Then, again, Keller, founder and senior pastor of Manhattan's Redeemer Presbyterian Church, will dash back to West 79th Street for his fourth service of the day at three leased locations.

It's not the traditional American mom-and-pop church, where the same pastor counsels parishioners, visits when they're ill or marries or buries them.

Keller's service-hopping - he usually preaches to three-fourths of the 5,500 people who attend Redeemer services - reflects a new model for worship spreading rapidly across the U.S. church landscape: multisite churches.

This form of high-efficiency evangelism allows thousands of worshipers to hear the same message from a lead pastor or a member of his team, in person or by video at three, five, even a dozen or more locations. Meanwhile, others take over the one-to-one side of ministry - counseling, ceremonies and small-group guidance.

Megachurches with two or more locations under the same leadership made up 37% of U.S. Protestant churches in 2008, up from 22% in 2000, according to a study by the Leadership Network and Hartford Institute for Religion Research in Hartford, Conn.

It's a growth strategy that works for churches of any size because it doesn't require new buildings or fighting for zoning or parking space, says Scott Thumma, professor of sociology of religion at Hartford Seminary, where the institute is based.

"They just rent a couple of extra theaters and high schools and put together a church in a box. Most pastors wouldn't give this as the primary reason, but clearly it's a distinct advantage," says Thumma, co-author of a 2008 study examining eight years of growth and change in megachurches.

Of the USA's 100 largest churches, 67% now have two or more sites and 60% of the 100 fastest-growing churches also have multiple sites, according to the annual listings of the USA's largest churches in Outreach magazine's October issue.

Still, the multisite model can prompt culture shock.

"I do miss having a pastor at the door shaking hands in the 'check-out line,' " says Lauren Green, drawn to join Redeemer by Keller's preaching. "But I realize that model of a personal relationship with a particular pastor is probably gone."

Green grew up in an American Methodist Episcopal church in Minneapolis, where her mother still worships and the pastor she has known all her life led her brother's funeral last month.

That congregational model is suffering, however.

Young adults change churches often as they move from job to job, marry and relocate. Older churches are costly for older members to maintain. And new pastors like the flexibility and evangelical energy of multisites.

Making it personal

Green recognizes, "We're just not looking for that kind of relationship with a pastor anymore. Today, it's all about a personal relationship with God, not the culture of a church. And a megachurch or a multisite church can still offer this. If you are there to hear a message and it's a powerful one, it shouldn't matter how it's delivered."

"Even if people are just watching the senior pastor on a screen, they are still gathering, as the Bible commands, they are still serving the poor, engaging in worship and study, and encouraging one another," says Ed Stetzer of LifeWay Research in Nashville, which studies church trends.

Protestant churches are not the only houses of worship to have multiple sites.

A few downtown Jewish synagogues developed secondary sites as members moved to the suburbs in the 1970s.

In the past five years many major Catholic dioceses, faced with low budgets and a shortage of priests, consolidated parishes and sent priests to serve "clusters" of parishes that still retain a distinct identity.

But it is chiefly young evangelical Protestants who have embraced the multichurch idea.

Craig Groeschel wanted to branch out in 1996 when he was a 28-year-old Methodist pastor, but denominational leaders deemed him too young to plant a new church. He went anyway, "to engage with people like myself."

Now his LifeChurch.tv is the second-largest church in the USA. From Edmund, Okla., his sermons are beamed to 26,776 people gathering every weekend for worship and fellowship at 13 meeting sites or "campuses" from Phoenix to Albany, N.Y.

Groeschel sees the multi-site route as a way to offer a classic evangelical message - "the Bible is true and salvation is only by grace" - at bargain volume rates. His website boasts that LifeChurch.tv reached 1 million people in July, at a cost of 7 cents each. "For us, multisite is only a tool, nothing more," he says.

Community Christian Church in suburban Chicago, with nine sites and two more planned, makes an effort to create distinctive cultures at individual sites with their own "campus pastors" and rotating teachers.

Jeff Wagner, 45, who worships at the Plainfield campus, says it is still a personalized experience. "It's your campus pastor who knows your name and makes you feel welcomed and cared for, like you matter."

There are still foreign mission fundraising drives and local events that pull all 5,000 people at Community Christian together, such as December gift marts, with thousands of donated presents and volunteers in nearby Aurora.

Warren Bird, research director for Leadership Network, a research and consulting group focused on church growth, wonders if the multisite church is simply "the next new thing" and excitement will fade in a few years.

Thumma says, "sociologically, the multisite model goes against every instinct about religious commitment to a church. But so far as we know, a larger network can do more for a community, and re-create intimate worship experiences in accessible places where people live, and create more opportunities for volunteerism and service."

'A high-tech upgrade'

In June, Mark Driscoll, pastor of the 10-site non-denominational Mars Hill Church in Seattle, said he would add 100 more video-linked sites plus 1,000 new "church plants," spinoffs with their own senior pastors and administrative staffs.

At a conference in 2008, Driscoll rooted the multisite model in history, citing Francis Asbury, the 18th-century founding bishop of Methodism in America. Asbury covered a quarter-million miles on foot and horseback launching churches: "Now, instead of a horse, we have a video screen. We've given it a high-tech upgrade."

Keller isn't ready to ride that high-tech horse. He relies on the subway or a staff-driven SUV to orbit among four of the five Redeemer services every week.

Mixed with members are visitors who want to hear Keller after reading his 2008 best seller, The Reason For God, or his new book, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power and the Only Hope that Matters, about the spiritual wreckage of the current recession.

"The core of the multisite concept is that a church must 'reverse the flow.' Instead of drawing people to the church, take the church into their world," he says.

He launched Redeemer in 1989. After rapid growth, the congregation moved to an East Side college auditorium site by 1993, then added two West Side locations to serve a more diverse community.

Now, Keller frets as he pushes Redeemer toward a $20 million plan for six more sites in the next 10 years.

For Green, more sites will mean fewer Sundays she'll see Keller in person on the pulpit. She says, "I know intellectually that this is needed, and I understand it and I go to church every Sunday even when he's not there. But I don't think it will be the same."

Keller acknowledges, "It all sounds shaky to people. It makes them nervous. But this is not such a bad thing. If you don't know how something will turn out, you pray like crazy."

END