5 Questions Stuck Churches Commonly Ask

Tag Archive - consulting

5 Questions Stuck Churches Commonly Ask

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

You’ve probably heard me say before that “stuckness” is no respecter of the “brand” or “flavor” of a church. All kinds of churches across America are stuck. Large churches, small churches, old churches, new churches, Baptist churches, Methodist churches, Nazarene churches, Presbyterian church and even non-denominational churches are stuck. In fact Thom Rainer, President and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources has stated in his research that:

“Eight out of ten of the approximately 400,000 churches in the United States are declining or have plateaued.”

That’s 80% if you’re doing the math. In my work consulting with churches and coaching church leaders there are 5 common questions or values that I see come up over and over again in churches that are stuck, but sometimes don’t know it yet. Could this be your church?

1. How do we make change and keep people from leaving the church?

The simple answer is, you don’t. The good news is people are always going to leave your church. You get to choose who leaves by the decisions you make and the way you lead. Churches who are making decisions based on who they are going to keep instead of who they are going to reach are stuck.

2. How do we get more people in our discipleship class?

If your primary method of discipleship is a class, your church may be educating people but they’re not building disciples. Christian education is not the same thing as disciple making. If you don’t have a clear pathway for people who say yes to Jesus to move towards knowing Him and following Him then your church is moving towards being stuck.

3. How can we hire more staff to run more ministries?

When your church is hiring people to do ministry instead of lead people to do ministry your church is stuck. Church that are rapidly moving towards providing more “ministry services” for more people to attend and participate in instead of investing those same resources into developing volunteers are often stuck and don’t know it yet. Ministry participation is not the same thing as people development.

4. How can we protect our kids and students from the world?

Churches that adopt a protection-oriented mindset instead of a preparation-oriented mindset often end up stuck because that thinking permeates the entire culture of the church. These churches are often risk-averse and talk about defending the Gospel. The Gospel doesn’t need to be defended from outsiders it needs to be unleashed. These churches often choose to curse the darkness instead of proclaiming the light.

5. How can we continue to increase our missions giving?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for missions. But when a church begins to take pride in supporting a long list of missionaries across an ocean instead of doing anything short of sin to reach people in their neighborhood with the Gospel they are stuck.

Need help getting your church unstuck? The Strategic Operating Process that we lead churches through at the Unstuck Group will help your church clarify your mission, vision, and core strategies—and then realize it through prioritized action initiatives.

Posted in Leadership

Celebrating an Incredible year at The Unstuck Group

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

If you’re like me, taking time to pause and celebrate probably isn’t a strong suit. I’m usually more interested in what’s next than what just happened. Slowing down, celebrating wins, and enjoying the fruit of ministry is a discipline I’m continuing to grow in.

Four years ago when I joined Tony Morgan to become a Consultant at The Unstuck Group I never imagined what that startup Consulting Group would turn into. Recently Tony shared some incredible wins from 2015 on a video call with team that I wanted to share with you.

We had the opportunity to serve more than 60 churches by helping them through a Ministry Health Assessment, the development of a Strategic Action Plan, and reviewing and developing their Staffing and Structure Plan for the future.
We added Amy Anderson, Amanda Baranowski, Ron Baum, Sara Chapple, Josh Clark, David D’Angelo, Chad Hunt, Tammy Kelley, Michael Moore, Chris Surratt and Elizabeth Welborne to our team. That more than doubled our capacity to serve churches.
We traveled to 22 states, Canada and the United Kingdom to help churches get unstuck.
We launched an online ministry health assessment to encourage churches to take a first step in understanding what’s working and where there are opportunities for improvement.
The churches we served ranged in size from under 100 to over 22,000 in attendance. In case you’re curious, the average size church we serve is 1,150 people.
We started GrowthSolutions–our service that is designed to coach leadership teams at smaller churches who want to take intentional steps towards growing their church to 500 in weekly attendance.
We worked in 18 different denominations. That included launching a new initiative supporting denominations that want to resource their healthiest churches that have the most potential for future growth.
We engaged 46 leaders in coaching networks to help them take their next steps in their leadership.
We refreshed our website to better reflect what we do to help churches get unstuck.
We released two eBooks. The first one was 7 Warning Signs Your Church Has Ministry Silos. The second one was Reaching and Leading Millennials.

It was a great year for our team, and I wanted to take the opportunity to share this with you. It’s exciting to see the Unstuck Group grow, I’m proud of the team that’s being built and I believe in the way we serve churches. But what’s even more exciting to me is to watch churches get unstuck and see more people meet Jesus as a result.

We want to help more churches get unstuck.

Posted in Leadership

10 Articles that will Help Your Church Make Vision Real

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Thank you for making September a great month here at Helping Churches Make Vision Real! It’s great staying connected with you through social media and hearing that these articles have been helpful. So, thank you for connecting with me through the content on this blog! You made these the top posts from this last month. If you missed out on any of them, here they are all in one place for your convenience!

10 Insider Focused Ministry Names

Yea, so even though this was written in 2013, this post continues to be one of the most visited on my blog. The language we choose to use is important because it both reflects and builds culture at the same time. And one of the most obvious ways to tell if a church is insider focused or outsider focused is the language that they choose to use. It either says that the church is “inclusive” or “exclusive.”

10 Indicators You’re Leading an Outsider-Focused Church

If you haven’t noticed, helping churches become outsider-focused and on mission with Jesus really matters to me. There is a tension that exists in most churches in America, a tension between being outsider-focused and insider-focused. The majority of churches I’ve worked with would affirm in principle that the bible teaches us that the Church should be focused on what Jesus is focused on, and that’s people who are outside of the faith meeting and following Him. However in practice most churches focus the majority of their budgets, staffing, energy and efforts not on reaching outsiders but keeping insiders happy. This leads to churches being insider-focused and missing the mission that Jesus has called His Church to.

8 Reasons Why People don’t Volunteer at your Church

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. This is a critical issue for churches to figure out. The reason why this has to be a front-burner issue is because at the heart of it, volunteering is an essential component of the discipleship process in someone’s life. Plainly put, volunteering is discipleship. Understanding that, here are 8 reasons people aren’t volunteering in your church…and subsequently aren’t growing in their relationship with God.

The 5 Most Common Core Issues Facing the Church Today

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Tony Morgan to discuss one of the Top 5 Core Issues Facing the Church Today. We discussed both internal and external communications. You see at The Unstuck Group we’ve worked with a lot of churches in the last couple of years, and we’ve started seeing some trends in the core issues that keep coming up. So, we conducted a small research project to identify the top five most common core issues of the churches we’ve worked with in the last year.

5 Symptoms your Church Needs more Volunteers

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.

How Many People Should Your Church have on Staff?

Before you buy into the idea that you need another staff person at your church, think again. That just may be the worst decision you make at your church this year. It’s not uncommon in churches that I work with to hear them say, “We need to add more staff.” After all if there are problems or areas where the church is stuck then throwing staff at that problem will surely fix it…right? Well, not always. In fact the opposite may be true. In fact the most effective churches that I see have a tendency to hire fewer staff not more staff. They hire more competent team members who have the ability to turn attenders into volunteers, volunteers into leaders, and build teams. Instead of paying people to do ministry they pay people to lead others to do ministry.

5 Ways to Help Your Small Groups be Successful

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.

Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit 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!

Ministry Health Assessment: Discover the True Health of your Church

I am really excited to let you know about a brand new tool from the Unstuck Group that will help you discover the true health of your church! For the first time ever you can actually take an online version of our Health Assessment tool and benchmark the health of your Church. You respond to the online survey; our team will analyze the responses and send you a customized report benchmarking your data against churches across the country. The report will give you unbiased data on your church’s health that you can use to inform your strategic priorities related to outreach, finances, connections, family ministry, serving, staffing and more!

Why Nice People Kill Churches

For the last 12 years I’ve had the incredible opportunity to serve on the Sr. Leadership Teams of some of the nations fastest growing and leading churches. Over that time I’ve observed time and time again one of the most destructive inclinations to church growth and the advancement of the Gospel is the simple fact that people on staff at most churches are simply too nice to each other.

Photo Credit: justin fain via Compfight cc

Posted in Leadership

Does Your Church Have Ministry Silos?

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Ministry silos are one of the most common dysfunctions in churches across our country, and they hinder ministry health and growth.

If you’ve ever been in a church with ministry silos you know it. People and ministries share the same roof but do nearly everything in isolation. Outside of Sundays, they rarely combine their efforts. Like members of a dysfunctional family, most church staff members know their team isn’t healthy, but they’ve learned to cope and get by, living separate lives within the same house.

My friend Tony Morgan at the Unstuck Group has just released a new eBook on this topic — 7 Warnings Signs Your Church Has Ministry Silos: Triggers and Symptoms of a Divided House. It’s available today on Amazon or from the TonyMorganLive.com store. The launch of this book has been so successful that it hit the Top 5 Christian Leadership Book List on Amazon!

It’s not hard to tell when a church has silos. The difficult part is discovering and eliminating their true causes. This eBook explores the triggers and symptoms of a “divided house” so you can identify the steps your church needs to take towards greater unity. Download it today!

Posted in Leadership, Staffing

7 Articles that will Help your Church Make Vision Real

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Thank you for making April an incredible month here at Helping Churches Make Vision Real! It’s great staying connected with you through social media and hearing that these articles have been helpful. So, thank you for connecting with me through the content on this blog! You made these the top 7 Posts from this last month. If you missed out on any of them, here they are all in one place for your convenience!

#1 5 Reasons Churches don’t Grow

Thom Rainer, President and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources has stated in his research that: “Eight out of ten of the approximately 400,000 churches in the United States are declining or have plateaued.” While there are all kinds of reasons that churches end up stuck, at the Unstuck Group we’ve identified 5 key contributors that lead to churches being stuck. Through working with churches across America we’ve observed these contributors over and over and over again. You can click on the headings in this post to learn more about each of the 5 key reasons that churches get stuck.

#2 A Large Multisite Church in Phoenix is Hiring a Children’s Pastor

I’m pleased to announce a new Staff Search. Sun Valley Community Church, the church I have the honor of serving at, is beginning a national search for a Children’s Pastor to serve on our Tempe Campus.

#3 5 Mistakes that Fast Growing Churches Make

If you’ve been in ministry for any length of time you know that momentum won’t always be on your side, growth won’t always be taking place, and things won’t always be up and to the right. Often momentum is lost when things are at their best because churches don’t know how to behave when things are going well. In fact below are the 5 biggest mistakes I’ve seen fast growing churches make.

#4 Why Structure is Not the Goal

If you’ve ever experienced a season of ministry like this you know how fun it can be. Churches during this phase of growth often hear people say things like, “There’s just something about this place.” They’re experiencing success, they’re just not exactly sure why. Even staff members sit back and watch it at moments hoping to ride the wave of momentum and not get in the way and mess it up.

Inevitably someone comes along and identifies the fact that we can’t operate like a “Mom & Pop” organization anymore. It could be the Board, the Pastor, or a trusted senior level Staff Member. But eventually someone will say something like; “We need to set up the proper structures to help us move past the chaos and into the future.”

#5 10 Insider Focused Ministry Names

The language we choose to use is important because it both reflects and builds culture at the same time. And one of the most obvious ways to tell if a church is insider focused or outsider focused is the language that they choose to use. It either says that the church is “inclusive” or “exclusive.”

#6 Stop Paying People to do Ministry

As they grow, many churches eagerly anticipate the moment when they’re finally big enough that they can afford to hire more staff and offer more ministry options for people. For example I’ve heard churches say they can’t wait to hire a Men’s Ministry Pastor. Nothing against Men’s Ministry per se, but that’s an expensive model. If you run it out to its logical end you’re going to have a lot of people on your payroll. Paying people to “do” ministry instead of “lead” ministry is an expensive mistake that many churches fall into. Here are 3 principles that will help you focus the Staffing & Volunteer philosophy at your church.