Top 10 Church Leadership Posts from 2017

Tag Archive - grow

Top Posts of 2017 #7 “Why Churches Decline and Die”

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Understanding why churches grow and decline is an annual topic of interest on my blog. While this post doesn’t cover all of the reasons a church declines, it’s a great overview of some of the major catalysts to church decline.

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

3 Shifts that Growing Multisite Churches Experience

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

The decision to adopt a multisite strategy to deliver growth may be a decision that your church is considering. While still young as a movement, multisite is proving to be an incredibly effective strategy for growing churches to deliver growth to new “markets” and reach new people with the Gospel.

However, going multisite will make things more complicated and more difficult for you as a leader and for your church.

If your church is considering going multisite, or has gone multisite but is now experiencing multi-stuck I’d encourage you to check out the Unstuck Group. We’ve developed a unique process to help churches prepare to go multisite as well as get multi-stuck churches unstuck.

Below are 3 shifts that we observe growing multisite churches commonly experience.

1. Staff Roles & Responsibility

When you’re just in one location the Staff Team only has responsibility for the one location. As you begin to add campuses it’s common for Staff to have “dual responsibilities.” For instance, someone may be the Kids Director on the original campus but influence Kids Ministry on all campuses. This is particularly true as you move from 1 campus 2-3 campuses. By the time you’re at 4+ campuses it’s more common that staff have a singular focus. They either serve at a particular campus and focus their attention on that campus or serve on the “central team” and serve all campuses.

2. Attenders

Campus attendance has the ability to shift the emotion of the Staff Team at the original campus significantly. Obviously when there is one location all of the attendance is at that one site. Even when you start your first campus or two it’s not uncommon that the majority of the attendance is still on the original location. However, as campuses are added it’s not uncommon that the majority of people who attend the church, attend at a different campus than the original site. This is a tipping point in your multisite journey where the Staff Team at the original site begin to see themselves as just another campus instead of the big boys on the block and ministry trend setters for the church.

3. Staff Restructures

While going multisite may be a mechanism to help your church reach more and new people with the Gospel it certainly makes things more complicated. There are multiple restructures that happen along the way as more campuses are added. Here are some general trends:

2-3 Campuses: Campus Pastors are hired and usually report to someone already on the team, Staff often play dual roles leading on a particular campus and influencing the entire church at the same time
4-5 Campuses: A Multisite Director is hired to lead the new Campus Pastor Team and the Multisite expansion strategy at the church, a Campus Pastor is hired at the original location and that site is treated as another campus instead of the “mother ship,” a true Central Service Team responsible for serving the campuses is beginning to be built.
6+ Campuses: Regionalization brings a whole new set of issues

Posted in Leadership

7 Questions to Help your Church Determine the Location of your Next Multisite Campus

Sunday, September 3, 2017

The multisite movement isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, the last statistics I saw indicated that only 12 of the 100 of the largest churches in America are not multisite churches. What was once a band aid solution that growing churches used to create space for outgrowing their facilities has now turned into a mainstream method to deliver growth to new locations.

If you church is thinking about launching a new multisite location in the next 18 months I’d encourage you to seriously think and talk through the following 7 questions with your Sr. Leadership Team to help you determine the next right location.

#1 Do we already have people attending our church that live in that new location?

You plant new churches where you don’t have people attending your church but you start new campuses where you already have people attending your church. Launching strong means “going where you are.” I know it may sound counterintuitive but it works. Start by mapping out where your current attenders live and identify pockets of greater density as potential areas to begin new campuses.

#2 Are there people in that new location already engaged in our mission?

Beyond attendance and “brand recognition,” do you have people in that area who are “all in” with you? People who will transfer your culture to the next location and who can lead not just attend? A great place to start is to determine who lives in that area that is already in a small group, they’re financially contributing to the church, they’re on a volunteer team, or they’re leading other volunteers.

#3 Is the new location 20-30 minutes from our existing location?

This is still the sweet spot nationally on drive time between campuses. Obviously, there are variations between urban, suburban and rural communities. There are also emotional barriers at play with drive times. Mountains, lakes, rivers, rail road tracks, highways and the like can all be mental barriers in communities to people attending a new campus or driving to a location…and those just may be a reason to put a new campus on the other side of that barrier.

#4 Does the location reflect who we are trying to reach?

All churches idealistically want to reach all people, I understand that sentiment. But your church is naturally built by intention or neglect to reach a certain kind of person. Your style and approach to ministry is designed to work with certain people and not with others. Don’t fight it. It’s a biblical approach. It’s called contextualization and it’s what the Apostle Paul did in the early stages of the Church.

#5 Are there available facilities with the right parking and seating capacities that are also in the right location?

It still holds true. Location, location, location…just ask any realtor. Does the location you’re considering meet your seating, kids space, and parking needs? Are you going to buy land and build ground up? Is it a popular area that has a lot of drive by traffic? Is it an area that people drive to or drive from?

#6 Are there already churches with a similar mission and style in the new area we’re looking at?

Other churches aren’t the enemy. The enemy (Satan) is the enemy. We are not in competition with other churches. If there is another church like you in that area and the population density wouldn’t work for more churches like that, then move on to another location.

#7 Is the potential location experiencing growth or development?

Are new people moving to the area? Is the area growing and experiencing new development? New people get involved in new churches and take new steps. New is a huge potential for success.

Need help with your multisite model or expansion? The Unstuck Group has a proven process to help you go multisite for the first time or develop your multisite model for future expansion! Follow this link to start a conversation!

Posted in Leadership

A Multisite Leadership Conversation

Sunday, August 27, 2017

I recently had a conversation with the Unstuck Group about multisite church leadership and here are a couple of highlights from the conversation:

Caroline: When leading a multisite church, what is the most important leadership tool to carry with you?

Paul: Hands down, your culture. You reproduce what you are, not what you think you are or wish you were. Does your church have a culture worth replicating? The fastest and most effective way to replicate your culture is through your people, both staff and volunteers. They are the cultural carriers of your church. Every church has a culture: the attitudes they want adopted, values they want championed, beliefs they want instilled and behaviors they want reproduced. Can you clearly and accurately articulate the culture of your church?

Caroline: In your multisite experience, what is the biggest challenge you’ve had to face?

Paul: The greatest challenge we’ve faced in going multisite is the challenge of “loss.” Just like you cannot follow Jesus and stay where you are, you cannot go multisite and stay where you are as a church. Going multisite forced us think about church in a new way. For example, the original campus staff experienced a loss of preference when going multisite changed the approach we took to campus ministries, including their own campus ministry. They experienced a loss of perceived power when we built a central service team. They weren’t making all of the decisions anymore. Additionally, they experienced a loss of prestige when the growth rates at other campuses began to exceed their own and attendance at other campuses rivaled their own. There is no significant leadership without loss, and when you make a big directional shift like multisite, you experience a lot of loss along the way. But leaders understand that.

Caroline: What multisite models are usually the most successful?

Paul: A lot of people in church world don’t want to define success or talk about how one model/approach may be more successful than another. However, Jesus gave His Church a mission and it seems to me that success would look like accomplishing that mission. So I’ve always figured more people meeting and following Jesus is more successful than less people meeting and following Jesus. As a result, our models/approach to ministry should always be held loosely, or be subservient to whatever helps people meet, know and follow Jesus. That being said, there are a lot of ways churches are approaching multisite. The ones that I find have the greatest success are more consistent with their ministry approach between campuses, have a strong central service team to lead and help campuses succeed, and they use video to deliver consistent teaching everywhere.

Caroline: What is the most common mistake you see among multisite leaders?

Paul: The last statistic I saw was that only 15% of multisite churches ever get past 3 campuses. One reason why is that most churches treat multisite as though they are adding another ministry offering to their church. Instead of adopting a multisite mindset across the entire organization, they adopt a multisite ministry. Multisite isn’t something that happens “over there” at a new campus; it is a strategic approach to ministry that changes the entire way you do church everywhere. Most church leaders completely underestimate this when they choose to go multisite.

Interested in learning more about developing a multisite strategy for your church? Sign up for our Fall 2017 Multisite Leadership Coaching Network. This experience will help you navigate how to run a healthy multisite by discovering the shifts that need to happen within your church. For more information and to apply, follow this link.

Caroline is a Content Specialist for The Unstuck Group. She is a graduate of The University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication. She is involved with her local church in Athens, GA as well as other local ministries. She is passionate about leveraging communication strategies for helping churches experience growth!

Posted in Leadership

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