Family Church’s Wellsville location seats about 130 people and currently hosts two Sunday services. A new facility under construction will more than double that capacity.
The alarm goes off at four. By five, Zach Wright is at Family Church in Wellsville, Kansas—checking tracks, running through the setup list, getting everything teed up before the worship team arrives for their 6:30 rehearsal. By 8 o'clock, the first service is underway. When it ends, Zach is in his car heading east ten miles to Baldwin City, where the satellite campus is finishing setup inside a performing arts center that seats six hundred and fifty people. He arrives around 8:30, facilitates the sound check, and stays through the 9:30 service. Then he's back in the car, hauling it back to Wellsville, arriving around 10:15 to meet the broadcast team. The 10:30 service starts on time.
Three services. Two campuses. In Person. One Sunday. Every week.
This is what it looks like, practically, to run a multi-site church that has chosen not to simulcast.
Family Church has been in Wellsville since the 1950s. Zach's father, Curtis, took over as lead pastor in 1988, and for decades the church was what you'd expect of a congregation in a town of 2,200 people—steady, rooted, small. In 2019, the church went through a significant rebrand, dropping its previous name and becoming Family Church. At the same time, Zach and his wife came back to help. His brother Kyle had been the executive pastor under their dad; now the two brothers were working alongside Curtis to rebuild momentum. When Zach and his wife walked through the doors in 2019, there were roughly 75 people in the room on a Sunday.
Family Church’s Baldwin City campus meets in a 650-seat performing arts center, giving the growing congregation room to serve a second community just ten miles from Wellsville.
"It's kind of been a hold-on-tight roller coaster ride," Zach says. "We've grown quite a bit the past seven years."
One church means neither campus gets the lesser version. “We don’t want people to say, ‘If you really want the good one…’” – Zach Wright
The growth didn't come from a single strategy so much as from momentum meeting opportunity. By 2023, people from Baldwin City had started making the drive to Wellsville regularly. That sounds like a win. It was, mostly. But it also created a problem: when those attendees tried to invite their neighbors, the neighbors wouldn't come.
"When you're going to a town where the schools are rivals, and there's kind of that small-town pride," Zach explains, "there was kind of this resistance for some of their neighbors and their friends to join them."
Ten miles is short by most measures. In rural Kansas, between two towns with a history, it's long enough to matter. Family Church felt the tension and leaned into it—planting the Baldwin City campus that same year, meeting in a performing arts center that offered far more room than the Wellsville auditorium, which holds about 130 at capacity. Today, roughly 500 people are spread across the two locations on a given Sunday, with Wellsville running two services and Baldwin City running one.
That growth has come alongside a leadership transition, too. Just recently, Curtis stepped back into a family pastor role, and Kyle took over as lead pastor. The church Zach grew up in is now his brother's to lead and his to serve.
The decision not to simulcast is the thing that surprises people.
Family Church could leverage Resi for live streaming—another church in nearby Kansas City donated a set of Resi decoders and an encoder. Most churches that have both the setup and the campuses to justify it eventually go that direction. The math seems obvious: one teaching, broadcast to multiple rooms, with local hosts and worship teams at each campus. Simpler. Scalable.
Family Church looked at that model and chose something harder.
Every Sunday, Kyle preaches the 8 o'clock service in Wellsville. The worship team plays that set, then packs their guitars and pedal boards into their cars and drives to Baldwin City. Duplicate drum sets and keyboard rigs are already staged there by the Baldwin setup team; the guitar players bring their own gear. Zach follows after the Wellsville service to facilitate the Baldwin sound check. The whole team does the 9:30, then everyone drives back for the 10:30 in Wellsville, which is also Family Church's broadcast service, but that’s just for the internet, not for their other campus.
It's a lot. Zach knows it's a lot.
The easier answer was simulcast. Family Church chose the highway.
"There's been a topic of discussion for a couple of years now, at least with our leadership team," he says. The question of eventually moving to simulcast hasn't gone away—Zach's own hunch is that they'll probably get there someday. But they haven't moved that needle yet, and the reason is rooted in something more fundamental than logistics.
The campuses are ten miles apart. At that distance, if there's any meaningful difference in experience between the two locations—a campus that feels polished versus one that feels like the B-team got sent over—everyone is going to notice. The people doing the inviting are going to notice. The people being invited are going to notice.
"We don't want people to say, 'Well, you can come here, but if you really want the good one...' We don't want to create that," Zach says. "We're really trying to be one church in two locations."
The mission statement of Family Church, “To be the easiest place to experience the love and forgiveness of Jesus,” comes from the book of Acts—the moment when the early church leaders were debating what requirements to place on Gentiles coming to faith. The conclusion they reached: let us not make it difficult for them. For Family Church, that phrase has become the lens through which they evaluate most decisions.
"Let's not create too many man-made barriers," Zach says. "Let's just create a space for people to encounter Jesus."
Running the same communicator and the same worship team at both campuses is how they protect that—making sure nobody at either location is getting a lesser version of what Family Church is. The 4 am Sunday alarm and the cross-county sprint between services: all of it exists in service of that principle.
"We don't really have the resources to do an A-B that are equal," Zach says plainly. "So we're going to have the same team go provide that same engaging worship experience at both locations."
Family Church creates a contemporary worship environment in Wellsville that feels intentional without overwhelming the scale of its 130-seat room.
By Christmas, the plan is to have a new building.
A member of the church donated about three acres just down the street from the current Wellsville location. Construction is underway. The new auditorium will seat just over 300—more than double the current capacity—and the surrounding space will give the kids ministry room it hasn't had. That's the crunch right now: children's programming is pressed into whatever corners the building can offer, and it's not working.
The new room will bring a new AV system—and a fresh debate over how much change volunteers can absorb.
Zach is careful about the scale. Wellsville is a town of 2,200 people, and the church has tried not to overbuild for that reality. Three hundred seats is ambitious for the context. It's also enough to let the church keep growing without constantly bumping against its own walls.
The new room will get a full AV system—an Adamson line array is already purchased, and the team is still working through the console decision. They've been leaning toward an Allen & Heath Avantis, but volunteers have gotten comfortable on the Wing they currently run in Wellsville, and Zach is weighing how much of a learning curve he wants to introduce.
"I don't want to overload our volunteers and frustrate them," he says. "We're kind of just debating how we want to navigate that."
The new building could also be the moment when Family Church revisits the simulcast question in earnest. Zach has said openly that if they ever get to a third campus, the answer probably becomes clear on its own. The new Wellsville facility, with a proper auditorium and a full broadcast setup, might shift what's possible in ways the current room doesn't allow.
For now, though, the answer is the same: the alarm goes off at four, and the team drives the ten miles east, and the same songs get played twice before the morning is done. It costs something. Zach thinks it's worth it.
"We want people that are inviting their friends and their neighbors to church," he says. "We want them to be inviting them to the same thing."
