Helping Churches Make Vision Real

Has your Church Hit a Growth Barrier?

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Growth barriers often leave leaders feeling like they’ve exhausted their options and resources for growth and that they are stuck. But, here’s the good news about growth barriers: they can be broken down by changing your ministry routine. Shifting the way you approach leadership, structure, and methods can provide a huge boost to your church’s growth.

For many years now, we’ve been hosting coaching networks. The Unstuck Team continues to put on these networks for many reasons, but the primary would be this: we want churches to get unstuck. We’ve seen these networks challenge and encourage leaders to break growth barriers by learning insights and strategies to take their church to the next level.

In these networks, you’ll learn best practices from healthy, growing churches and begin applying them in your church environment from day one. The Unstuck Team will walk alongside you as you take your next steps in leadership by fighting for healthy growth and learning how to establish a healthy church structure.

Each church is unique in its strategies, methods and practices. This is why we believe in the power of coming together to discover ways to explore outside of our ministry routine to experience growth.

This fall, we’re hosting 3 leadership coaching networks. Each will consist of a 7-month, collaborative coaching experience that includes 3 gatherings in Atlanta, 2 exclusive webinars, and 2 one-on-one coaching calls. Here are the options:

The Unstuck Church: Reaching 1,000 Coaching Network

This network is designed to help you move from reaching hundreds to reaching 1,000 in attendance by clarifying what’s working and what’s wrong, defining an action plan for next steps, and establishing a staffing and ministry structure that supports growth and health.

The Unstuck Church: Growing Beyond 2,000 Coaching Network

This network will help you develop strategies to tackle the unique challenges of larger churches including leadership development, staffing, communications, discipleship and establishing healthy growth engines.

Multisite Leadership Coaching Network

This experience will set you up to more effectively lead a growing, multisite church. We will help you navigate Common Pitfalls in Multisite, Refining Your Model, Clarifying How You Structure and Operate, Best Practices for Launching a Campus, Managing the Tension (Central vs Campus), and more!

We have space for only 7 churches in each network — some of which are already gone, so make sure to follow this link secure your spot soon!

Posted in Leadership

Why Churches Decline and Die

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Years ago, a church started in the Phoenix east valley. This church plant grew rapidly. Helping new people meet Jesus, they became one of the first mega churches in the east valley. Eventually the pastor, under whose leadership this growth took place, left and the succession didn’t go very well. Neither did the next succession. Or the next. In fact, that church went through 18 straight years of decline until at the end of that decline they ended up merging with another church.

Today the new campus averages more than 1,000 people in weekend attendance and is helping new people meet, know and follow Jesus.

Unfortunately for most churches in decline there’s no great comeback story. Churches decline for all kinds of reasons and it’s usually more complicated than one simple decision that was made somewhere along the way.

However, church decline can be avoided and even turned around. If your church is stuck or in decline I’d encourage you to start a conversation with the Unstuck Group. They have proven track record of helping churches get unstuck. Here are a couple big reasons, in no particular order, why churches decline and die.

1. Fuzzy Vision

Vision answers the question, “Where are we going?” Vision provides everyone clarity and without clarity things slow down, or even worse people start doing what they think is right in their own eyes. One of the single most life-threatening indicators that a church is in trouble is a lack of clarity. Clarity provides a church with the power to make decisions efficiently and align the organizational components of the church to move forward. If you don’t know where you’re going, and can’t state it clearly, you’ve got no chance to get there.

2. Staff Hired to Do Ministry

When your church has a high staff to attendance ratio (at the Unstuck Group we encourage churches to staff 1:100 – that is 1 full time staff equivalent for every 100 attenders) and you’re hiring staff to do ministry instead of leading ministry by recruiting, developing and empowering volunteers to do and lead ministry your church will end up in decline.

3. No Strategic Plan

Strategy answers the question, “How are we going to get there?” Strategy fills the gap between where you are and where you want to be. It’s planning for tomorrow today. Little is more demoralizing to a church staff team than a bunch of empty inspirational talk that never materializes into real courageous action.

4. Over Reaching

My dad used to call this having, “Wine taste on a beer budget.” Over reaching and overextending the church with unsustainable decisions such as too much debt, offering too many ministry options, or starting too many things at once can cripple a church and set it back years, often times never recovering.

5. Style Worship

No, not worship style (although those battles can be tough too), style worship. When churches begin to care more about ministry programs or a style and approach to ministry than the results of the ministry they’re on their way to decline.

6. Demographic Drift

Over time it’s not uncommon for the demographics around a church to shift. This can easily be observed most commonly through age and race. Many churches choose to ignore these changes and as a result never change their approach to ministry which leads to decline every time.

7. Insider Focus

I’ve said this many times before, the most dangerous place a church can be in their life cycle is when the ministry they are doing is having a big impact with insiders (people who already know Jesus and are inside the church) but a low impact with outsiders (people who don’t know Jesus yet). It’s dangerous because it’s comfortable. It feels like things are going well and you have momentum because people are happy, they’re regularly attending, and they seem to be “all in” with what you’re doing. But if you aren’t reaching new people, your church or ministry is already moving towards unhealthiness and decline.

Posted in Leadership

Leadership Summit 2017: Gary Haugen

Friday, August 18, 2017

Gary Haugen leads International Justice Mission (IJM), a world-wide agency rescuing victims of violence, exploitation, slavery and oppression. Recognized by the U.S. State Department as a Trafficking in Persons “Hero” – the highest honor given by the U.S. government for anti-slavery leadership – Haugen is the author of three books and has been featured in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times and Forbes.

There is one thing that stands between what you learn and what you do. And that one thing is fear.
All of the finest leadership training in the world can be rendered useless by fear.
That’s why on his last night with His disciples Jesus tells them not to be afraid.
Fear is the silent destroyer of dreams
Leadership begins with a dream
Fear destroys the love that inspires the dream and replaces it with a preoccupation with self
We are most likely to not know what scares us the most deeply
Being brave is hard
You must relentlessly inventory your own fears…what are you really afraid of?
Switch from playing defense to playing offense. No great dream was built on the fear of what might go wrong
If we are more impressed with bad men than a good God then fear is going to eat your leadership for lunch
You cannot move towards a dream of love while retreating to a bunker of fear
Hell is playing defense not the kingdom of God
46million people on the planet are in slavery today. More people than at any point in the history of the planet.
Great leaders forge a community of courage around them
Lone rangers do not make great dreams come true ever, lone rangers make movies
If anyone was entitled to adopt a lone ranger leadership model it was Jesus…but what did He do? He forged a community of courage around him.
Courage, like fear, is contagious
Remember that we are only servants on the battlefield and that the real soldier is Christ Himself.

Posted in Leadership

Leadership Summit 2017: Angela Duckworth

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Angela Duckworth is a professor of psychology at University of Pennsylvania and founder of Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance the practice of character development. An advisor to the White House, the World Bank and Fortune 500 CEO’s, Duckworth studies grit and self-control, two attributes critical to success and well-being. Her first book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, debuted in 2016 as a New York Times bestseller.

All people are ambitious. People like to be good at what they do and when given a choice they would like to be excellent.

What do high performers have in common?

#1 They are hard workers
#2 They finish whatever they begin
#3 They have difficulty maintaining their focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete
#4 They change their interests from year to year

The maturity principle: with age and experience qualities and character like grit get better
Grit can change with culture and experience
We can build grit
There is a huge distinction between talent and effort
It takes passion and perseverance
Grit = Sustained passion and perseverance for especially long term goal
Talent x effort = skill
Skill x effort = achievement
You can say of talented people that they were born to do something, but you can’t say they were born doing something
It takes deliberate practice to become excellent
Most people live a life of arrested development…they plateau
Many people even drop out and quit
World class excellence…what is deliberate practice?
It beings with setting a goal
They focus 100% on it
They get feedback and coaching (you can’t get better at anything without feedback)
Reflect and refine
Why doesn’t everyone do these things? Why don’t more people do more deliberate practice? It’s not that much fun.
Everyone has to drop out of something at some point to pursue other opportunities and goals
Grit and happiness go hand in hand…people who have grit are usually content with their life as well

How to build Grit:

#1 Develop your interests before training your weaknesses
#2 Know the science of deliberate practice…can I do a little more deliberate practice
#3 Cultivate purpose beyond yourself
#4 Adopt a growth mindset

Somebody in your life needs to love you so much that they’ll let you quit on a good day but not on a bad day

Posted in Leadership

Leadership Summit 2017: Immaculee Ilibagiza

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Immaculee Ilibagiza is a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide that took the lives of nearly one million Tutsi, including her entire family except for one brother. She survived by huddling silently with seven other women in a 3-by-4 foot bathroom for 91 days. Despite unimaginable suffering, she committed herself to a life of peace, hope and forgiveness. Ilibagiza works with the United Nations and is the best-selling author of Left to Tell.

I learned to forgive, but more importantly I learned the joy of forgiveness and that forgiveness is possible in every situation
To know without a shadow of a doubt that God is real and that when you can’t He can
And whatever God tells you, He’s right
The genocide happened because we failed to love one another
I can’t change other people but I can change myself
When things get bad…they can get worse
Complaining doesn’t help things get any better
In times of crisis you will hear all kinds of voices and you will have to choose the right voice to listen to