We’re back with another “Ask Anything” episode!
Ron Baum, a long-time consultant at The Unstuck Group and ministry leader who has served in the local church for over 30 years, and I answer some questions that YOU, our listeners, have sent in.
We have some fun questions to address in this episode—a few about space and adding service times and several about strategic planning and getting traction.
If you’ve got a question for the next “Ask Anything” episode, call our voicemail line at (615) 398-9171 or send us a message on social media.
If your leaders aren’t recruiting, developing, mentoring and coaching those that are under them, then really they're becoming doers in the ministry. [episode 450] #unstuckchurch Share on X How do you decide what to prune? Ask the question: does this actually help us reach and disciple the people that we're trying to reach? [episode 450] #unstuckchurch Share on X Do your metrics align with your vision? [episode 450] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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Transcript
Sean:
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Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, your host, and today we have another installment of our Ask Anything episodes, where we turn the podcast over to you, the listener, and answer your questions from our voicemail line and questions through social media. Before we get to the questions, I wanna introduce my co-host for today, Ron Baum. Ron is a longtime consultant here at the Unstuck Group and a ministry leader who has served in the local church for, actually, it’s been more than 30 years, right, Ron?
Ron:
Yeah, exactly. Sean. This year, I actually celebrated 39 years of ministry, 19 years at the current church that I’m at, and then, with Unstuck, celebrated 11 years.
Sean:
And Ron, you help churches in all different aspects of what we do. Assessment, planning, staffing, and structure, all of those different phases, right?
Ron:
Yeah. Somehow I became that utility player to take on whatever is thrown my way.
Sean:
It’s because you’re good at a lot of things.
Ron:
Well, I think it’s 39 years of experience.
Sean:
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m sure that has something to do with it. Ron, you’ve been on the team long enough to actually serve churches who at one point were part of, an Unstuck cohort. So our cohorts are a little bit different than the onsite consulting that we do, but we see a number of church leaders go through a cohort and then later bring us in to work specifically with their church. Part of the reason behind that is that our cohorts are focused more specifically on a small group of leaders. There might be one or two leaders from any given church that join us and several other pastors and leaders from like-sized, like-minded churches in a cohort to kind of learn together and explore some specific topics together. And I mentioned that because we have a brand new cohort that I’m really looking forward to that starts this August, just for church leaders who are in churches with less than 500 in attendance.
We’ve never really done this before, but I think this is gonna be a great gathering of these leaders. Myself and another of our Unstuck consultants, Chad Hunt, will be hosting this one together in Nashville, Tennessee. It starts August 17th and runs through the 19th. And then we have a year of calls that go on after that. Now Chad is especially equipped to lead this cohort because he has been a small church pastor. He has been an executive pastor, and he’s been a part of a church as a lead pastor that grew from under 500 to over a thousand. And so Chad brings a ton of experience to that conversation, and he’s a great pastor to pastors as well. As part of that cohort, we’re gonna work through conversations on how to assess the health of your church, how to rev up your reach strategies, how to build discipleship strategies that really move people forward in spiritual formation and a lot more. So if you are a pastor leading in a church of under 500 in attendance and that interests you, just go to theunstuckgroup.com/cohorts for more information.
Alright, so Ron, let’s dive into some of our listener questions for today. And we’re gonna explore some topics around space constraints. That’s been a common question we’ve gotten recently. Alignment how they bring more unity to their team, staffing and organizational structure. Ron, I’m gonna lean on you for that one. Benchmarking, you know, looking at numbers, metrics and using them to help us make decisions. And so I’m really looking forward to exploring these questions from some of our listeners. So let’s get right into it. First up, we have a voicemail and I wanna actually listen to this one because in the voicemail he’s describing a situation that’s more layered than I can even summarize. So let’s listen to this.
Pastor One:
Hey, yeah. I’m a pastor in western Nebraska here of a church of about 200. And we’re just calling ’cause I’m curious on some advice about our space issues. We have grown from 35 people to where we are now at 200 in about five years. And we are in a fishbowl. We’re landlocked. Our parking is insufficient to say the least. We have 71 less spaces than we should have according to your church vitals assessment. We’re in need of a third service. We’re not quite at the staffing position to get to a third service. We would be overstaffed according to your vitals assessment as well if we did that. And I feel like our volunteers are very stretched. I just don’t feel like in my gut that God would be leading in that direction for us right now. The reason why I’m asking is because our space just does not serve our mission well.
And so, I was just curious what you would suggest for pitching this idea to our group of elders, our elder chair, so to speak, owns a construction company in town. So we move at the speed of him. And the speed of him is very slow when it comes to moving to a different location and seeing the value of parking. So there’s my question: how to navigate a situation like that. How to see the reason for parking and the necessity for parking and the necessity for space that serves our mission when there are deep family ties to the building.
Sean:
Alright, well first of all, hearing this story, Ron, it’s incredible. I heard they’ve grown from 35 people in attendance to now over 200 in just five years.
Ron:
That’s amazing.
Sean:
So I think the good news behind this is that while the facility in the space constraints are real issue, this is not a dying church that’s making desperate moves on the facility side, right? This is a growing church that’s hitting very predictable lids, lids that we see churches run into all of the time. So, there’s a more positive aspect to the steps that you’re thinking through going forward. And probably a sense of excitement and momentum within the church right now.
A little on our parking math, because he mentioned parking spaces per our vital signs assessment, you need roughly one parking spot per one and a half auditorium seats per service. And this is really a legitimate ceiling for reaching your community, for reaching your mission field. When people pull into your parking lot and they cannot find a parking space, of course they’re gonna turn around and probably drive right back out of the parking lot and never be back. You might only get that one opportunity with a family who thinks now next week we can’t go there because there’s not anywhere for us to park.
The third service issue that he mentioned, in the voicemail may be more about developing a volunteer and leadership bench. They may not have the staff to do it today or feel like their staff will be too stretched at three services. But if you really focus in on how you’re developing your volunteer bench, your leadership bench, actually we’re gonna talk about that in just a couple of weeks on the podcast. You can do some things to fill in the gaps in areas where you need help. You need hands and feet to do ministry on Sunday morning that rather than hiring a staff person for volunteers really can fill that.
And then lastly, my last thought on this one, Ron, the elder situation, I think it’s really a leadership conversation before it’s a facility conversation. You know, bringing the elders into a planning process to build buy-in on future direction, I think would be a great next step. Let’s really build alignment with all of our leadership, our elders, some of our key staff so that we have clarity around when we’re making decisions about a facility, which really is just a resource to get ministry accomplished. What is the ministry that we’re actually trying to accomplish with that resource? I think that could guide some of the conversations and make ’em more productive, more fruitful with that elder. Anything you would add, Ron?
Ron:
You know, I think of times like this. I mean, we wanna celebrate with them the growth that they’re experiencing. I mean, that’s amazing. And so what a great problem to have, right? But this is a time where a team really has to sit down together and clean slate it and get creative. Think outside the box. There’s some of the obvious things. If you’re landlocked and there’s no room for people to sit in the sanctuary. Okay, I get that. So now let’s just wipe the slate clean and what would we think of? Do staff, key volunteers, some people have been coming for a while, do they park elsewhere? And get, you know, transported in to make room for the guests. Because if we’re guest-centric and that’s what we’re thinking about and we’re welcoming, well then sometimes we have to be inconvenienced, right?
And so I think there’s just opportunity to think of it differently. You know, the adding the service, I’m with you, that’s developing a volunteer pipeline, a leadership pipeline quickly in this instance to say, Hey, we’re gonna move to another service and so therefore we need some hands and feet on the ground. Maybe it’s not on Sunday. Maybe there’s another opportunity during the week to either lead into the weekend or come out of the weekend that gives some people an opportunity to attend and have, you know, room for their family.
Sean:
Yeah, that’s true. We’ve talked about this on the podcast before because space constraints has been a ongoing conversation now for a couple of years, which is great, but still a real challenge. And you know, we’ve had churches that have explored and seen some success with services that are other nights of the week: Thursday night, Wednesday night; some churches still even seeing success on Saturday night. And so, you know, those are answers that need to be contextualized within your community where you’re doing ministry, but certainly options. That’s a great thought, Ron.
Alright, let’s move on to the next question. So this one’s around alignment, and this is specifically an executive pastor question, Ron. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. This next one came in anonymously, which probably tells you a little something about the topic itself. The question is, “Any tips for an executive pastor to encourage the senior pastor to prioritize defining some of the direction section of the alignment pyramid?” So they’re referencing our alignment pyramid in the direction we’re talking about vision, we’re talking about goals, we’re talking about strategies. Ron, what’s your opinion? How could they lead up and encourage the senior pastor to do that?
Ron:
Yeah, I think if as Sean as the senior pastor, lead pastor needs to be the vision keeper, the vision communicator, right? He may experience collaboration amongst the team to develop the vision, but the vision needs to be clear. It can’t be just a reiteration of their mission statement. There needs to be clarity about the direction they see the church going. Where do they see themselves in the next 12 months, the next 36 months? Where do they see themselves heading? And the senior pastor can bring real clarity to that, so that then the executive pastor can take that vision and begin to implement it with the team. And so he would get down into, you know, into the nitty gritty of each ministry, at least key ministries: kids ministry, youth ministry, adult ministry groups, those kinds of things. How does each one take ownership of that particular piece of the vision?
So, you know, we’ve used the example before. If we say, “Hey, our goal next year is to, or next three years is to have, you know, 200 baptisms. All right? So we break that down to a hundred a year. Well, how much does each ministry own in which to accomplish that piece of the vision?” And so student ministry says, “Hey, we’re gonna take, you know, 20 of those, we’re gonna really reach into our student ministry group and find out those that need to give their life to Jesus and take those next steps of being baptized.” Just do it from an obedience and a public profession to say, I am going to align with the vision and communicate to my group what the importance is behind this and how we all get behind it. You know, vision allows each ministry to not be siloed. But to be in alignment with how the senior pastor sees the direction of the church heading.
Sean:
Yeah. Ron, I don’t wanna put you on the spot here. Or, maybe I do because it makes a more interesting podcast.
Ron:
Right? Yeah, sure.
Sean:
But you, you sat in that XP seat for a long time. You have a lot of experience there. What were some of the things that you did to lead up in instances where you had to lead up? Are there any practical thoughts or things that you’ve learned or experienced in your years in that XP seat?
Ron:
Yeah. You know, if you have the relationship, that is a lot easier of course. And the relationship just says, Hey, can we have honest conversation? Here’s what the team is feeling. Here’s how I’m interpreting that as the XP, and I want to best support you. Right? I’m there to give support to that lead pastor. And if there’s not clarity around the vision in regards to this particular topic to say, “Hey, could we begin to, you know, deep dive on this either together or bring a couple other people into the conversation,” but that’s just using your voice. And, stepping into, instead of just stepping back and allowing it to be muddy on the ground, you know, it, it might be clear up in the realms of executive leadership, but as it works its way down, it gets muddier or cloudier. And so the executive pastor steps into a role to say, I wanna bring clarity to the team, and I want to best support you. You know, as an executive pastor, you don’t run to the team to say, I don’t know, I can’t get an answer outta the senior pastor.
Sean:
Right.
Ron:
That’s not gonna help. But hey, we’re working on the vision piece of it, and we’re gonna bring clarity to you so that you can lead effectively. That’s your conversation with them to say, Hey, it would help all of us if we could gain clarity around this. Let’s have clear metrics, let’s have clear expectations, and let’s move it forward. So I think the executive passage needs to use their voice. They’re not trying to side rail or embarrass the senior pastor for any reason. But to have that open conversation to say, I want to help you. And so, in order to help you, help me understand how you would define this piece of it so that I can communicate that to the team.
Sean:
Yeah. You just made me think as you were saying that, you know, maybe you don’t frame it up as, you know, we need to do strategic planning, or we need to develop a vision. Maybe it’s more of, I want to help our team get clarity on a few questions that keep coming up, and then you start with the question that’s creating the most friction and kind of work on from there.
All right. Let’s move on to the staffing question. So Marcelo asked what percentage of staff would be pastoral and what percentage would be creative, financial, etc., for a church of about a thousand people. So I think Marcelo’s thinking through how do we designate pastoral staff versus support staff or other staff? I don’t know what you’re seeing, Ron. I think it’s probably very similar to what I’m seeing. You know, most churches don’t look at staff as pastoral or not pastoral anymore. So that would be a little bit of a unique, or maybe if I’m bold enough, say out-of-date approach to looking at it because all staff are ministry staff, right? We’re all doing ministry.
What might be more helpful is to look at how churches allocate their senior leadership staff. From our research, churches under 500 allocate about 23% of their staff to senior leadership. But when the church grows above a thousand, that number’s more like 11%. We’re actually getting ready to refresh all of that research and data in next month’s Unstuck Church Report. What have you seen, Ron, what’s your, your experience been in terms of how a church of a thousand is allocating those staff pastoral versus, maybe some other support staff?
Ron:
Yeah, Sean, when I think about it, you know, I know we’ve given percentages, you know, in, in the past and maybe we’re gonna, provide some of that as far as what average churches are doing out there. But I have to think of it more so is, are we developing an executive leadership team? And these are leaders of leaders, right? Not doers. We certainly need doers on the team and that’s an important factor, but from a leadership standpoint, if they’re not recruiting and developing and mentoring and coaching those that are under them, then really they’re becoming doers in the ministry. They’re probably carrying too much of the responsibility and the weight, and they’re in the weeds rather than becoming leader of leaders.
And so I think of it as appropriate span of care from the lead pastor that he has specific strategic thinkers on the team, that when he puts ’em in a room, they’re representing all the different ministries that are occurring because everything touches them in some direction of leadership. But they ought to be their greatest success is how many people are they recruiting? What’s their leadership bench look like? Are they, you know, we, we’ve talked about in the past, you know, how do you work yourself out of a job? Not necessarily talking about that. I think that the job is be the best leader of leaders that you can be. And the success rate of that is that those leaders are developing additional leaders to replace themselves so that you get into a better, appropriate span of care.
There are individuals that they do their best leading, you know, one to 10 people. But then there’s other leaders who can take an entire group of a hundred people and break them up into teams. And be more effective in their lane of ministry. And so I don’t know that we, you know, you take the average of churches and figure out what the percentages are as much as develop your team around what the vision is for the church, and execute appropriately with the right leaders in the right seats on the bus.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good. That is such a key shift, especially when churches break that thousand barrier. And a lot of churches find themselves stuck when they get there, and they kind of bounce up against that thousand barrier. If they don’t have people who are really gifted leaders in some of those positions within their organizational structure, they just find they can’t build a deep enough volunteer bench to really support the church at the size that it is then. So really key, move that they need to make.
Alright, Ron, let’s move on to talking about some benchmarking. So, Tiana reached out to us at, with a really interesting question. She asked, “What are some baseline questions to ask when trying to determine if a program or initiative needs to be cut?” Tiana’s asking a question about pruning, which is always an uncomfortable question because this is a little more difficult, actually, churches just in general aren’t great at pruning, right? I think for us, you know, we just talked about the strategic alignment pyramid.
For us, it starts with mission alignment. You can look at, and this may not be a metric, but you could look at the program and ask the question, does this program, this initiative, this thing that we’re doing, does it actually help us reach and disciple the people that we’re trying to reach? I’ve certainly worked with churches, Ron, I’m guessing you have too, where we would look at some of the things that they’re doing and say, actually, that’s not accomplishing anything that we’re trying to accomplish. It’s just keeping pe people busy in the background. Another question: Does the ministry have a strong leader? Is there a volunteer base engaged in that ministry or program? And then maybe more importantly, are there clear next steps coming out of it for people. If people are participating in it, but then they don’t know, okay, what do I do next? Or, how does this help me move forward in my discipleship? It might not be something that you need on your list of programs and to be allocating resources for.
And I think for most churches, they just need to remind themselves when we stop doing something, we’re not stopping something because it’s bad. Right? All ministry is good. It’s hard to look at anything and say there’s a reason to not be doing that. But what you’re actually doing is you’re making room for something better. And when you frame pruning as more a stewardship rather than a rejection of a program or something people, some people care about, that really starts to help change the conversation and how you approach it.
Ron:
We do pruning exercise once a year. And the intention is, it’s based around our strategic planning, but we take one portion of our timeframe and say, Hey, let’s take a look at all of our ministries. And this is an opportunity for all leaders to make sure that they’re holding loosely what they own, because we can hold on too tight. And there can be an idea of, hey, this is all about vision alignment. We wanna make sure that we’re on track to reach the destination that we’re heading to. We gotta be careful the detours the thing that takes us, you know, into a different lane, into a different off-ramp and we don’t even know how we got there. And churches are notorious for that, right? All of a sudden we start something new or someone comes up with some brilliant idea that the leadership should be doing. But they don’t wanna lead it, you know?
And so it’s that once a year of conversation, say, Hey, everything’s going on the board. And we’ve used a chart, within The Unstuck Group, that just basically measures what are the resources that it takes? Is it low or high? And when I say resources, I mean money, time, and people. And then what’s the kingdom impact? Are lives being changed? Is it low or is it high? And you kind of plot it on this chart to determine, hey, these things have kind of an immediate stop date. These things may need to be reconsidered and repurposed. Here are some areas we haven’t even considered. They’re an absolute gold mine that we should be going after because of the alignment. So I think the chart helps with that to determine, hey, let’s, let’s not have the fluff. We can become Cheesecake Factory churches, with a menu of all kinds of ministries that just get confusing and doesn’t communicate that we have a direction that we’re heading. And so how can we simplify in which to accomplish and align with the vision that we’ve set forth?
Sean:
Alright. Last one. Ron Sam reached out and he asked, do any of the vital signs and benchmarks become more or less relevant for a metropolitan or urban inner city church versus a church that’s in a more suburban area? One of the examples that comes immediately to mind, Ron, was you worked with a church in San Francisco that had zero parking spots, right? So that that changes how we look at some of the parking data for sure.
Ron:
Yeah. Right. That was so fun to go to that church ’cause they told me, Hey, don’t rent a car here. There’s nowhere to park it. You have to Uber, you have to walk it, you have to, but that’s what they’re used to. And so the metric of parking becomes something that is irrelevant to that particular church.
Sean:
Yeah. So I think there’s some benchmarks like that that flex if there’s an urban or any inner city church. And some of those things are contextualized a little bit differently. Parking’s a great example. You know, those churches aren’t usually gonna hit the standard benchmark, but we can still look at some of the public transit options around them if they have public parking spaces. There’s some things like that that we could look at. But of course it’s gonna be different.
I think another one that comes to mind, Ron, is giving per attender can vary by context. You know, there’s different costs of living out there, economic demographics of the mission field, those types of things. And so one of the numbers we look at is per capita giving. And I like per capita giving because churches, almost every church, can historically tell us what their per capita was, stretching back many years because there’s two numbers really that we need to know to know per capita: what was our total giving and what was our attendance. And most churches know those numbers, so we can look back and see historical data. So for me, I’m more concerned about their historical data and is that trending in the right direction? Is it trending up? Is it holding steady, or is there actually a decline in per-person giving over a number of years? If there is, obviously, that’s an area we need to dig into. So I don’t know if there are other, any other benchmarks that come to mind for you, Ron, that might change by context.
Ron:
Yeah, I don’t know about specifics, and maybe we’re, you know, beating this dead horse of saying, do your metrics align with your vision? And so are, are you counting the right things? I think there’s some things we count because we should always count them, right? I’m a numbers nerd; I love numbers. I know some people don’t. But I think it’s that realm of saying if it aligns with the vision, we wanna make sure we’re counting it in an appropriate fashion—not just attendance, but engagement, next steps. A friend of mine, he uses the phrase, what did you hire this thing to do? So if you’re gonna have groups, what’d you hire to do? What was the outcome? And if it didn’t produce the outcome, you need to either rethink it and repurpose it. Or maybe that’s a ministry to change and move on from.
Sean:
Yeah. You know what that also brought to mind what doesn’t change? The relational benchmarks that we look at, the percentage of people engaged in serving small group participation, volunteer leader ratios, none of those metrics change depending on the context of the church. They’re all the same. We use percentages and ratios so that those metrics do work in churches of all sizes and all different contexts. So there are gonna be some that vary, but some that are gonna stay exactly where they should.
Ron:
Yeah. You know, sometimes I’ll use the illustration of, when people aren’t numbers people, I’ll talk about our metrics is simply a dashboard. So if you think of a dashboard in a car Well, what kind of car are you driving? Are you driving a two-wheel drive or a four-wheel drive? That dashboard’s gonna look different. Are you driving an American-made car or a foreign car? That dashboard’s gonna look different. Are you driving an electric car? I dunno if you driven an electric car.
Sean:
Oh yeah.
Ron:
But you know, you have an iPad is what you have. And so depending on what you’re driving is the dashboard that you create. So, church, what ministry are you trying to accomplish? How does it align with the vision? Now, therefore, create your dashboard appropriately.
Sean:
That’s good. Love that. Alright, Ron, well, that’s all the time we have for today. Thanks for joining me and taking some of these questions from our listeners. Listeners, if you have a question for our next Ask Anything episode, you can call our voicemail line at (615) 398-9171. That’s 615-398-9171. We’ll include that in the show notes as well, or send us a message. You can do that on Instagram or X, and we will address your question in our next Ask Anything episode.
And if anything we talked about today, hit close to home for you, whether it’s a facility ceiling, a staffing question, or just have a nagging sense that something isn’t quite working right, we’d love to have a conversation with you. We’d love to be able to help your church. You can reach out to us today at theunstuckgroup.com. Next week, we’re back to start a brand new series. So until then, have a great week.
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