsors at least five dependent or pre—independent satellite units on a continuous basis. Each regional judicatory must define the criteria that are consistent with its strategy, goals, values and resources.” Schaller, Innovations in Ministry, 73. See also, Joseph E. Early, Jr., A Texas Baptist History Sourcebook: A Companion to McBeth's Texas Baptists (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2004), 554-57.
58J. V. Thomas, Investing in Eternity: The Indigenous Satellite Church Strategy (Dallas: J. V.
Thomas, 1991), 2.