How Do We Break The Next Growth Barrier? – Episode 400

Just Maintaining (Part 2)

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Your church isn’t declining… but it’s not growing either. You might be stuck in “maintenance mode.” 

Many aspects of ministry look healthy, but growth has slowed, you’re not really reaching new guests, and less people are crossing the line of faith. What now? 

In this episode, Sean and I talk about what you actually need to do to change course. We’ll cover what it means to have a maintenance mindset, how to focus back on reaching new people, and practical applications on how break through the next growth barrier.

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Inwardly focused churches are more interested in preserving the past than championing the future. [episode 400] #unstuckchurch Share on X If you find your church in maintenance, evaluate every aspect of your weekend experience through the eyes of a newcomer. [episode 400] #unstuckchurch Share on X Want to reach new people? Shift your congregation from being consumers to contributors. [episode 400] #unstuckchurch Share on X Church leaders need to do their part in order for the church body to do their part: inviting the people that God's placed around them. [episode 400] #unstuckchurch Share on X

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Are you considering adding a second or third campus to your growing church? Need help telling your church’s unique story across every location? PlainJoe, a Storyland Studio, has you covered. Their team of creative storytellers, talented designers and innovative architects are passionate about helping churches tell their stories through spatial, interactive and strategic storytelling. 

Reach out to learn more at plainjoe.net.

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The Unstuck Church: Equipping Churches to Experience Sustained Health

In The Unstuck Church, our founder, Tony Morgan, unpacks each phase of the church lifecycle, and offers specific and strategic next steps the church leader can take to find its way to sustained health . . . and finally become unstuck.

Get the book here.

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Transcript

Sean:

Before we start this week’s episode, I want to take a moment and say thanks to our podcast series sponsor Planning Center. If you don’t know Planning Center, Planning Center is an all-in-one church management software. You can use Planning Center to track your first time guests, manage your volunteer schedules, and also create easy ways for your congregation to get involved all from one single platform. If you need a check-in system, if you need event signups, if you need an online giving solution, Planning Center can help you nurture your community and keep the people in your church connected. And best of all, you can get started for free with Planning Center at planningcenter.com.

Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, your host here with my teammate Amy Anderson. Amy, this is an exciting week on the podcast. This is episode number 400 for us.

Amy:

400.

Sean:

Unbelievable.

Amy:

Holy cow.

Sean:

Yeah, it’s unreal.

Amy:

Maybe we should do something around the number 400, like our 400 favorite churches.

Sean:

We could probably come up with 400 favorite churches, couldn’t we?

Amy:

We probably could.

Sean:

A lot of churches that I’ve really been a blast to serve. I was thinking back to the early days when Tony first started the podcast years ago. You know, our founder, Tony Morgan.

Amy:

Oh goodness.

Sean:

I think he might have been writer, director, producer, a little bit of everything on the podcast.

Amy:

Game designer. He would do games on the podcast.

Sean:

Had a lot of games. One of my greatest Tony memories is one of the games that you and he played where he was trying to get out a question about, I dunno, something financially related.

Amy:

Oh goodness.

Sean:

And he just, I mean, he must have tried half a dozen times, and he could not get this question out, and it just devolved into you two laughing constantly.

Amy:

It did.

Sean:

It is one of my favorite Tony clips.

Amy:

We should probably put that out as a bonus with our 400th episode that you can hear him trying to ask this crazy question and we can see each other. Right? We’re not in the same room, but we do this so we can look at one another. And I, yeah, I did. I lost it. It was the craziest question ever. Yeah. Let’s put that out there for bonus.

Sean:

The video part might be the best part, just watching him laugh at himself. Oh, so great. If you knew Tony at all and you see that video, you’re gonna laugh too. Yeah.

Amy:

Just for clarity, though, there’s a lot of bloopers you cannot put out there.

Sean:

Kinda accidental statements. Words are hard sometimes, right? Words are hard.

Amy:

Words are hard.

Sean:

Yep. Yeah. Alright, well, we’re continuing our series this week here in episode number 400 with a conversation about one of the trickiest seasons for church leaders in the life cycle of their church. And that’s the maintenance phase. And this is when aspects of the ministry look really healthy. But a lot of times growth has kind of slowed down or stopped and the church is no longer really reaching new people or seeing new people cross the line of faith, right?

Amy:

Yeah, that’s right. This is part of the seven phases of the typical church life cycle that The Unstuck Group’s founder Tony Morgan wrote in his book, The Unstuck Church, and maintenance, that phase is that first spot you slip into after seasons of growth and sustained health. And it’s the very early beginning of decline. And in the first episode we talked about the first question that tends to hit leaders when the alarm bells goes off. And that’s like, why aren’t we growing anymore? Right? You can hear the senior pastor saying that. But today we’re gonna carry that forward and talk about what you actually need to do to change course and start focusing on breaking the next growth barrier.

Sean:

Alright, well, let’s jump right into the content. What, what’s the underlying tension for church leaders when they realize that they’ve slipped into the maintenance phase and they wanna get focused on healthy growth again?

Amy:

Yeah. Well, most churches in the maintenance phase are in maintenance mode. Whether they realize it or not, most likely they have lost their focus on reaching new people. This actually happened to us at our church. You know, we had just come off a year of like 40% growth when we opened our new building. And the next year we dropped to zero to 2% growth.

Sean:

Oh wow.

Amy:

And at first, we just brushed it off as we’re just getting some time, you know, to grow up these new people that had started coming to our church the past year. But if we’re honest, the invite temperature, it had cooled significantly in the recent past. And again, maintenance can sneak in anytime, and when your growth is flat, it’s telling you something. And it’s often linked again to this loss of focus on reaching the people who are currently not connected to faith or the church. So that’s the first thing that comes to mind.

But second, and it’s a related underlying tension, is that the church has maybe unconsciously drifted towards being more insider focused. Right? They have shifted most, if not all of their energy to caring for the people, paying attention to the people that they already have. Meaning that the voices of people inside the church have become louder than those of the people outside the church and outside the faith. And here’s why I say they’ve unconsciously drifted because likely their group’s numbers, their serving numbers, all of those type of things are really high. So the church feels healthy, but there’s no new people offsetting all of those good numbers. Yeah. So those are the two underlying tensions for me. We’ve lost our focus on people outside the church and our invite, you know, culture has cooled.

Sean:

Yeah. Alright, so let’s talk about kind of how that shows up practically. I don’t think most church leaders of previously thriving growing churches would immediately agree that they’ve lost their focus on reaching new people. What are some of the warning signs that a church has shifted into this maintenance mindset?

Amy:

Yeah, here’s a few. See if any of these set off your alarm. So the bulletin program, pre-service slides, weekend service, we’re just loaded with announcements, right? Usually this is an indication the church is focused on programs rather than people, and programs are competing for people’s attention rather than creating a clear path for new people to take next steps. Second, there’s just a lot of meetings. The more inwardly focused a church gets, the more board and committee meetings there are to talk about buildings and budgets. When people are on a mission to reach others, there are just fewer meetings there. There’s a focus there. Third, you rarely hear and share stories of life change. Instead, you’re more likely to hear about the activities happening in the church. People are becoming resistant to change. Doesn’t matter how big or small the change, you know, service times, paint color, room assignments, service order, song selection. Inwardly focused churches are more interested in preserving the past. And so when you sense this, we don’t wanna change, this is an indication we’re getting into maintenance. Next people aren’t inviting their friends. And because of that, the gut reaction maybe to teach more on like evangelism, but that typically doesn’t fix the problem. Your weekend services, they feel more like a gathering of longtime friends than a place to welcome newcomers. Right? We’ve lost some of that sensitivity. And, if you look at finances kind of thing, most of your ministry resources are now going to internal programs rather than to reach strategies.

Sean:

That’s good. Amy, I’m really glad that you focused some of those kind of practical thoughts more on the kind of strategies that the church employs and some of the communication. I’m thinking back to your story about the year that your church grew by 40% and then the next year, pretty much flatlined. You know, in my experience in the church, most of the times our growth happens from what I would call the edges, meaning new people who are connecting with our church and attending our church. Typically people who are newer to our church, they know more people who are outside the church. Right?

Amy:

They do.

Sean:

The ones who are part of the church, the more church people we know. Honestly, those people are the most excited about what they’ve experienced in our church because it’s all new to them. And so what I experienced in the churches I served in is a lot of times some of those people were our best inviters.

Amy:

For sure.

Sean:

And if they weren’t inviting, it was typically a strategy problem on our side and a communication problem on our side. It is something that we hadn’t done, not something that they hadn’t done. And so I just loved how your next steps there and your focus is really focused on the strategy of the church. Let’s move into solutions then pretty quickly here. What’s the first step a church needs to take to kind of break out of this maintenance mode?

Amy:

Absolutely. Well, I will camp on invite culture here for a little bit because I think that the first and most important step is to assess and create a plan around your invite culture. Again, most likely this is cooled off in your church. Maybe it’s cooled off in your heart, right? Maybe it’s cooled off with your leadership team or your staff. And if it’s cooled there, it will have cooled off with your congregation.

Sean:

Yes.

Amy:

So you need to be re-envisioning your team and your congregation around that invite culture. You know, one of my favorite examples of this, and I’ve said it before in the podcast, but it was from TD Jakes back in the early two thousands, he was teaching on the fish in the loaves at a creative conference down at Fellowship Church. And he was reminding all of us as church leaders that we need to help the congregation see themselves as the disciples, as the apostles. Not the crowd in that story. In other words, it’s easy to get caught up because we’re actually in a crowd when we go to church, but we’re actually followers of Jesus who should be handing out the fish in the loaves. Not just consuming. So that’s the first thing, you know. Get some work, do some assessment on where is our invite culture. And again, it starts with you first, it starts with the leaders. Are we inviting? Are we proud of the experience that’s being created every weekend? You know, that we wanna invite our friends to that.

So second would be around mission field. I touched on this last week, but man, if you wanna get outta maintenance mode, you need to get clear on who you’re trying to reach, right? In our mission field, there’s lots of people we can reach, but who are we really going to pursue? How old are they? What stage of life are they in? What’s their spiritual condition? What are the key needs in their life? What do they value? Because when you can get specific like this, then you can actually assess how well your ministry strategies are connecting with the people that you’re trying to reach.

In fact, Sean, this actually reminds me of one of the very first churches I got to serve at the Unstuck Group. I don’t know if they knew they were one of the first churches I served. Well, they’ll find out today. But it’s Beach Church down in Jacksonville, Florida. Jerry Sweat. Was the lead pastor then. I don’t know if he still is, we haven’t connected for a while, but it was back in 2015 when the church engaged us and they had, I was looking back at their stats, they’d only been growing like 2% year over year. When they looked at the number of kids they had, that was only 9% of their attendance, which we would say healthy growing churches have 20% of their attendance. And kids, they were down to nine, they were very overstaffed and they were firmly in the maintenance mode. And once they had that awareness, right, once they had the clarity that they were in maintenance, they made some very strategic decisions around changes that they needed to make in order to reach their mission field.

So they redesigned their worship center, they updated it, they stopped doing multiple worship venues and went to one style of worship that they felt would connect with that mission field. They offered kid services now at every service. Before that, they just had it at one of the services. They overhauled their first impressions team and yeah, it took several months, probably closer to a year to work through, to work through their plans.

But I remember this email I got from their pastor from Jerry, and here’s just a piece of the email he sent me after they had combined into one worship style, so this is probably six to eight months after they went through the Unstuck Process. He said this, nearly 100 First Impressions team members were serving throughout the morning. They had full children’s ministry volunteer team staff to cover both services. Again, this was the first time that they were getting to have kids ministry at every service. He said, this is the first time we have had a thousand adults in worship in a long time.

Sean:

Oh wow.

Amy:

They had over 150 children in the morning, and then he said, with all these exclamations and lots of first time guests, new connection centers up and running at full strength. I think he said, I think we had nine new guests come and get connected and get their first time gift. So that was just like kind of celebrating this unification of one worship style, all the changes.  And then three weeks after that, he sent me another email and he’s celebrating once again. He said, children’s Beach Kids attendance is up 25% from last year’s average attendance. He said, our adults in weekend worship, these first three weeks is up 10% over last year’s average, they had 45 identified new guests.

Sean:

Wow.

Amy:

And they had 33 salvations in two weeks where invitations were given. Isn’t that so encouraging?

Sean:

I love that. Yeah. I remember that story. And Jerry was a courageous leader. He led through that change pretty decisively and pretty quickly. And man it created great results for his church. So, that is so encouraging. Yeah.

Amy:

It was so fun.

Sean:

So let’s break that back down. I once we’ve identified trying to reach as a church, what practical change then needs to happen? I’m sure you alluded to some of that in the story with Beach Church.

Amy:

Yeah. Let me break that down. So specifically, I would encourage you again, if you find yourself in maintenance, evaluate every aspect of your weekend experience through the eyes of that newcomer. So Beach Church recognized not having kids services at every service wouldn’t work for the families that they were trying to reach. And they also sunsetted that traditional service because it wasn’t on mission, it wasn’t reaching their mission field once they got that identified. So when we intentionally create environments where life change happens, people wanna invite their friends to church. So assess that weekend service through the lens of your mission field.

Second, develop a comprehensive hospitality strategy that makes guests feel welcomed and valued. Make sure a good, and this is important, make sure a good portion of your greeters and ushers actually look like the people you’re trying to reach. Again, mission field informs all of these decisions. And so we want people when we’re reaching, when they come to our church, we want them to see people like them. It doesn’t mean that that’s the only age group you can have. But I’m just saying make sure you’ve got a good portion of it. Same thing goes with your platform. Make sure the people you’re trying to reach are represented on those teams. We’ve said this before, but Lee Kricher in his book For a New Generation, he actually recommends that 75% of the people on your platform should be in the age range of those you’re trying to reach. So most churches have some work to do there.

And third, man, rally your congregation around reaching these people Shift them from being those consumers to contributors shift them from being the crowd to being the disciples. And again, this was part of our story when we flatlined, we put together a very specific plan to get back to a place where we were on mission and our invite culture heated up. So we spent four months doing this. We did a series about really what, why Jesus created the church and what it was for and how beautiful it is when it works well. We spent four weeks talking about just people like how we need to look like Jesus. We don’t need to look like Christians. We need to look like Jesus, and how do we break through sin patterns? How do we really get permission to actually invite people to church because maybe there’s something beautiful about our lives. We did four weeks on kind of the parable of the one, and that we needed to notice the ones that were around us. We needed to pray for them. And then we rallied everyone. Those whole three months we were doing those series, we said, what if we all just invited one person and we made the promise. We said, we’ll do our part; you do your part. We’ll be ready for this series that we want you to invite to. It was called, It Would Take a Miracle. And honestly, it didn’t happen overnight ’cause it was four months, but I swear overnight we were back to, you know, reaching those people and the ones that you know, when to reach them, they can’t wait to tell their friends. And that flywheel started again.

Sean:

Amy, I’m glad you mentioned kind of an assessment through the eyes of a newcomer to your church, and we actually, as part of our process, we have a tool that we use in the assessment that we do with churches, really to help train their staff of how to objectively look at their service from the eyes of a new person who’s visiting. And it’s just so important as you start to determine kind of next steps to how you would design things in order to reach your mission field. So that may be a tool that would be helpful for churches; if they’re interested in that, they can reach out to us at theunstuckgroup.com. Let’s move into implementation and get kind of specific there. What are some of the first few action steps that a church should take in order to start to address this?

Amy:

Yeah. So if this content has resonated with you and where you’re at, I’m gonna just back up to what you just said. It always starts with an assessment. So start by auditing your weekend service experience, from the parking lot to the closing prayer. Look at the service length, look at the content. Is everything serving your mission to reach new people? Are you using insider language? By the way, if you really wanna see your weekend with fresh eyes, invite someone to go to church with you who isn’t connected to your faith or your church.

Sean:

Absolutely. Yep.

Amy:

Better yet, have everyone on your leadership team do this, right? Have everyone on your leadership team have the responsibility to invite someone and then assess the experience through their eyes. You know, then all of you can gather, debrief, and I bet there’s gonna be commonalities, the things you notice that maybe you didn’t notice before that that need to change. Bottom line for your church to increase its invite-ability, if that’s a word. It needs, it needs to be a predictably excellent and relevant experience for your church body. They need to feel that like every week. I know I can invite someone who isn’t following Jesus.

Honestly, if the quality is hit or miss, if they’re like, I like this teacher, not that teacher, or I wonder who’s leading worship or wonder if they’re gonna do that weird thing again, people won’t invite because they, they don’t have the trust. You haven’t built the trust with them to know that I can invite someone every weekend. And I think, you know, this weekly event, the weekend service, it needs focus planning. It needs focused execution. It needs debrief.  Because as I said a few minutes ago, this is your part of the equation. You need to do your part in order for your church body to do their part, which is to invite the people that God’s placed around them.

And then, you know, once you identify what needs to change, maybe it’s just a few small tweaks. Maybe it’s some big things like what Jerry had to lead through. Then it’s time to put your plan together for re-envisioning your congregation and boldly step into the changes that need to be made. In other words, this is where I said earlier, don’t do a series on evangelism if you guys haven’t looked inside first and figured out what you need to change, you know, how we need to fix this experience. You wanna do that work first and then re-envision your congregation to step into, you know, that inviting their friends again.

Sean:

Well, Amy, we’ve been talking a lot about the weekend service here and, and how we can see it through the eyes of a newcomer and be helpful to them in the weekend service. But I just know a lot of church leaders who are listening are probably also thinking we have a lot of kind of core people who’ve been around our church for a long time, who are also a part of the weekend service. How do we include them? What, how would you respond?

Amy:

Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I get pretty passionate on this topic be just because I know that the weekend is the big front door for new people to be coming.

Sean:

Of course. Yeah.

Amy:

And I think it’s easy for us as church leaders to keep the people who are always there in mind. And sometimes we can forget about the people outside, but you’re absolutely right. I mean, the weekend service is for believers. I mean, when we worship, worship is for the believer, teaching. Anytime we can hear a gifted teacher talk on, you know, God’s word and what he’s calling us to do, which by the way is the deepest form of teaching, right? When we know how to apply it. So, definitely, I’m just asking for this purpose if we’re in maintenance, make sure you do that extra work again, to sharpen your eyes on what is it like for the people who are not here.

Sean:

That’s good. And, and that’s what we found is we’ve worked with churches. They typically need more encouragement to think about those who are outside the church in faith right now than they do to think about those who are already connected to the church. That’s good, Amy.

Amy:

That’s right. Yep.

Sean:

Alright, well let’s wrap up this week’s episode. Any final thoughts?

Amy:

Yeah, I guess I would just piggyback on what you said. You know, sometimes you need an outside perspective when you’re looking at your church. When you’re looking at the weekend, when you’re evaluating ministries. And this goes without saying, but this is what we do. We would love to come alongside you and help you develop a plan to get out of maintenance and back to sustained health. If you feel like that outside partner would be helpful. We’ve been doing this with over 700 churches now. And, this Unstuck tribe is just a great tribe to be connected to. There’s great things happening.

Sean:

Absolutely. And Amy, even as you say, 700 churches, I just think, man, what an honor to get to partner with 700 plus churches to walk through this type of work together. So, yeah. Pretty incredible. And our tribe, I always see more and more of our tribe networking together, churches building relationship and getting to know each other and learn from each other. So it’s not just learning from the Unstuck Group, but also from other like-minded churches, which has been really fun. Well, we know you as a church leader, you don’t want to get stuck in the maintenance phase, and churches can stay there for far too long. Next week, we’re gonna be specifically looking at how you, the lead pastor need to kind of adjust your leadership to get your church out of the maintenance phase. So, lead pastors, we will be talking to you next week. Everyone else, you’ll certainly want to tune in and lean into that conversation so you can learn as well.

If you haven’t yet, sign up for our free webinar we have coming up on June 26th. We’re gonna do a deep dive into the differences between the strategic growth phase and the maintenance phase, and then how you lead changes from either side towards Sustained Health. We know that leaders see stuckness first. They see those challenges on the horizon first. So we wanna learn, help you learn how to kind of recognize and interpret the signs of declining momentum and then grow more confident in your ability to lead change for the health and future momentum of your church. You can sign up for that webinar at theunstuckgroup.com/webinar, and of course, that’s completely free. Don’t forget to subscribe to get our podcast show notes so that every week you can get all the companion resources that we put together for that week’s podcast at theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. Until then, we’ll see you next week.