TX Congregations Rolled Off From The Village Church Multi-Site Model are Thriving

Congregations reported steady growth in years since they became independent.

On October 20, 2019, a severe tornado hit Northway Church in Dallas, Texas, destroying its worship center and damaging the surrounding community. The storm barrelled through only three weeks after the church had been commissioned as an independent congregation and no longer a satellite of The Village Church (TVC).

Five months later, the congregation was facing the COVID-19 pandemic.

“[O]ur roll off from TVC was met almost immediately by some very challenging circumstances,” Northway Church’s lead pastor Shea Sumlin told MinistryWatch.

“It was those very challenges that the Lord used to help wean us off of TVC — in a good way — and forge our new identity almost immediately. It was amazing to watch the church band together and begin serving the needs of the community around us. In many ways, it was the best thing the Lord could have used to help us step up and launch into the church He was setting us apart to be in our new reality,” he said.

Northway was one of several satellite campuses part of TVC’s “Multiply” effort that began in 2017—a move to transition campuses of the multi-site model to independent congregations.

In 2021, MinistryWatch reported about the completion of “Multiply.” We recently followed up with The Village Church and the young, independent congregations to see what benefits and challenges they have experienced along the way.

“Many people probably naturally wondered what would happen to our church after we multiplied off from TVC, no longer under the Village name or resources,” Sumlin said.

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“Then add on top of that a tornado and pandemic right out of the gate, and many might assume we’d shrink [or] become less effective, but the opposite has actually occurred. God used our time as a TVC campus to help provide a healthy foundation that anchored us for the challenges that would come”

According to Sumlin, the church is “as healthy now as we’ve ever been.” It has a young congregation with an average age of 27, over half of which are single. It is in an area of Dallas that draws young professionals, who are fairly transient due to career changes.

As such, most of the current congregation’s members weren’t part of Northway when it was a satellite of The Village, Sumlin pointed out. Nor do most of its visitors know about its former association, but go to Northway based on personal recommendations from people they know.

“We do share our history in each of our membership classes,” Sumlin clarified.

Northway has planted two new churches out of its congregation, sending 500 members to one and 250 to another. Even with those two church plants, the congregation’s size hovers around 1,800, a bit larger than it was at the time of the roll-off from TVC.

Citizens Church in Plano also became an autonomous congregation in 2019. In reflecting on the years since the roll-off, Pastors Jamin Roller and Joe Widner told MinistryWatch they are grateful for the vision behind “Multiply.”

“The Lord has been very faithful. Our continued prayer is that our church is becoming more like Jesus together,” they said.

While not providing specific numbers, Roller and Widner said the attendance and membership at Citizens Church has steadily increased over the years. In the beginning, visitors would mention the church’s association with TVC, but that has been less true as years have passed.

Restoration Church in Southlake was the last congregation to become independent in July 2021. Discipleship and Mission Pastor Matt Clakley analogized it to a baby giraffe. “We had a staff and membership that resembled the size of something fully grown, but we were in our infancy as a church,” he explained.

The church faced organizational and operational challenges in the beginning, Clakley admitted, but it also saw many blessings and benefits.

“One of the surprising benefits we’ve experienced is an increased partnership with other local churches and ministries,” he said.

“As a [satellite] campus, our interaction with other churches was in some way mediated through TVC. We now have better relationships with many of the like-minded churches around us and are eager to see how those relationships begin to bear fruit for God’s kingdom. In addition, we’re able to more robustly cooperate with other Southern Baptist Churches in church planting and sending missionaries globally.”

Restoration Church has experienced strong growth and has planted another church in coordination with TVC — Beacon Church in nearby Bedford.

Most new members have “no connection or knowledge of our history as a campus of TVC,” Clakley said. It shares its history with new members, including its unique position as part of a “replanting strategy” between The Village Church and a small, struggling Carroll Baptist Church.

Now Restoration Church has an opportunity to pay it forward by helping another small, struggling church nearby.

The Village Church has also seen “great and continued” benefits from the unwinding of the satellite churches.

Lead Pastor Josh Patterson is grateful The Village Church is now “one local church with one campus [and] with one local staff.”

“I wouldn’t say we are any less busy, but we are less organizationally complex. The complexities we had to manage in the past weren’t wrong, but they were present and to ignore them was to everyone’s detriment. So, we managed the complexities,” Patterson told MinistryWatch.

“It is nice to not have to focus on those things so that we can now focus on being a local church in a community. In my conversations with the leaders from our former campuses, they all feel this sentiment as well,” he said.

Patterson said a few families returned to TVC’s main campus from the satellites after the roll-off, but “the overwhelming majority stayed at their new church.”

The Village Church is still in the church-planting business, with a 2030 Vision that includes planting and revitalizing 30 churches.

Church plants are not satellite campuses, however, Patterson said: “These are all independent congregations and not satellites. At this point, we don’t have any plans or desires to plant satellite campuses.”

TVC also aims to have 100 missionaries reaching 10 unreached people groups and reach more than 50,000 individuals with the gospel through its campuses, church plants, revitalization efforts, and missionaries by 2030.

Before the pandemic, TVC’s main campus had an average attendance of 4,615 in person each week. Like many others, the church suffered a decline of in-person attendance during and after the pandemic, but that has bounced back to an average of over 4,000 per week in 2024, Lindsey Eenigenburg, TVC’s executive director of engagement, told MinistryWatch.

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