Franchising the church

Brett Maragni, a pastor and friend of mine from college days, has written 3 insightful posts on the franchising of the church. The link will take you to the most recent post which has links to the previous two. I encourage you to check them out. His basic point is to examine a new trend of popular pastors creating new branches of their church in places as far away as in other states! Even while these ‘branches’ would have local leadership, surely something is lost when the ‘preaching pastor’ is someone from an entirely different community whom you will never see in daily life, and he does not live in and experience the same community the people do. This is another trend towards the ‘impersonalization’ of the church.