CLERMONT — Since its opening, Lanier Hills Church has thrived at its Duckett Mill location.

But the Rev. Randall Popham and the church's congregation are ready to expand to a new ministry — and a new campus. The second Lanier Hills campus, which is located in Clermont, will officially welcome members and visitors Oct. 4.

The campus expansion is part of what Popham calls a multicampus strategy. The movement of multiple church locations is popular among some expanding churches, Popham said.

"It is not relatively new, the multicampus strategy, and there is a whole network of churches that are doing this," he said, citing North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, which broadcasts video of services to different campuses.

"Our goal is not to be video based but to have leaders at each one that are leading a campus and doing the teaching."

The vision for the church is to have 32 Lanier Hills campuses in the next 20 years.

"This is the first one, so the plan is that every five years every campus starts a new campus," Popham said. "So it is exponential growth, but it is all one church and it has different locations."

At the new Clermont campus, the Rev. Trent Dollyhigh will take the lead as campus pastor next week.

"It is not a traditional church plant where you start from scratch," Dollyhigh said. "You have the core group coming out of that (Duckett Mill) campus, who are fully involved and part of the vision."

This will be Dollyhigh's first assignment as lead campus pastor, after serving as associate pastor at the Duckett Mill campus.

And longtime church member and Clermont resident Ron Cain is excited about the new campus pastor and new campus.

"Trent, being the associate pastor at Duckett Mill, had many opportunities to speak, and we are used to him and love hearing him speak," Cain said. "I think the people are really excited for him to be the campus pastor. There are a lot of good churches in the Clermont area ... we just want to give an alternative to people."

Dollyhigh said his goals for the new campus are very much the same as when he was at the Duckett Mill campus.

"Every number represents a life, and our goal is to literally see people's lives change, marriages grow stronger, families grow stronger in this area," he said. "We want to have an impact in this community so that once this campus is more established, if it were to leave this community, it would be felt."

At the preview service a couple of weeks ago, 150 people showed up to the new campus.

"The reason we chose this (location) is because we have a good group of people that already live in this area," Popham said. "They have been driving 30 minutes every Sunday, all the time, and going back and forth. They have been very involved, and we want to be in their neighborhood."

The new campus wasn't built from scratch; space is rented at an existing church, The Fellowship of Living Praise. But the Fellowship of Living Praise's worship area is completely changed when Lanier Hills takes over the building on Sunday evenings.

"Everything changes to black, with Lanier Hills logos ... so it is completely different," Popham said. "They have a lot of banners, so it looks a lot different than ours. So when we come in we move banners and we set up a whole backdrop and we give it our own flair."

The first sermon that Dollyhigh will bring to the new campus will kick off a series called "Under Construction."

"The first message that we are going to bring to this community is that we are all in process and a work in progress," Popham said. "From Moses to David, some of the great figures of the Bible were under construction, and God built them back up to a place that he could use them."