Mount Pleasant Christian Church (MPCC) is a megachurch of about 4,000 active participants with a campus of more than 80 acres in Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood, Indiana. Given its size and visibility, adopting the multisite church model seemed almost inevitable. 

That model—which dates to the 1980s—has been among the hottest church-growth trends of the past two decades. It involves large, well-resourced churches replicating themselves in one or more separate locations. There were roughly 200 multisite churches in the U.S. in 2001—the year Rev. Chris Philbeck became MPCC’s senior pastor. By 2014, there were an estimated 8,000 multisite churches nationally.

But Philbeck was not entirely sold on the model as it is usually implemented—i.e., launching new churches in communities that are mirror images of the main campus, demographically. “While there were some places where that was really effective, in a lot of places, instead of being fishers of men, it was just rearranging the fish tank,” Philbeck says.

A ministry that MPCC launched in the early 1990s, however, planted a seed in Philbeck’s mind that led the church to implement its own successful innovation on the model.

Reimagining church

The Impact Center, as it has come to be known, began as a closet-sized food pantry. It eventually moved into a nearby house that the church owned. The Center grew steadily over the years and moved into a new, 15,000 square-foot building next to MPCC’s main campus in 2013. Pre-Covid, it served about 350 families each week; it now serves about 200 families weekly.

Philbeck would often visit with the people who came for help with food and clothing. “I was struck by how big the need was, and how open the people were,” he says. The Center’s work left Philbeck with the conviction that the ministry could—and should—be replicated elsewhere, especially in low-income neighborhoods where people in need could go and find help. It also left him with a key insight.

“I remember one day thinking, there’s no set model of what a church looks like anymore,” says Philbeck, who celebrated his twentieth anniversary with MPCC last October. “In the scriptures there are some guidelines. I think about Acts 2:42, and how it says that they devoted themselves to teaching and fellowship and breaking of bread and prayer. And I felt like, if [those elements are present], then you’ve got a church service, regardless of what it looks like. That caused me to reimagine what we were doing.”

In the near term, he decided instead to add half an hour of teaching and fellowship to the Center’s food and clothing distribution. In the longer term, Philbeck conceived and implemented a model that focuses on investing in churches that are declining and/or located in low-income neighborhoods and providing them with resources to sustain and expand their programming.

Specifically, MPCC has launched three new churches over the past four years, under the umbrella of the Impact ministry. Two of them—Impact Fairfax and Impact Bethany—were

friendly “takeovers” of churches that were more than 100 years but were declining and on the verge of closing. A third—Impact Old Southside—is a new church that meets in a renovated building.

Each is in a very different neighborhood than MPCC’s main campus.

The median-household income within a one-mile radius of Fairfax is about $37,500, and 61 percent of residents are people of color. In the one-mile radius around Old Southside and Bethany, the median household income is $48,500 and $50,000, respectively. The percentage of people of color is 28.5 percent and 16 percent.

In the community around MPCC’s main campus in Greenwood, the median household income is more than $107,000; 8 percent of residents are people of color.

Creating synergies

Much of the potential power of the Impact model lies in creating synergies.

The Impact Center, adjacent to the MPCC main campus, is a force multiplier for the entire ministry. It not only serves people at its Greenwood location (who come from all over Central Indiana) but coordinates with the three Impact churches, supplying them with food and clothes for their pantries. The Impact Center has its own pastor, Steve Saunders, as well as a warehouse manager and a part-time assistant. Roughly 150 MPCC volunteers help keep it running smoothly.

Meanwhile, the three congregations experiment with their own approaches to ministry. For example, at Impact Old Southside, the freedom to experiment means it to has “dinner church” on Sunday evenings. The service takes place around tables, over a meal prepared by the church.

Impact Fairfax, for its part, aims to help stabilize its neighborhood with youth outreaches and by planting seeds in the local housing market. Members of MPCC have purchased three houses in the neighborhood so far. They rent two of them out at below-market rates, and volunteers from MPCC do the upkeep.

Another house, located behind Impact Fairfax, was a blighted and abandoned “drug house,” according to the church’s pastor, Andrew Fillmore. The police were called to it routinely, and people frequently overdosed. Now it has been renovated and will be used by an organization called the Isaiah 1:17 Project, which works with the Indiana Department of Children Services to help children who are transitioning to foster homes.

Beyond the comfort zone

At less than five years old, the Impact ministry is still in its infancy. Each church currently serves a few dozen adults in weekend worship services and an equal number of youth across various programs throughout the week. How it will evolve remains to be seen.

So far, it has been ahead of the curve in some key ways. The disruptions of the pandemic are forcing congregations of all faiths and denominations to reimagine their worship formats—and perhaps even their definitions of “success.” 

Congregations often measure success in numbers and growth. The Impact ministry’s model suggests that, for congregations of all faiths and denominations, success can mean growth in another sense: creating connections, being a good neighbor, and moving beyond one’s comfort zone.

“Investing yourself in the lives of other people and having a greater understanding of who they are, where they are, and why they are where they are, has been eye opening,” says Saunders. “It’s humbling in a lot of ways. Because there are things that, going into it, I thought I had figured out. And I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

“And it really is affirming that people are people. We all have our own issues. And we can all relate to one another on some level. No matter what our socio-economic, cultural background is—there’s a commonality of people wanting to feel connected in some way. That’s at the foundation of what we’re wanting to do.”