LEAGUE CITY — The rock band’s final notes are echoing into the dark, empty high school auditorium. Bruce Wesley, 1.0 sits watching as a cinema-sized high-definition television screen descends on the stage the musicians just vacated.
There, 12-feet high, his alter ego, Bruce 2.0 appears. The projected image proceeds to explain the concept of a video sermon to the unoccupied seats.
But they aren’t vacant for long. An army of more than 300 volunteers, color-coded with naval precision in vests, aprons or T-shirts that reflect their roles, has labored since 6 a.m. to convert Clear Springs High School into a state-of-the-art Sunday School, worship center and, yes, virtual church.
This may be the year of the mega-church in Galveston County. Friendswood Community Church recently completed a major expansion; Calvary Chapel is building their large addition now; and Clear Creek Community, having largely filled their Egret Bay Campus in eastern League City, has launched their Clear Creek 2.0 satellite campus at CCISD’s newest high school, located on the west side of town.
The flesh and blood Wesley explains that he will actually be on three screens.
“We will also have I-Mag, though for some reason they can’t get it working today,” he said of the inset-video technology worthy of a major sporting event. It will focus the speaker’s face on two smaller screens offering expressive close-ups that the larger, HDTV projection might somehow miss.
In the Bible, Moses parted the Red Sea, but local pastors and church planters agree that both the causeway and Interstate 45 are barriers to contemporary congregations.
“If there is any single piece of data that influenced our thinking, it was a study that we did that showed how much proximity matters,” he said. “People on the west side of the freeway were three times less likely to come to Clear Creek than those on the east side of it.”
Creek’s original campus routinely hosts 3,500 on a Sunday. The expansion will host some 600 at Clear Springs. But Wesley insists that it isn’t all about size and growth.
“We don’t want to become just a big church. We want to be a place where people have real relationships, and we know that happens better in smaller settings,” he said. “We’d rather meet in multiple locations where people have a little more intimate sense of what church is about.”
In addition, this expansion gives Wesley something else he really wants: empty seats. What pastor wants vacant chairs?
One who intends to fill them.
“Opening here at Springs allows our Egret Bay (eastern) campus to have empty seats during optimal inviting hours in proximity to those in the community,” he said using verbiage reminiscent of a business marketing campaign.
Wesley will later tell his newest congregation that he and some of his early followers have turned a school into a church some 443 times in a row during the church’s formative years. Clear Creek began 14 years ago using both Ferguson Elementary School and CCHS’s Ninth Grade Center as worship centers before constructing their own Egret Bay campus.
Now that multi-acre site on League City’s east side has largely been built-out. In the “grow-or-die” mega-church movement, successful ones must continue to expand. In the big city to our north, Second Baptist and other churches pioneered the multi-campus, multi-service, sermon-by-satellite years ago, but Wesley and company are trailblazers here in Galveston County.
Although the Creek leaders are pioneers now, they won’t be alone in the HDTV sermon business for long. A pastor from Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Nassau Bay observed and took notes of the school’s conversion. This spring, Gloria will launch its own second campus in a school south of its present location.
Although some may struggle with church-by-wire, the staff at Creek 2.0 has overcome their own initial concerns about it.
“The idea of virtual church is more challenging that the actual experience of virtual church,” Wesley said.
Outside, after each service, volunteers pass out hundreds of Coroplast yard signs book marks, and folded business card invitations to those heading for the parking lot half-filled with SUVs, mini-vans, imported luxury cars and the occasional aged jalopy.
If the church’s expansion curve continues to dramatically outpace that of the growing county itself, even Clear Spring High won’t be space enough for long.
A thought that would bring a smile to the faces of both versions of Wesley.
