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Interview with a LifeChurch.tv Network Church Pastor

The following is a recent interview with Patrick Moore, Pastor of Life Church in Franklin. They are a Network church of LifeChurch.tv.

What is your ministry background? What did you do before becoming a Network Pastor?
I spent 7 years in radio broadcasting as a small market General Manager, Sales Rep and some on air. Before going full time as the lead pastor of Life Church last year at Thanksgiving, I worked as a Director of Sales and Marketing at a billion dollar community bank in western North Carolina. My ministry background involves about 8 years of ministry volunteer work as a youth leader and worship leader.

If you were a pastor, do you still preach? If you were a pastor, do you miss preaching regularly?
n/a

How would you define the role of Campus Pastor?
My role as the campus pastor is much the same as a pastor that teaches every week except the hours I would spend preparing a message are used to build relationships with our leaders, volunteers and people in our church and community. I work very hard to communicate and direct our church to keep pursuing the vision God has given us for our community and our mission to lead people to become fully devoted followers of Christ. With the LC.tv Network we’re completely autonomous from LC.tv in every area except that they give us their teaching resources for free. It gives us the ability to still be the unique church we need to be for our community and have access to the amazing teaching from Craig Groeschel.

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? What are the advantages of your role?
The best part about being a in the LifeChurch.tv Network is that I can spend my week completely pouring into the people in our church and community. With my background in radio I love public speaking and rather enjoy preaching, but I have found through the LC.tv Network that I am much more effective as a relational, connecting pastor than spending hours preparing messages. I love that I can spend my week meeting with our leaders and people in the church to continue building a healthy community church.

What are the unique challenges for a Pastor in a network partner situation?
The biggest challenge for us as a LC.tv Network church (and I think all the other Network churches) is communicating the relationship between our church and LC.tv. I constantly am communicating to our church and guests that we are a partner with LC.tv but totally autonomous in every area except using their free teaching resources. It was harder when we launched the church, but now our church attendees know the relationship and can explain it as well. It really comes down to casting the vision for the Network and how it works. LC.tv has also worked very hard to communicate the Network to their church and acknowledging the Network at each opportunity they have.

What is your communication like with your main campus or central support system?
Again the Network is setup so each church in the network is it’s own church. We all have our own leadership teams, bylaws, policies, ect…  We do however have regular communication that comes from LC.tv to the Network churches so we know important information that will affect us from a video teaching perspective. They also allow us to peer in a lot of the other things LC.tv does from a vision, creativity and training stand point. One thing to keep in mind is that the LC.tv Network is very much so a work in progress. We joined the Network 2 years ago and we were the 35th church to join. Now there are over 110 church in the Network.

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?
The backup plan is to just sing lots of music if there is a failure.

No, but really we do have a backup plan. First, from a technical side there are 3 different versions of the message file that we download on Saturday nights to use on Sunday morning. We download all 3 versions and us a 720p HD for our main and have a DVD for backup. We have never had to use the backup file. If there were to be a major technical malfunction (loss of power, computer failure, etc…) I always have a message in standby that I can preach live. We have actually began doing some team teaching a couple times with Craig this year where he teaches half the message by video and hands it off to us local pastors to teach the second part. It has worked really well. If all the technology were to fail I would be more than ready to preach live myself.

Anything that you’d like to say, add, point out, etc.?
We are a great success of how God has used video teaching effectively in a small community. We started with 9 people 2 1/2 years ago and are now seeing over 400 people every Sunday. As the fast growing and biggest church in our community, people are amazed at the effectiveness of video teaching. I don’t think video teaching is for everyone, but I know it is for us. As a pastor it takes laying down your pride to believe God can work and lead people to Jesus through video as well (probably better) than you could do as a “live” preacher. Then it allows you to do relational pastoring with your church.

*** If any of this resonates with you and maybe you feel God leading you to transition to this type of ministry, I would encourage you to check out LifeChurch.tv’s Network churches.