Campus Constants for Multisite Churches

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Campus Constants for Multisite Churches

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Last week the Unstuck Group hosted a successful webinar, “Making Multisite Work” with Tony Morgan, Warren Bird and members of the Unstuck Group. During that webinar I mentioned a “Campus Constant” document that we use at Sun Valley, a large multisite church in the Phoenix Metro area that I have the privilege of serving at, that helps us remain clear on our multisite model. During the live chat on the webinar we received multiple requests for me to share that document. So to make it easy I figured I’d just share it here for you. Feel free to learn from this and adapt it for your context. We’ve found that this document along with our leadership distinctives and “playbooks” developed by each Ministry Development Team member for each of their ministry areas has really helped us define, stay on track, and provide clarity to our multisite model.

Make sure you scroll to the bottom of this post to find the link to the replay of the webinar if you missed it and other multisite resources!

Mission: Helping people meet, know, and follow Jesus.

Vision: To help as many people meet, know and follow Jesus as we possibly can by growing a movement of reproducing Campuses and Churches.

By 2020, we believe God is leading us to:
– Experience 3,000 baptisms
– Expand to 7 campuses
– Start 7 new churches
– Start Residency Program
– Grow to 10,000 people in attendance

Strategy: This strategy serves as the foundation for spiritual growth.

Meet: We help people meet Jesus through Weekend Services.
Know: We help people know Jesus through Small Groups.
Follow: We help people follow Jesus through opportunities to Give, Serve and Share

Cultural Values: These values are what keep us on target as we move towards our vision.

Authenticity: Trusting Jesus and others with the real me.
Community: Learning from Jesus through strong friendships centered around God’s Word.
Generosity: Living like Jesus through giving, serving and sharing.

Leadership Distinctives: This is what we expect from those in leadership and what makes the Sun Valley Staff Culture so unique. Follow this link if you’re interested in seeing these distinctives written out.

Leadership Structure: At Sun Valley vision is global and leadership is local. Leadership authority and responsibility flows through the Campus Pastors and influence flows through Central Services and the Ministry Development Team. Every ministry of the Church at each Campus will operate under one leadership structure that ultimately comes under the authority of the Board of Servant Leaders and the Lead Pastor.

Campus Pastor Team: Campus Pastors are responsible for executing the Sun Valley Mission, Vision, Strategy, Values and Leadership Distinctives on their respective campus. The Campus Pastor role is a Management and Shepherding role at Sun Valley. They manage SV Kids, SV Students, SV Groups and Guest Service ministries on their campus. They also shepherd the staff, volunteers, and congregants at their campus.

Ministry Development Team: The Ministry Development Team influences the ministries on each Sun Valley Campus. They help to ensure that the following takes place on each Sun Valley Campus:

Content: Curriculum and teaching in each sub-ministry environment is the same on each campus.
Consistent: Ministry practices, behaviors, and experiences are consistent on each campus.
Communication: Clear lines of communication exist between ministry counterparts on each campus as well as between the Ministry Development Team and the Campus Pastors.
Coach: Observe sub-ministries and staff members on campuses and coach them towards effectiveness and Sun Valley cultural consistency.

Weekend Teaching: The Teaching Team will set the teaching schedule and will serve as the primary communicators either in person or by video.

Branding: Every Campus will operate under the same branding and communication strategy including a centralized website for the church representing all Campuses.

Financial Model: Every Campus will share these financial goals:

Within 12 months, offerings from the Campus will cover its ongoing ministry expenses including staffing costs.
Within 24 months, the Campus will also contribute its prorated portion of central service expenses.
Within 36 months, the Campus will also contribute towards expansion endeavors.

Alignment: We choose to align the best practices, behaviors, and experiences on each of our Campuses, including SV Kids, SV Students, Groups, Missions, Guest Services, Weekend Services and Business Services.

SV Kids: We create safe environments for kids to experience fun and exciting ministry programming, create trust and partnership with parents, and provide a great guest experience to everyone.

Early Childhood: Birth-Pre-K
Elementary: K-4

SV Students: We create safe environments for students to experience fun and exciting relationally based ministry, create trust and partnerships with parents, and provide a great guest experience to everyone.

Preteen: 5-6 Grade
High: 7-8 Grade
High School: 9-12 Grade

SV Groups: We help people get to know Jesus through strong friendship centered around God’s Word because we believe that life-change takes place best in the context of community. SV Groups provides leadership to move people through the spiritual formation pathway at Sun Valley including Yes Weekends, Starting Point, Baptisms, Bridge Groups, Small Groups, Recovery & Support Groups, and Local Outreach.

Guest Services: We provide an exceptional experience to every guest who attends a Sun Valley Campus every time. Each Campus builds and utilizes the following strategies and teams:

Parking Team & New Here Park Here
New Here Start Here
Greeters
Ushers
Info Center
Coffee Shop / Refreshments
Campus Safety

Missions: Our strategic passions are 1) Church Planting 2) Leadership Development 3) Social Justice. Every mission partner we support and each short-term project we participate in will pass the filter of our strategic passions. Each Campus will participate in the same short-term projects and support the same partners. Each Campus will also participate in the generosity offerings annually.

Weekend Services: There is one centralized process to build the weekend worship experience from concept to completion and then deliver it to each campus. Beginning with biblical content, including creativity, and resulting in an exceptional and engaging Christ-centered experience.

Business Services: There will be one centralized process or system for administrative services including banking, budgeting, staffing, payroll, benefits, capital expenditures, I.T., church management software, facility management, lease agreements, legal needs, etc.

Multisite Resources from the Unstuck Group:

Download our free White Paper: “One Team. Multiple Locations. How Staff Teams at Effective Multisite Churches Overcome Distance and Lead Together.”
Watch a replay of our recent webinar: “Making Multisite Work, with Tony Morgan, Warren Bird, and members of The Unstuck Group team.”
Multisite Consulting: If your church is thinking about going multisite, need help clarifying your multisite strategy, or stuck at a couple campuses and want to move forward we offer consulting solutions designed specifically for multisite churches!

Photo Credit: kevin dooley via Compfight cc

Posted in Leadership

How Much Should Your Church Pay Your Pastor?

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

The larger the church the younger it is. In other words, churches in the 1,000-person range have on average been around for about 40 years. Churches in the 10,000-person range on average have been around about 25 years.
The younger the church, the more likely it is to be multisite.
74% of large churches are growing.
One of the things I really liked about the way Leadership Network chose to show the information was that they showed the 25%, 50% (or median), and 75% instead of simply showing the average. These numbers offer better benchmarks because they minimize the influence of extremely high or low salaries.

Related Resources:

Interested in a Custom Compensation Analysis by Vanderbloemen Search Firm
Interested in a Compensation Study done for churches under 1,000?

Posted in Leadership, Staffing

Top Posts of 2012 #5: Better Together Making Church Mergers Work

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

For the next five days I’m going to be running down the top 5 posts from 2012 on Helping Churches Make Vision Real. These are the posts that generated the most traffic, comments, tweets, and Facebook posts. We start off with what ended up being a 2-part post. One of the most exciting things I’ve ever had the opportunity to have a part in leading through was the merger between 2 churches. This 2 Part post was a conversation that highlighted some of what was navigated during that merger.

Leadership Network recently released a new book called, “Better Together: Making Church Mergers Work” by Jim Tomberlin and Warren Bird. A first of it’s kind; the book provides readers with an incredible guide to help them navigate their way through this new world of church mergers. It is filled with real-world accounts, tangible research, helpful tools, transferable principles, and a new framework for language on the subject. Anyone considering a church merger or wanting to stay current on what is happening in the modern church needs to pick this book up.

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with the Lead Pastors at Sun Valley Community Church, Scott Ridout and Chad Moore, whose merger story is told in the book, “Better Together.”

Here’s Part-1 of my interview with Scott and Chad:

Paul: When I talk mergers with people the first question everyone wants to know the answer to is, “How did this happen?” So take a moment and walk us through the story about Bethany Community Church merging with Sun Valley Community Church.

Scott and Chad: We had been thinking about it at the Executive-level of our staff for some time. We knew that in the near future our current campus in Gilbert, situated on 9 acres, would max out attendance between 4,000-4,500 and the relocation option was too expensive. So we initiated some conversations with churches that we knew of who were struggling and where momentum was waning. Through our involvement with Leadership Network we had been influenced on our ideas about multisite being around guys like Greg Surratt, Larry Osborne and Mark Driscol. When we first approached our Board they were hesitant about the idea. But we gave them each a copy of Multisite Church Revolution to read and discuss the next time we got together. At our next meeting it was the Board saying we need to do this. We had a couple of start and stops along the way. There was an opportunity to purchase the facility of a dying church, another time there was a gentleman in the church who said he was going to donate a large sum of money to be used towards a multisite. While neither of these options became reality it forced us to begin preparing and start dreaming. As we approached different churches about the idea, at the request of our Board, the biggest consistent obstacle to potential merger that kept coming up in many churches was the blind pride of existing leadership. Thinking that they were okay even though they had been plateaued or in decline for years. Financial stability became the indicator for health and survival, not Kingdom impact, growth or momentum.

When the idea of approaching Bethany Community Church surfaced we thought it was too big of a step to take. Bethany had a beautiful built out campus, was debt free, had a history as a large influential church back in the day, and the campus is located on 14 acres right next to a freeway. But momentum had waned and they had been in decline for over 15 years. In initial meetings with their pastor he indicated that they had been playing defense for too long, and in football no one every says, “that offense is tired.”

Paul: It’s one thing to get a positive vote and officially merge, it’s a whole other thing to role up your sleeves and do the hard work after the vote. What are some of the unforeseen obstacles that you’ve run up against?

Chad: Honestly we were surprised by how much that had to change on the original campus to make this happen. Particularly when it comes to Scott and his leadership. No one has gone through more change in this than Scott. To transfer culture and provide strong leadership we chose to have Scott lead out on the new Tempe Campus. To do that he had to leave a campus where he had literally helped build the first building with his bare hands.

Scott: There is always sacrifice and loss involved significant change. This change, required great trust in other leaders and incredible sober mindedness. We thought things were really good on the original campus, but we discovered that we couldn’t articulate things well enough to be reproduced quickly on two new campuses (Sun Valley has also begun a new campus south of Phoenix in Casa Grande). We discovered that we needed to go back to the drawing board to clarify some things; we had actually out grown many of our systems. We had gotten very focused on the merger and the future and clarity had been lost during that period of time regarding vision, values, and our pathway.

Paul: Sun Valley and Bethany chose to bring Jim Tomberlin from Multisite Solutions to the table as a consultant to walk both parties through this journey. What was your experience like with Jim?

Scott and Chad: A neutral party like Jim can say some hard things to both parties involved. He helped us define reality very well in the process and mapped a clear course forward. The best consultants have the ability to help their clients “understand the king doesn’t have any clothes on” and help navigate potential landmines. Jim helped us walk through 25 things that every church needs to talk about in a potential merger. He laid the track out for us to run on. He helped us articulate not only is this feasible, but also is it wise. Jim helped us work through pages of documents over and over and over again. By the time it got to the public phase it had been wrestled with so much that all of the leaders involved were using the same language and on the same page. At the end of the day Jim was seen as an objective party with expert experience. He gave us real hope that it was feasible, that this could be done, because it’s been done, and he’s been a part of it.

You can read the rest of the interview by clicking here.

You can read more about Sun Valley’s story in chapters 12-13 as well as in Appendix B and C of the book “Better Together: Making Church Mergers Work.”

Posted in Leadership