CityLife Church: Building a Culture of Multiplication
By Warren Bird
Every Thursday morning at 8:00 a.m., about 150 students at a high school in the suburb of Berwick in Melbourne, Australia, receive breakfast from CityLife Church’s Casey campus. Providing these meals began 17 years ago when the site was only three years old because the church had learned about the serious trend of rising domestic violence.
“We wanted to respond to the needs of the neighborhood when we realized that many teens skip breakfast in order to escape domestic violence situations by leaving home early in the morning,” explains Amanda Saenz, lead pastor of the Casey campus.
When she recently asked the school’s principal if the meals were still helping, the principal said yes—and could the church do some mentoring as well?
“There are more requests in our area than we can respond to,” Saenz says.
While providing this service and meeting other needs in the community are an important focus of CityLife Casey, the campus also wants to multiply itself in a town about 45 minutes away.
Some people have wondered how the Casey location, which draws approximately 350 people each week, can start another campus despite its limited size and its energies already going into local outreach. The answer is it’s happening because of strong support from a central services team, a church multiplication taskforce, and a multisite senior leadership team that works with each campus leader to develop four steps toward site replication: discern, design, develop and then deploy.
Creating Independence
The main CityLife Church has six physical campuses in greater Melbourne, along with an online campus. It also supports two Chinese-speaking congregations, plus a church-planting hub in Ethiopia, and additional church-planting efforts in nine other nations.
The original CityLife location, founded in 1967, became multisite in 2006 with Casey as its first campus.
“We have always been a movement of churches; that’s always been part of our missional DNA,” observes Andrew Chisholm, senior minister at CityLife since 2019. “We call ourselves one church in many locations, but we are helping each site become more decentralized and independent in order to move toward multiplication.”
One testimony in the path toward multiplication happened when the church released one of its staff members to serve overseas. Paulos Djini, an Ethiopian national who joined CityLife in 2008, was sent out by the church back to Ethiopia. To date the church planting movement pioneered by Djini has started more than 30 churches, and through CityLife Ethiopia, more than 5,000 people have given their life to Christ.
More locally, CityLife has been learning to decentralize over the years. According to Chisholm, “Back when we moved from four to seven campuses here in Melbourne, it required many shifts.”
The church’s staff has worked to define not only what can be decentralized, but also what ministry constants are their distinctives—the essential elements of any CityLife Church plant, such as its Life Group strategy and discipleship programs.
“We have spent a lot of time articulating and agreeing to the campus constants or non-negotiables,” Saenz says. “We have also identified where flexibility is appropriate, from service structure to how we do local outreach.”
“Our ongoing question is how to maintain our missional DNA,” Chisholm adds. “That seems to be a discussion that will never be finished.”
Coaching and Support
In addition to the local empowerment that comes through decentralization, CityLife’s leadership is committed to training, coaching and mentoring when one of its campuses takes up the challenge of replicating itself. It is truly a team effort.
The four most recent campuses were each a different expression. After several stops and starts in their early development, two Chinese-language congregations came about in 2005. The online campus was birthed by the church’s Knox congregation through COVID-19. In 2022, CityLife opened a campus in the middle of Melbourne City by multiplying out of its Manningham site, where the focus has been reaching university students and families. To this day, that new site’s ratio of conversion to attendance is second only to the Chinese-language congregations.
“For 2026, we have been encouraging every existing site to move toward planting a new site,” Saenz attests. In the spirit of the apostle Paul’s quest to take the gospel to Rome, she explains that they ask each location’s lead pastor, “Where’s your Rome?”
Saenz says that for herself and other leaders at Casey, “Since 2017 we have sensed a stirring toward a neighborhood called Mornington.”
With many prophetic confirmations that now is the time, church planting discussions in Mornington have birthed monthly outreach meetings.
Reproducing Disciples
Across every location, CityLife leaders return to the same mission: making disciples who impact communities, cities and nations. Saenz says Jeremiah 29 helps frame that focus—God’s call to seek the welfare of the city and pray for it, trusting that as the city flourishes, its people will flourish too.
“You’ve got to start with reproducing disciples, which means you have got to take evangelism and apprenticeship seriously. They all feed each other,” Saenz says.
“By multiplying new congregations, we reinvigorate our missional DNA,” Chisholm says.
These efforts have combined to strengthen a culture shift where people have begun to re-engage with a heart for reaching the lost and reaching those people on the margins.
Saenz emphasizes that multiplication begins before new campuses ever launch.
“A lot of pastors have the heart to reproduce and plant churches, but unless you multiply disciples and leaders, you won’t reproduce churches,” she notes.
In CityLife’s experience, evangelism and apprenticeship develop disciples and leaders who form healthy communities, and healthy communities become a base for future growth—both locally and, in time, beyond.
CITYLIFECHURCH
Melbourne, Australia
Senior Minister: Andrew Chisholm
Website: CityLife.church
Founded: 1967
Total Melbourne-area Attendance: 4,000
