Tag Archive - campus

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Introducing “Multisite Unstuck” the Newest Online Course from the Unstuck Group

Sunday, June 16, 2019

Without a Clear Strategy, Going Multisite Will Get You Multistuck.

When you originally went multisite, I know you started expanding campuses with the desire to reach more people for Jesus.

But, adding campuses adds complexity to your ministry. Strategies that are supposed to help you engage more people, maximize resources and eliminate space constraints can instead knot things up in multiple areas of the ministry.

This shouldn’t keep us from expanding, but if you want to effectively multiply your church’s impact, reaching more people in more places, we have to prepare to do multisite well.

If you find yourself feeling stuck, you’re not the only multisite church feeling like this. And the good news? There IS a way forward.

I am so excited to announce our newest online course
Multisite Unstuck.

Our team has 100+ years of combined experience leading in effective multisite churches. We wanted to leverage that experience and help churches across the country get unstuck through this online course.

In this course, you can expect to gain—

  • Tools for clarifying decision rights, choosing locations, and building volunteer strength for campus launches.
  • Clarity on the multisite mindset and gaps your church has in fully adopting it.
  • A plan to reduce the tension that tends to develop between central ministry and campus leaders.
  • A process to right-size staff and volunteer teams based on the size of your multisite campuses.
  • Tools for evaluating the campus pastor role and setting Campus Pastors up for success.
  • Best practices for multisite models and for structuring your team.
  • Strategies for improving internal and external communication… and more.

And the best part? It’s all on your own time. It’s all formatted to work with your busy schedule. It gives tangible next steps that help you implement your learnings in your unique context.

We’re seeing more and more multisite churches unintentionally find themselves at the point of “un-multisiting,” with senior pastors finding themselves thinking, “How did we get here?”

I want to encourage you to be proactive. Leaders see stuckness first—and they get things moving again.

Follow this link to learn more!

Posted in Leadership

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Avoiding My Multisite Mistakes

Monday, January 28, 2019

For the past seven years I’ve been serving as an Executive Pastor in a large multisite church in the Phoenix metro area…before that it was a single site megachurch in the Phoenix metro area…but adopting a multisite strategy changed everything. If you’d have asked me back in High School when I was called into ministry if I ever wanted to be an Executive Pastor at a Mega-Multisite church I probably would have replied, “What’s an Executive Pastor and what does Multisite mean?”

Recently I’ve been hearing stories of churches that went multisite somewhere along the way as a strategy to reach more people and deliver growth to a new community that are now releasing those campuses to be their own independent churches, shutting campuses down, or abandoning their multisite approach altogether.

I’m a firm believer in multisite as a strong and successful strategy to deliver growth into new communities for the right churches. I believe in it so strongly because I’ve seen so many people get to meet, know and follow Jesus that otherwise would not have been reached. But not every church is ready to go multisite.

The statistic still holds true that only 15% of multisite churches ever get past 3 campuses. It doesn’t have to be that way for you and your church. Here’s a few mistakes that I’ve made along the way that I hope you can learn from.

The Campus Pastor

Unfortunately, every time we’ve hired a Campus Pastor from the outside it hasn’t worked, every time. However, every time we’ve promoted someone from the inside, even if they’d only been on the team for a year, it’s been a win. One of the worst mistakes I made was hiring in a Campus Pastor from the outside and putting him on a campus that was the furthest away with the least visibility to coaching and the Central Team. He wasn’t a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination, we just didn’t put him in a situation to succeed.

Location, Location, Location!

We’ve started one campus in a set up and tear down situation. It met in the biggest, newest high school in the community. The room they met in had a pitched floor, theatre seating and a great stage. It was nicer than most churches! The problem was it was in the wrong location, it was buried in a neighborhood. As soon as we relocated that campus to their own facility on a major road with the right volume of drive by traffic, parking and accessibility it grew by nearly 50%.

Give Rope Don’t Take It

Multisite provides the opportunity to come up with all kinds of new solutions. Those new solutions 9 times out of 10 don’t come from central team that serves all of the campuses, they come from the campuses, because they’re the ones closest to the people. The trouble is when every campus is coming up with their own solutions it can make for not only complexity but straight up conflict between campuses and the central team. I’m all for innovation, but we’ve learned that there’s no innovation without first communication…and we’ve learned it’s much easier to give a little rope along the way and margin to contextualize and innovate than have to corral the horses and take that rope back once it’s already out there.

It Cost More Than You Think

Going multisite forced us to change our entire financial approach. We had church planted for years, and honestly church planting was a pretty low financial investment compared to starting a new campus. When you plant a church, you may send out a leader or two, you may send some families to go with them, you financially invest in it for a season and you may provide coaching for a while. But then once it’s birthed it’s pretty much on its own. When you launch a multisite campus you’re on the financial hook for the whole thing. If finances get tight you have to figure it out. You can count on multisite costing more than you think.

Need some help with the multisite journey at your church? The Unstuck Group has a unique process designed specifically for multisite churches. Follow this link to learn more!

Posted in Leadership

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8 Characteristics of a Great Campus Pastor

Sunday, September 23, 2018

I wrote my first article about multisite churches eight years ago, it was entitled, “Why 20 Churches Went, Didn’t Go, and Still Might Go Multisite.” The article was based on a conversation with a group of Executive Pastors from large churches across America that I had been asked to facilitate. Since that time, I’ve written over 40 articles about multisite churches and I’ve learned a few things along the way from leading in a multisite church and making mistakes, finding success, as well as learning from other great multisite churches.

There’s a lot that goes into building a successful approach to multisite. However, in my experience there’s one thing that stands out above all the conversations and arguments that take place over the next location, financial and staffing strategies, live verses video teaching, branding, culture, decision rights, and what ministries you should replicate at each new location. The Campus Pastor. That’s because people make decisions and replicate culture. That’s something structures, policies or even systems can never do. Policies, structures and systems may institutionalize or support your culture, but people build and replicate it. Get the right people and the right people will lead you to the right solutions.

So with that in mind, here are eight characteristics that you need to be looking for in your next Campus Pastor.

#1 Culture: They fit your organizational “DNA.” They embody and champion the mission, vision and values of your team.

#2 Communication: Depending on your teaching model, they don’t necessarily need to be able to teach from the stage, but they do need to be a good communicator. They need to be able to speak with your church’s “voice” and have the capacity to inspire people and motivate movement.

#3 Relationships: They’ve got to have great relational skills. This may sound shallow, but people need to like them. If they don’t like them then they won’t like your church. This means they have to have a pretty high E.Q. and be good with people.

#4 Leadership: To be a Campus Pastor they not only have to be a gifted leader, but they need to have a proven leadership track record of building and leading teams. They need to be able to show how they’ve led through others by not only delegating tasks but empowering decision making.

#5 Driven: Being a Campus Pastor isn’t always rainbows and unicorns. If you’ve ever wanted to be a Campus Pastor, be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Campus Pastors need to be mentally tough and have a certain amount of grit to lead through the tensions of moving people from where they are to where they need to be. They need to be able to execute and deliver, not just pontificate about ideas.

#6 Start Date: They’ve got to be able to join your team at least 6 to 12 months prior to the launch of the new location. It’s going to take that long for them to be a part of building the core team, staff team and deal with launch details. I’d encourage you to give them an even longer onramp if they’re being hired in from the outside and need to learn and embrace your culture.

#7 Community: They’ve got to be willing to live in and/or engage the community where the new campus is going to be.

#8 Second-Chair: Great Campus Pastors are wired to serve as a second-chair leader. They don’t need to be the vision caster but they need to believe in and be a vision carrier.

Posted in Leadership, Staffing

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Why Video Teaching Will Work in Your Town Too

Sunday, March 4, 2018

When I consult with churches that are considering going multisite one of the key exercises I facilitate with their team centers around how they are going to approach preaching in their weekend worship services. It’s a big conversation and a decision that has significant implications to the model and approach that churches take when it comes to multisite.

Inevitably somewhere in the conversation someone challenges the idea of video teaching and says something like, “You don’t know our people, video teaching will never work with our people or in this community.” While I’d be the first to say that video teaching isn’t the right approach for every church to take it works better than you think, more often than you think, and in more locations than you think.

In fact the picture below is a video venue for a large multisite church that I recently took. This venue is their one traditional service that they do. The service has a choir and a more traditional physical space. It’s a very different vibe than the modern worship services they do in their auditoriums, but the video teaching is the same. The average age in this service is over 70. Video works. Even with an older demographic. Even in a traditional setting.

The World is not Engaging with Technology Less

People around the country and around the world are not engaging with technology less, they’re engaging with technology more. Content and information is increasingly being delivered to people over a screen. In fact on a recent trip to the Philippines, even in a poorer area, people had their smart phones. It’s time for churches to stop debating it and watching the world pass them by and start leveraging it.

I Never Saw Jesus Preach the Sermon on the Mount

Whenever this conversation comes up I routinely remind people that I never saw Jesus preach the best sermon in history (commonly referred to as the sermon on the mount) but it’s changed my life. It was written down for us to read because video technology didn’t exist yet. My hunch is if Steve Jobs was a contemporary to Jesus then someone would have pulled out their iPhone and stuck that sermon on YouTube so we could all see and hear it for ourselves.

Video Teaching Creates Greater Cultural Consistency between Campuses

I firmly believe that nothing else in your church has the power to build the unique culture of your church than preaching does. Video teaching provides churches the opportunity to allow teaching to be consistent across campuses and venues, and as a result keep culture more consistent. This is why the church pictured above has video teaching even in their “traditional service.” They wanted the people who attend the traditional service to feel like they were a part of the church not going to another church.

Most People are Against Video Teaching in Principle…until they try it

I’ve found that most “church-people” are against the idea of video teaching until they personally experience it. I say “church-people” on purpose because people who are new to your church have no idea what to expect because they’ve never been to church before. Everything is new to them so I’ve discovered that people who are new to church and Jesus don’t have the same hangups that “church-people” do.  Even in the traditional service pictured above I observed firsthand how people quickly forget that they’re watching video preaching and begin to interact with video by laughing, nodding their heads, raising their hands when asked to by the pastor, and even stand up and walk to a volunteer to say yes to following Jesus. All through video teaching.

Posted in Leadership

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4 Questions to Shift your Thinking about Church Mergers

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Through my experience working with churches I’ve discovered that the idea of “Church Mergers” is met with a variety of emotions, many which are negative. I’ve found that some view it as a cannibalistic way for growing churches to gobble up smaller struggling churches to enlarge their own footprint and grow their brand, not the Kingdom of God. I’ve even seen some churches that would rather die and close their doors than merge with or gift their property to another church.

With all of this negative emotion around the idea of church mergers I thought I’d throw out a couple of questions that may open a more helpful conversation about mergers and maybe even shift some thinking.

What are you going to do with those Kingdom Assets?

There are churches that have a great story of growing and reaching people in the past but have declined and are on “life-support” today. Many of these Kingdom assets are in places like L.A., New York, Chicago, Washington D.C. and other areas where the cost of real-estate is a barrier to starting new churches. Why not gift those assets to a thriving and growing church in your state that has a proven and successful multisite model and turn that location into a campus?

Would a Merger Yield Greater Kingdom Results?

If you merged with another church would you experience a greater Kingdom impact together than you would individually? If each church would take more Kingdom ground as an individual autonomous church then by all means they should stay that way. But, if greater ground would be taken together it’s worth a serious conversation.

Do you want this person to be your Sr. Pastor?

Language is important. In a church merger, you’re often leading through a highly emotionally charged situation. Poorly wording things can stop things before they really get going. I’ve found one helpful way to discuss it is to ask the church that is potentially joining your church if they would want your Pastor to be their Pastor? This reframes the conversation and makes it a lot less threatening.

Would you want to adopt the Vision and Practices of the church you’re merging with?

It’s difficult to generate much traction in a church merger conversation if you lead early on with all of the stuff that the joining church is going to have to change. For instance, adopting a new vision, approach to ministry and different practices. That can feel overwhelming and threatening to the joining church. A more palatable way to get into that conversation may be to start with the stories of life-change, momentum and all of the great stuff that God is doing in and through the ministry of your church. Would the potentially joining church like to have that kind of a story and those kinds of results?

Posted in Leadership, Staffing
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