What Ready-For-Multisite Looks Like (Part 3)
A multisite model that’s too complex can’t be multiplied… and a model that is only captured in your head can’t be handed off.
To go multisite, you need something clear enough to repeat and captured well enough to share.
It’s one thing to know who you are, but it’s another to simplify and document it so well that someone else can actually run the same ministries and systems without the need for your constant input.
In this episode, Jesse and I talk about what you do as a multisite church and how you do it—your Ministry Model and your Defined Systems and Strategies. Plus, I check in with Amy Anderson to hear about her recovery.
- Pruning & Prioritizing
- You Can Only Replicate What’s Recorded
- Documenting Decision Rights
- A Word from Amy Anderson
You have to simplify to multiply. [episode 462] #unstuckchurch Share on X The churches that scale well aren’t the ones doing the most. They’re the ones that have gotten clear on the few things that matter. [episode 462] #unstuckchurch Share on X You cannot replicate what isn’t clearly recorded. [episode 462] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean Bublitz, managing director at The Unstuck Group. Here again with my co-host for this series, Jesse Tink. Jesse’s one of the consultants on our team and the lead pastor of Prairie Lakes Church in Iowa, an awesome multisite church with seven locations. Jesse, it’s great to have you back here on the podcast for week three.
Jesse:
Good to be back, Sean.
Sean:
Before we start this week’s podcast, I have an update to share with you. For those of you who have listened to this podcast for any length of time, you know that our teammate, Amy Anderson, suffered a stroke in April of this year. Since then, Amy’s been working hard at recovering. Recently, I had a chance to record an update with Amy, and I’m really excited to be able to share that with you on the podcast today.
Well, Amy Anderson, it is great to hear your voice on the podcast again. It’s been four months since you experienced a stroke, and I have had countless listeners reach out and ask for updates on you in the weeks since then. Can you share an update on how you’re doing for everyone who’s been praying and thinking about you?
Amy:
It’s so great to be here today to be able to speak to all my friends who are out there. So many people have let me know they were praying for me.
This is where I sat every week for over 10 years on the podcast. On April 8, my life completely changed. I’m sure we all have things like that in our lives where there’s a clear before and after. For me, I call it Amy 101, and now we’re on 201, because a lot changed that day that I won’t get back.
It’s so nice to be here for a moment with the friends that I walked with for a good decade, talked about their churches with, and learned together.
Sean:
Absolutely. It’s helpful for so many people even just to hear your voice. There were a couple of weeks after we heard about your stroke when we didn’t talk. When I got to see you and hear from you again, it was really encouraging. I know it’s encouraging for so many of your friends, churches you’ve worked with and been on-site with, churches you’ve been in the trenches with, and even churches that have just heard you on the podcast and learned from some of your experience over the years.
Amy:
It’s an incredible tribe to be a part of. I’ll share a few things.
First, you might have heard people say, “I have so-and-so who had a stroke.” If you’ve met someone who’s had a stroke, you’ve really met one person who’s had a stroke. What I’ve learned through this is that every stroke is different. It’s ironic, but my stroke is sort of camouflaged by my speech and by my walking. I was fortunate to get my speech back. I can’t say it came back quickly, but all things considered, within three months it came back. If I’m tired, it gets worse, but I was able to get it back.
When I talk, people say, “Oh my gosh, Amy, it’s you.” I’m so thankful that I have access to my brain and everything that I’ve learned, and that I can speak about it. The second thing is that I was really lucky to walk again. That’s not something that a lot of people who have strokes get, but my physical therapy came through, and I am walking. Every once in a while, I might need a cane, but for the most part, I’m not using one anymore.
People will see me walking, then they’ll hear me talking, and it’s like we’re back on. With my stroke, my whole right side is numb. I’m walking on a leg that I can’t feel, and I’m praying that those things will come back. That’s what holds me back from getting back to work and getting back to what this next phase of my life is. I still have a lot of work to do. I’m praying and trusting that the Lord will be with me this next year, but who knows what it will look like?
Sean:
One of the most encouraging things I heard you say, Amy, as we were talking recently was that God still has a purpose for your life. I think that’s the encouragement to everybody who listens to the podcast. There’s a lot that we go through personally, and there’s a lot that we go through in ministry. Sometimes the road ahead might not be clear, but God has a purpose for us. Your perspective on that is encouraging and inspiring for me. I know there have been a lot of people praying for you over the last four months. How can people continue to pray for you? What specifics should they think about as they’re praying for you?
Amy:
Through this process, my husband and I are in a place we’ve never been before. My husband actually goes back to work this week. He took three months off when I had the stroke, and he’s been my coach, helping me get back on my feet. Now he’ll be back in his lead pastor role, and I will be focusing on my full-time job, which is intense therapy. I wake up, go for a walk, and do my other therapies. I eat lunch, take a short nap, and then do it all over again.
I would ask listeners to pray for a little bit of my mental health, honestly. It’s hard to be someone who’s wired as a go-go person and recognize that I really get one day at a time. I can’t handle more than one day at a time because of the stroke I had. Please pray for endurance and for God’s miracle in how much I recover. I will never be the Amy Anderson who was there on April 8. There is definite loss. I’ve heard you can never quite get it all. But if I could get 80%, 85%, 90%, or 95%, that would be my prayer. I’m going to go after that until God says no.
You’re right, there is a lot of time left for me. I’m 57 years old. I love what I have been doing, and I may be back to it. I’ve learned a lot about the stroke community, and who knows, maybe there will be a part of that that I have to dive into. I’m going to pay attention to what God is doing in my life and where he’s calling me. If God could take this next six to eight months and really provide a path of healing, that’s what I’m praying for. That’s what I would love to have people pray for.
Sean:
Here’s what I know: 80% of Amy Anderson is as sharp as anybody I’ve met. We’ll take that. Amy, thank you for sharing all this. I’ve heard from so many people asking how they can pray for Amy, and hearing it from you, I’m sure, is really, really encouraging for them. Thanks for doing this on the podcast.
Amy:
Can I say one thing?
Sean:
Of course.
Amy:
I shouldn’t have lived. The kind of stroke I had is called a hemorrhagic stroke. Only about 13% of people have that type of stroke, and half of those people die within 24 hours. That’s the kind of stroke I had, and I made it.
That’s where I go: God spared me. There’s a purpose here.
I want to say to the people who are listening that you have the most important mission on the planet. And you know what? I could have died. What if I didn’t have the church that was doing church for me, that was really caring about people who don’t have hope? You know me. The church for me is, yes, our believers are going to learn stuff every week, but every week we also have to be prepared for people who don’t know Jesus and who are broken.
This experience for me again, I went through the whole thing with Jesus. I cannot imagine going through this without Christ. For those of you listening, that’s the other thing you can do: Please work hard at being a church that is regularly helping people hear the good news of Christ.
Sean:
That’s a great note to end on. Thanks, Amy.
If you’re just joining us, this is part three of our series, “Are You Really Ready for Multisite?” Emphasis on the really. This series is for churches that are growing and just starting to ask whether multisite is the right next step for them.
We’re walking through what we call the Multisite Readiness Checkpoints. It’s a tool that we use with churches as we lead them through our first-launch consulting process. There are 10 checkpoints, and they help you take an honest look before you launch and ask, “Are we ready or not?” The first week, we covered the first three checkpoints for the church as a whole: clarity of DNA, organizational buy-in, and current growth. Last week, we shifted to the team and walked through staff leadership capacity, staff health, and volunteer strength.
Today, we’re moving to what you do as a church and how you do it. These two checkpoints include what we call your ministry model and defined systems and strategies. Here’s the connection between them: Your ministry model is what you do. Your systems are how you’ve captured it. Both have to be ready to hand to a new location, because it’s one thing to know who you are. It’s another to make it simple enough and written down well enough that someone else can actually run it.
Jesse:
Very much like our consulting process, the further you get into this one, the more concrete and even managerial it becomes. Those first few checkpoints we talked about in the first couple of episodes are critically important and foundational, but they’re also a little more abstract and conceptual: your DNA, buy-in, and things like that. Now we’re getting into topics that, if you’re an executive pastor, finally feel relevant. Or some of your more director-level people—the world that those of us in those seats, the world that we live in is figuring out, “Hey, how do we actually deliver ministry across sites? How do we leverage our systems and structures to bring this campus into existence and move forward together?”
Some of you listening may be we like got to experience one another in the room together. So you’ll remember, there’s a point in the planning process, usually around the middle of day two, where we stop talking about all the things we need to do and start designing the projects we’re going to do. When we get to that point, to the team in the room, here’s what I usually say, something along the lines of, “To this point, some of the more future-oriented, abstract, visionary, idealistic people in the room have dominated the conversation. We needed them to. But from this point, we kinda need them to shut up.”
If you’re more concrete in your thinking, more of a project manager, more of a people manager, have a low tolerance for ambiguity, and a high tolerance for getting things done, this point in the multisite readiness, this is like your time to shine. We don’t want the rest of you to check out, but if you’re wired in this way, this is where we need you to dial in. This episode is for all of you XPs and directors who manage people, systems, and operational systems to keep the church moving, keep it on track, and going in the right direction. You have a critical role of determining your church’s readiness to go multisite.
Sean:
I love that you said that because, jumping back to last week, this is why your team is so important. Right? All of us have different giftings and skills, and we all play a role in this process.
Before we get into it, let me thank our podcast sponsor, PlainJoe Studios. On our most recent Unstuck Church Report, we found that the churches we surveyed were growing by 12% year over year. That means a lot of churches are paying attention to their worship spaces right now. The creative team at PlainJoe works with churches to create beautiful, engaging spaces to help them better connect with their communities. They have a team of architectural experts, design experts, and branding experts that come in and help you transform worship spaces into attractive, engaging hubs. If that’s an area your church needs to get better in, I encourage you to reach out to PlainJoe Studios. You can do that today at plainjoe.net.
Let’s start the conversation around the ministry model. Some of you might call it your programming. That’s the old kind of terminology for some of this. Here’s the principle: To multiply your church in future locations, you have to define how you do church in a way that’s actually scalable at your current location first. There’s a phrase we use all the time: You have to simplify to multiply. That matters because multisite is about replication. You replicate who you are. We’ve said it throughout the first two weeks of this podcast series, but you also replicate everything that you do: your programs, events, and key things on your calendar.
The more you’re running here, the more you’re asking the new campus to run there. This is where overprogrammed churches get stuck. Think about how a church builds its programming. Some of you have 20 or 30 years of ministries that you’ve grown into over time. A ministry got added here, another event got added there, and for most churches, nothing has ever been stopped or pruned. Now imagine handing all of that to a brand-new campus on day one. It’s not reasonable or wise. That campus doesn’t have 30 years of experience. It has a launch team and a lot to figure out in front of them.
The churches that scale well aren’t the ones doing the most. They’re the ones that have gotten clear on the few things that matter and do those things well. A simple model is replicable. A complicated one isn’t. Jesse, what are churches looking for as they begin to clarify their model here?
Jesse:
You’re describing the gift and curse of multisite. It’s going to reveal all of the things you’re doing simply because you can, not because you must. Honestly, when we get to this point in the conversation in the room with churches, there’s usually going to be some anxiety or even defensiveness in the room. Why? Because there are ministries, ministry initiatives, and ministry leaders that feel threatened by this new multisite initiative. They may have to compete for the church’s attention and resources as the church moves in this new direction.
I kind of want to pause and acknowledge that this is real. You may not cut some of those ministries out of your budget, you may not cut them out of your ministry offerings, but you also aren’t going to try to deliver all of them at your next location. You have to get honest with yourself and eventually with others in this process. I know what some of you are thinking right now: “Just because we don’t offer those at the next location doesn’t mean we have to cut them all out right now.”
True. You might feel like you can just let everything you’re doing continue to exist while simply adding a multisite to everyone’s plate; you could. But if you do, consider this, ok? Launching a second location, frankly, is a lot of work. It’s really, really good work, but it’s a lot. Developing and launching this campus is going to take time from your calendar and your staff’s calendar. It’s going to take focus and attention. By default, it’s going to displace some of the things you’re currently doing or compete with some of the things you’re currently asking your people to do. And so it’s better to anticipate that and get ahead of it than to launch into it and then dodge.
One of the exercises we do in the planning phase, it defines what you’ll offer at your next location from day one. When that campus opens, what ministries must happen? It’s not rocket science to figure that out. You need weekend services: worship, a sermon, and a clear strategy for what the host or campus pastor communicates from the platform. You need children’s ministry. You need to replicate your guest experience. How do we help people connect to the church for the first time? Then you need some next steps or discipleship opportunities to help people connect to serving opportunities or communities so they can grow in their relationship with Jesus and with one another. That’s pretty much it: weekends, children’s ministry, connection, and discipleship. It’s a clear, simple, well-established model. And while you might feel the need to probably optimize some of those, those are the growth engines. Those are the ministries that drive the overall success and health of the church.
Sean:
Yeah. Right.
Jesse:
But, as you walk through defining and refining that model, here’s what you’re often going to find: There are a bunch of events that you didn’t even know about. That are kind of sprinkled into every single one of those, you know? But here’s what multisite is going to do, especially when you grapple with this ministry model question. It’s going to force you to do the hard work you probably should have been doing but neglected. It’s not unlike moving. When you go from one house to the next, you’re confronted with how much stuff you’ve accumulated.
Sean:
Of course. It’s a terrifying thought. I dread the next time we move.
Jesse:
100%. Why? Because it was easier to just put it in some box or drawer, put it on a shelf, and then don’t think about it sometimes for years. But do you really want to carry it into your next home? Is it worth the sweat equity? You know? Because all it’s going to do there, and you know it, is it’s just going to sit on a different shelf and take up a different kind of space. In the church world, these are the things that take up church resources, people’s time, energy, and attention that we probably should steward in a different direction.
Sean:
You’re back to the idea that we’ve talked about throughout this series: This is great work to get healthy and ready for multisite, but it’s also great healthy-church work, too. Alright, let’s move on to the practical side here. If you want to know whether your model is ready to multiply, here’s where I’d recommend starting out.
First, have a pruning conversation before you ever start the new location. Get your team in the room together and put everything on the table: your programming, events, and ministries. Then ask the hard question about each one: Does this move people along our discipleship pathway, or is it just something we’ve always done? You’re not sitting down to cut for the sake of cutting. You’re purposefully getting simple enough so that you can multiply in the future. I want to connect this back to something we talked about last week; remember that stop-doing list for your staff’s capacity? This is the same list from a different perspective. Pruning programming is how you free up your team Jesse talked about—just the capacity your team will need. Nothing is innocent. And so the model and the team really are tied together here.
Second, do an audit of your on-ramps. Walk through how a brand-new person actually gets connected at your church. Be honest about where it gets confusing for people who try to plug in. The steps that aren’t working here at the location you know inside and out are going to be worse at the new campus, where the team is working through these steps for the very first time. Easy on-ramps at the sending location become possible on-ramps at the next location. If you go through this and realize that your model is too complex to hand off, that’s a good thing to know now. It means the next season is about simplifying before you launch anything. Usually, a simpler church is a healthier church anyway. So, again, this is back to we’re just doing healthy-church work. Multisite just forces the conversation for us.
Jesse:
If you want a roadmap of exactly how to do this, like a document, I want to point you to two places. First, we did a podcast back in 2023 on pruning. I went back and found it, Sean. It’s episode 325. Take a listen to that. That’s the first place I’d point you to. Second, so I remember listening to that. I was so inspired by that podcast that I went back to it, listened to it, paused, and translated what Tony and Amy were saying into a documented exercise that you can run with your team, complete with charts and facilitation instructions—the whole nine yards. Now, it’s offered as a PDF on our website. You can grab it there. I would run that with your teams. The document is called “Pruning and Prioritizing: Ministry Evaluation.” It will give you a great roadmap for doing some of this work.
Sean:
If you go to theunstuckgroup.com, our Resource Hub has all of our digital resources. It’s a good tool. Checkpoint number eight, and this one really partners with the last one: defined systems and strategies. Here’s the principle: You cannot replicate what isn’t clearly recorded. It’s pretty simple. Let me talk through the challenge and why this one matters. When you go multisite, your teams are rarely doing ministry near each other anymore. You have people running your ministry in buildings that might be across town or across the state, as in your case, Jesse, across different areas of Iowa. That distance has an impact on your team. It creates room for communication to break down, for teams to drift out of alignment, and for people to misunderstand what was supposed to happen.
When everybody’s under one roof, you can get away with this because you can walk down the hall and figure it out. You correct things in the moment, but you can’t walk down the hall to a campus that’s 30 minutes away. The things you’ve been carrying just in your head and passing along by telling people start to fall apart the moment there’s distance between your locations. It’s critical that churches going multisite address this before it becomes an issue. To do that, you move from what we call an oral tradition to a written one. Instead of telling people how things work, you capture things in writing. Anyone at any location then has access to that, and they can run it the same way.
That’s what we’re looking for: documented, exportable strategies for each ministry. Could you hand a new campus the written version of how you do children’s ministry or your weekend and what the win and success look like there? Or would they have what they need just by looking at the documentation you’ve put together? On the operations side, are your systems defined well enough that a campus leader can work with your central departments without having to guess or call any time they have a question? They know how to engage your central team.
If you’re considering going multisite, now is the time to ask the key question: Are you ready operationally? Do you know how a campus is going to budget, handle money, get communication support, and work with HR? Often, those questions don’t feel urgent until you have a second location asking them and no written answer ready to give. Jesse, how have you handled this at Prairie Lakes or with some of the churches you’ve been consulting with?
Jesse:
Sure. I know there’s been such a whipsaw around AI and its place, but honestly this is how we’re handling it. There are a few of us who are born-and-bred documenters. You hear Sean talk about this readiness checkpoint and think, “Yes, finally, I can sit in front of my computer and write all this stuff down.” Most of us aren’t like that. Most of us in ministry don’t relish the idea of sitting down and creating manuals and brand standards for how we do what we do. This is where ChatGPT has been helpful to us.
Think about this: If you use AI or don’t, I’m not trying to push you one way or another. But sit in front of it and prompt it with something like: “Hey, I work at a church, and we’re trying to document our ministry’s best practices and processes in order to have a common reference library that everyone can access across multiple locations digitally. Could you please produce a template that each of our ministry leaders can use to start building that library?”
Sean:
That’s a good prompt.
Jesse:
Yeah, and then you just kind of hone that template in. You’re letting something/someone else do the work. Once you create the template, the next step here is get your key staff leaders in the room to take a look at it before you unleash it on them. Share the goal of it, get their input into its design, and help them see how you want them to use it and how you want the church to use it before you tell them they have to use it. Once you finalize it with their input, set them loose to populate the template for their area of ministry. Once they do and they come back and deliver that, create a shared, cloud-based drive or file system where everyone at every location can access it.
This is one of those things that I think you can choose to be as simple as you want it to be, as high level as you want it to be, or you can kind of be as specific and weedy as you prefer. That’s kind of one of the cool things about AI. Whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another tool, you can interface it with your digital file system and have it serve as the search engine your staff uses. So let me just give you like this vision here for the finish line. How cool would it be? Just imagine if your next-steps person at your next location who is maybe newer to your staff, imagine they have a question about your baptism process or child dedication. Comes up in multisite all the time. How cool would it be if you had a clearly documented resource that they could easily find or even have a conversation with your AI-based search engine and resource library? That vision can be compelling and motivating as you get this project up and running.
Sean:
I love that. That’s a great idea. You didn’t ask AI to put together the system for you. You asked it to put together the template.
Jesse:
Correct.
Sean:
Let’s move to the practical side here, too. If you need to move from oral tradition to written tradition, here’s where I think you start. To be honest, this is the least exciting checkpoint in the series. Very few people get into ministry to write process documents. But this is often the difference between a campus launch that creates momentum and a campus launch that creates frustration. First, document your decision rights: how decisions actually get made. This is the one that a lot of churches skip, and it causes probably the most tension later. Who decides what? What does a campus decide on its own? What does Central get to decide?
When we work with churches through this first-launch process, we help them clarify who gets to make what decisions using these specific categories: First, Central decides, meaning the Central team makes the call on its own. Next, Central decides with campus input, which means the Central team still has decision rights, but they include the campus as it gathers information before making the decision. The third option is that the decision is made by consensus, meaning neither Central nor the campus is opposed to the decision. Next, the campus decides with Central input, which means Central shares information, but the campus makes the call. Lastly, the campus decides, which means the campus has full decision-making ability around that issue. Sit down and determine what your decision rights look like and how decisions get made. Write those down before you get to a disagreement, not in the middle of one.
Second, write down your money processes. How does a campus build its budget? How does it handle money day to day? What can it spend without asking? What needs sign-off from someone centrally? Money is often where the distance between campuses creates the most confusion, so get that on paper as well. Third, build a communications playbook. How does a campus get something promoted? Who makes graphics? Who handles announcements? How does a campus request support? A new location shouldn’t need to reinvent the communication strategy. That’s a bad idea.
Fourth, document your HR processes. How do you hire, onboard people, and handle staff issues across your locations? When your people are spread out, “We’ll just handle it as it comes up” stops working. You can’t do it that way. Here’s the encouraging part: This work is valuable whether you ever go multisite or not. When you move a church from oral tradition to written tradition, everything gets clearer for the people you already have. Multisite makes this non-negotiable for your church.
Jesse:
Almost every church I’ve worked with on the ground in multisite planning walks away with this as one—what we’re talking about here—as one of their key initiatives. They all start saying, “We need to go from oral to written.” Almost every single one. That last sentence is worth repeating: This work is valuable even if you never go multisite. This month, I’m starting my third decade in ministry.
Sean:
Now you do sound old, Jesse.
Jesse:
I know. It’s because I am. What’s even crazier is that every one of those years has been with the same church. Twenty years at the same church, which is pretty unique. Here’s what I’m noticing at this stage in my ministry career. There’s a next generation of leaders and staff members who have stepped into high-level roles but, as always, haven’t had the same shared experiences or learnings that the rest of us long-in-the-tooth, crafty veterans have had.
Before you anticipate where I’m going with this, too often I make the assumption that they already know, that they’re probably already comfortable, or that they don’t want coaching from someone telling stories about how things were back in ‘08. So I assume that, but what I find instead is this: They’re trying to come up with solutions to old and ever-present problems, like volunteer recruitment or development, not knowing that we’ve already solved that one. Maybe they’re doing their best to figure something out or do something the right way, but secretly wish they didn’t have to build the ship while sailing it.
When you take seriously the task of going from oral to written, you’re setting the next generation up to learn from their history and spend their best energies on new problems and new opportunities. Don’t get me wrong. These documents aren’t stone tablets. You’re going to iterate on them, improve them, and change them. But you shouldn’t have to recreate them conversationally every time the same issue comes up. You shouldn’t leave the church wide open to having all of its organizational history and managerial processes walk out the door with you.
Sean:
Let’s close out today’s episode, Jesse. We’ve covered two more of the readiness checkpoints: the ministry model and defined systems and strategies. What ties them together is that one is about getting simple and the other is about getting it written down. A model that’s too complex can’t be multiplied. A model that’s only captured in your head can’t be handed off to somebody else. To go multisite, you need something clear enough to repeat and captured well enough to share with others. I’ll give you the last word, Jesse. What’s the key thought leaders need to walk away with from today’s conversation?
Jesse:
I’m going to quote Andy Stanley again. He’s got this phrase that he uses when he talks about his communication or leadership philosophy: “What’s memorable is portable.” When we’re talking about today’s conversation, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make our ministry more portable. Unlike a sermon, we’re not trying to make it more portable by making it more memorable. We’re trying to make it more portable by documenting it.
Here’s what I would add to making our ministry model more portable: What’s portable is repeatable. If you give everyone access to the same documented standards, everyone everywhere your church exists will be able to do ministry in the way your church does it. Building on that, what’s repeatable is transferable. Here’s what I mean: A documented library of your church’s ministry model is one of the greatest gifts you can give to your campus pastor. It will be an invaluable resource for coaching staff and holding them accountable. The campus pastor can transfer your way of doing ministry to all of the staff and volunteers. What’s repeatable is transferable.
Finally, what’s transferable is scalable. It’s a lot of heavy lifting at first. Documenting all of these processes, strategies, standards, and decision-making rights. But you only have to do it once. You don’t have to do it every time a new campus launches. They get to benefit from the work already done. It’s scalable. Without it, you have to recreate the training and coaching wheel with every new staff member or campus launch. But when you have it, you can launch at whatever pace God opens up. What’s transferable is scalable.
So it comes to this, right? What’s portable is repeatable, what’s repeatable is transferable, and what’s transferrable is scalable. If you wanna launch new locations, get this part done and out of the way.
Sean:
That’s good. I hope we’ve convinced some people in ministry to get into process documentation. I think they’ll walk away from today’s conversation excited about it.
Jesse:
Yeah. Yeah.
Sean:
I hope so. Here’s what I hope you’re noticing across this whole series: None of the checkpoints require you to launch anything to start working on them. Simplifying your model and writing down your systems are good work for your team. It makes your church healthier today, whether a second location happens or not. Multisite readiness just becomes a bonus.
Next week, we wrap up the series with the final two checkpoints: financial strength and a replicable weekend experience. We’ll talk about what it takes to fund a launch without putting your church at risk and whether your weekend—the thing most people show up for—is something you can deliver in more than one place. It’s the last piece of the readiness picture, so don’t miss next week.
If today put words to the gap you’ve been sensing, whether it’s a model that’s become too complicated or systems that still only live in people’s heads, that’s the kind of work we’re doing every week with churches. Our team at The Unstuck Group walks with churches through our multisite launch process to help them assess their readiness across all 10 checkpoints, clarify their model, and build a clear, phased plan to launch that first location with confidence—and potentially more locations in the future if that’s part of your vision.
The goal is for your first launch to be healthy and sustainable and it reaches the people you’re trying to reach from the grand opening of that location. Most churches going multisite have few people, if anyone, in leadership who have done this before. Don’t go at this alone. If you’d like to start a conversation about how we could help, head to theunstuckgroup.com/multisite.
If this podcast or series has been helpful for you, take a minute to leave us a review on whatever platform you’re listening on. It will only take a few seconds, but it helps other church leaders find these conversations.
Jesse, thanks again. We’ll be back next week for the wrap-up to this series. Listeners, we’ll see you next week.
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