Helping Churches Make Vision Real

5 Big Questions to Answer Before you go Multisite

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Currently there are more than 8,000 multisite churches across America and more than 1,600 mega churches (churches of more than 2,000 people in weekly attendance). While both are growing the multisite church movement has outpaced the mega church movement in America. What was once seen as only a Band-Aid strategy for space issues at mega churches has become a vehicle for growth in local churches of all kinds and all sizes (the average size a church goes multisite is around 850-1200). “Multi” doesn’t mean “Mega” anymore.

Your church may be considering going multisite. If so, that’s exciting news and I’d love to hear about it! But before you do here are 5 big questions you need to answer before you take the multisite plunge.

1. How are we going to Deliver Teaching?

About 50% of multisite churches are delivering teaching via video while the other 50% are using live teaching in their locations. Live teaching requires less investment in technology for distribution while delivering teaching via video allows for clearer vision, culture and leadership through one voice. There are a lot of pros and cons. What best fits the unique personality of your church and best supports the vision of where you’re going?

2. Why are we going Multisite?

This is the biggest question you need to be able to answer before you pull the trigger on multisite. Are you doing it because you are mimicking the practice of others or are you doing it because it’s a natural recourse of your identity and vision? Do you have a culture worth replicating or would you be better off church planting? Multisite is not a growth engine, but it is a delivery system for growth. If your church is currently stuck and not growing, moving to a multisite model is not going to make your church grow.

3. What are we looking for in a Campus Pastor?

Are you looking for someone who is a visionary and entrepreneurial or are you looking for someone who is a strong leader and can implement and replicate systems and culture? Do you need someone who can teach and lead from the stage or someone who can develop staff and build teams? Do you want to hire from within so they already understand your culture or do you want to hire from the outside so you can change things? Do you know what you’re looking for in a campus pastor?

4. What is our Launch Strategy?

Have you chosen a strategic location that reflects your culture? Are you launching in a location where you already have people who drive to your original campus living in? Have you developed a core team and started small groups in the community prior to a public launch of the new campus? Do you have a financial model built to move the campus towards becoming financially self sustaining and ultimately giving towards future campuses? Have you developed a staffing strategy for the campus as it launches and grows? How will you grand open the location and invite the community?

5. How Consistent will our Approach be?

How autonomous or consistent will each campus be in it’s approach to ministry? Will the guest experience be the same or unique on each campus? Will people check-in kids the same way on each campus? Will the weekend worship service be identical, similar, or different? Will each campus have the same ministries or unique? Will each campus go on their own mission trips and have their own local and international partners or will campuses pool their resources and do it together? The list could go on and on, but the question that needs to be answered is how consistent will you be in your approach?

Posted in Leadership

Five Ways to Help Your Small Groups be Successful

Sunday, September 27, 2015

The following is a guest post by Chris Surratt. Chris is a ministry consultant with the Unstuck Group and has over twenty-two years of experience serving the local church. Most recently, Chris served on the Executive Team at Cross Point Church in Nashville, TN. Before coming to Cross Point in 2009, Chris was on staff at Seacoast Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Chris’s first book, Small Groups For The Rest Of Us: How to Design Your Small Groups System to Reach the Fringes, will be released by Thomas Nelson on September 29, 2015. You can find Chris blogging regularly at www.chrissurratt.com on the subjects of community, discipleship and leadership.

Whether you are starting from scratch at a brand-new church plant or blowing up a large system at an existing church, there are some principles that can help set up your new plan for success down the road. Here are five guidelines to think through.

1. Define the Win

Every ministry has to decide what its win looks like, and this is especially true for groups. If you don’t know what success looks like, how can you celebrate it? As you dream about what groups could look like at your church, start with the end in mind. What results would you like to see if your system works perfectly? Andy Stanley says, “Your system is perfectly designed to get the results you’re getting.” If my church is not producing disciples, there’s probably a systems problem. If only a small percentage of the congregation is involved in groups, it’s probably a systems issue. If we are not developing enough leaders to keep up with our growth, it probably has something to do with our leadership development system.

2. Choose a Champion

I talk to a lot of small-group pastors who cannot get any traction with groups at their churches. The first question I ask is, Is your senior pastor in a small group? Almost every time the answer is “no.”

It’s not impossible to build a successful groups system without the senior leader being fully on board, but it’s extremely difficult. The congregation is going to take its cues from the leaders, and if the senior pastor is not engaged in community, they will follow his lead. It does not matter how much he talks about the importance of groups from the pulpit if there are not consistent stories circulating from his own small group.

3. Put It in the Budget

When it comes down to budgeting for small groups, a lot of churches follow the example of Pharaoh in Exodus:

That same day the king gave a command to the slave masters and foremen. He said, “Don’t give the people straw to make bricks as you used to do. Let them gather their own straw. But they must still make the same number of bricks as they did before. Do not accept fewer.” (Exodus 5:6–8)

We are asking our point people for groups to build a successful system without the necessary straw but still expecting big results. As much as we want to believe community happens organically, it still takes resources for them to be strategic and effective.

4. Make It Scalable

Your church may never triple in size overnight (although it could), but now is the time to start planning for God to do the unexpected. What happens when you activate your first all-church campaign and suddenly need to triple the number of current groups to meet the demand? Do you have enough coaches? How difficult is it to become a small-group leader? Can you fast-track the vetting of new leaders? You should always be ready to go when God moves.

5. Make It Replicable

Think through not only what could be replicable across different locations, but also what do small groups look like in different layers of your church? The heart of student and kids ministries are small groups, and those ministries can benefit from partnering with the adult groups system for training, leadership development, and structure ideas. What if the same team that develops Sunday message studies works with the student leaders on theirs? What if a few adult group leaders mentor small-group leaders in the kid’s ministry? Replicating successful systems will help break down silos within a church.

Posted in Leadership, Spiritual Formation

Mastering the Art of Facilitation

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

If you haven’t noticed leadership and leading young leaders in particular is changing. Peter Drucker, considered to be the father of modern management, actually predicted this shift. He once said that:

“The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.”

Most leaders find it easier to tell than to ask. And that’s because it is. It takes less time and it requires less personal security (among other things). But facilitating leaders have got this “ask first tell second” concept down.

The Team Outperforms the Individual

Great facilitators believe that the team outperforms the individual. That “we” is always better than “me.” While you may be a fantastic leader, no leader gets everything right every time. Involving the team reduces your “miss-rate,” and builds trust and buy-in at the same time.

Process not Content

Great facilitators believe that they’re “process” and the “content” lives within their team. The job of the facilitating leader is to mine out and unlock the best ideas from their team. They trust the process and their team. Try believing in your team, you may just be surprised how they rise to the occasion.

Questions not Answers

Instead of leading with answers, facilitating leaders lead with questions. Even if your experience and leadership intuition tells you the right answer, resist the temptation to tell, and instead ask. Facilitating leaders don’t believe they have all the right answers so they ask good questions. Asking great questions teaches people to think and begin to develop their leadership muscle instead of just blindly follow by being told what to do.

By the way, if you haven’t connected the dots yet, let me help. Peter Drucker didn’t think this one up all by himself. This idea is a very Gospel centered idea. The Apostle Paul wrote about this idea multiple times throughout the New Testament comparing Christians to the “body of Christ.” Stating over and over again this idea that we are better together and none of us are as good as all of us.

Posted in Leadership, Staffing

5 Symptoms Your Church Needs More Volunteers

Sunday, September 20, 2015

I’ve never worked with a church that has said they don’t need more volunteers. But I’ve worked with a bunch of churches that have trouble getting people to volunteer and stay engaged volunteering.

Through our research at the Unstuck Group we’ve discovered that the average church in America has 43% of their adults and students volunteering somewhere in the church. Follow this link if you’re interested in learning if your church is healthy in this area and others.

While a lot of churches need more volunteers, most don’t know why they need more volunteers, or why it’s difficult for them to enlist and keep new volunteers.

1. Your “span of care” is too broad

If you can’t care for your volunteers, you’re not going to keep your volunteers very long. Because they’ll begin to sense that you want something from them not for them. In business-world Fortune 500 CEOs usually only have seven direct reports. That’s probably a great rule of thumb for ministry-world as well. A simple way to figure this out in your context is to add up the number of volunteers and then divide by the number of staff and volunteer leaders. If the result is more than seven, then you have a span of care issue and you need more leaders.

2. You have too many staff

One symptom I see over and over again in churches that struggle with building an effective volunteer ministry is that they are over-staffed. Instead of paying staff to lead, develop, and disciple people in the church they pay the staff to do the ministry. The research we’ve done at the Unstuck Group working with literally 100’s of churches has shown us that if you’re staffed at a ratio higher than 1:100 (1 FTE Staff Member for every 100 people attending your church) you’re overstaffed.

3. Every decision comes back to your desk

If every decision is coming back to your desk you haven’t figured out how to empower people. Empowering people first starts with clarifying the mission, vision, values and strategy. It means clearly articulating the role for volunteers, helping them understand how to make decisions that help the church move towards its vision, and then moving people from doing tasks to leading their teams.

4 Using people instead of developing people

Many churches I’ve observed view volunteering as roles to be filled instead of people to be developed. Here’s what I know, when you’re primarily focused on the number of volunteers you have and the ratios you have in classrooms you’ll never have enough volunteers. On the other hand when you primarily focus volunteers as people to be developed and discipleship, you’re far less likely to have a volunteer shortage. Because after all volunteering is discipleship.

5. It’s Difficult to get Involved

The number one complaint I hear from people who want to volunteer in churches who don’t is that they’ve tried to volunteer, they’ve signed up, they want to but they don’t know how to get involved, it was hard to get involved (they had to take multiple classes or be a member of the church prior to volunteering), or no one ever called them back. Does your church make it easy or difficult for people to get involved and start volunteering?

Posted in Leadership, Volunteers

Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit 2015

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

If you missed the 2015 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit, then you missed some great content, great speakers, and incredible ideas that have the potential to shift your thinking when it comes to leadership. But no worries! Now you’ve got all the notes to every session right here at your fingertips for free! Hope you enjoy!

Session #1 Bill Hybels

Bill Hybels is the founder and Senior Pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL. He also the founded The Global Leadership Summit, now in over 200 U.S. sites and over 260 cities worldwide including 85 countries opened the Summit by talking about the 5 intangibles of leadership.

Session #2 Jim Collins

Jim Collins, a Summit favorite and successful leadership author delivered 7 Questions he learned to ask from West Point.

Session #3 Ed Catmull

Ed Catmull, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios and President of Walt Disney Animation Studios, delivered a fantastic talk on creativity and leadership!

Session #4 Brene Brown

Dr. Brene Brown, research professor at the University of Houston and best selling author delivered a fantastic talk on the power of rising strong! Her 2010 TEDx Houston talk, The Power of Vulnerability, is one of the top five most viewed TED talks in the world with more than 18 million views!

Session #5 Adam Grant

Adam Grant is a professor at the Wharton School of Business and best-selling author. He is one of the world’s 40 best business professors under 40. He discussed the principles from his new book Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives our Success.

Session #6 Sallie Krawcheck

Sallie Krawcheck, the Chair of Ellevate Network and former President of Bank of America’s Global Wealth & Investment Management delivered a great talk on ethics and diversity in leadership!

Session #7 Albert Tate

Albert Tate, founder and Senior Pastor at Fellowship Monrovia in Southern California gave a great challenge on how to lead with leftovers.

Session #8 Horst Schulze

Horst Schulze, the Chairman and CEO of the Capella Hotel Group and Founding President and former COO of the Ritz Carlton began day-2 at the Summit and did an incredible job of challenging leaders to inspire customer loyalty by raising the bar on customer service. I was particularly intrigued by the connection he made between customer service and the life of Jesus.

Session #9 Sheila Heen

Shelia Heen is the founder of the Triad Consulting Group and faculty at Harvard Law School.

Session #10 Brian Houston

Brian Houston is the Sr. Pastor of Australia based Hillsong Church, a global family of congregations comprising more than 100,000 weekly attendees. During this session Bill Hybels sat down with Brian for an interview…here are some of my take aways.

Session #11 Sam Adeyemi

Sam Adeyemi the founder and Senior Pastor of Daystar Christian Center in Nigeria gave a fantastic talk on “Crushing the Power Gap.”

Session #12 Liz Wiseman

Liz Wiseman, the President of the Wiseman Group and best-selling author gave a talk based on her new book: Rookie Smarts – Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work.

Session #13 Craig Groeschel

Craig Groeschel is the founder and Senior Pastor of LifeChurch.tv, known for using innovative technology to spread the Gospel to multiple locations around the U.S. and globally via Church Online. Craig closed out summit with an incredible talk about expanding your leadership capacity.