What Ready-For-Multisite Looks Like (Part 2)
Multisite doesn’t just stretch your building. It stretches your bench.
You can have clear DNA, full buy-in, and real growth, and still not be ready because you don’t have the leaders to pull it off.
Before you launch a new location, you need to assess whether you have enough of the right leaders, healthy leaders, and a deep enough volunteer bench.
In this episode, we’re looking at three checkpoints that focus on your team: Staff Leadership Capacity, Staff Health and Volunteer Strength.
- Replicating the Right Leaders
- Building a Team that Trusts
- Raising up Volunteer Leaders
Good leaders figure out a way to deprioritize the less important things in order to get the most important thing done. [episode 461] #unstuckchurch Share on X When you go multisite, you replicate your strengths and your dysfunction. [episode 461] #unstuckchurch Share on X Multisite is a people thing before it’s a building thing. [episode 461] #unstuckchurch Share on X
This Episode Is Brought to You By PlainJoe Studios.
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean Bubltz, managing director at The Unstuck Group. Here again with my co-host for this series, Jesse Tink. Jesse’s a consultant here at the Unstuck Group and the lead pastor of Prairie Lakes Church in Iowa, a multisite church with seven locations across Iowa. Jesse, it’s good to have you back. With all of the consulting work that you do for our team, where have you been lately and any churches that you’d like to brag on?
Jesse:
Man, the last two churches I was on the ground with are both fantastic. So shout out to Community Church in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, home of the Central Michigan University Chippewas.
Sean:
Nice. Everybody loves the Chippewas.
Jesse:
That’s exactly right. Their lead pastor, Alan Cullen, has just a really compelling vision for launching campuses in Central Michigan. And then his partner, executive pastor Eric Barz, just really good guy, has the character and leadership chops to just help realize it. So I really enjoyed being with them and their team. And then the other one I was with a little bit earlier in the year was Connection Church in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. So like 45 minutes from the heart of Philly. And their lead pastor who—Sean, you and I are pretty tall guys, like 6’3″, 6’4″. Their pastor—
Sean:
He’s a lot taller than me.
Jesse:
Pastor Joe is like 6’10”, I think. But he and Pastor Dan, their church out there is growing by leaps and bounds. They’re thinking about an expansion or a multisite, and just cool to see in both of those churches, I think, the lead pastor, executive pastor partnership.
Sean:
Love that. Well, if you’re just joining us, this is part two of our series, Are You Really Ready for Multisite? And it’s built for churches that are growing, sensing the momentum right now, and then starting to ask the question whether multisite is the right next step for them. And we’re walking through a tool that we use with churches called the Multisite Readiness Checkpoints. There are 10 of these checkpoints, and they help you take an honest look before you launch and ask, are we ready here or are we not? And last week we covered the first three: clarity of DNA, organizational buy-in, and current growth. Those three are about the church as a whole. Do you know who you are? Is everyone on board? And are you actually growing right now?
Today, we shift the focus from the church to the team because here’s the thing that we said at the end of the last episode: multisite doesn’t just stretch out your building, it actually stretches your bench. You can have clear DNA, full buy-in, real growth happening, and still not be ready for multisite because you don’t have the leaders to pull it off right now. So today, we’re looking at three more checkpoints that impact each other: staff leadership capacity, staff health, and volunteer strength. With these three checkpoints, you’re gonna be able to assess whether you have enough of the right leaders, healthy leaders, and a deep enough volunteer bench to send out to a new location.
Jesse:
That’s right. It’s such a critical part of this whole multisite question and something that I think, depending on how you’re wired as a leader—a lot of us in ministry are just more relationally wired as leaders. And we’ve invested in people, we’ve cared for them. They like us and we like them. And so maybe we assume that we’ve got just a deep well of people to draw from, but there is a real difference between “hey, they like our church” and “they’re ready and willing to go.” And so it’s just a gap that I don’t think you often discover until you make the ask and then realize you’ve got maybe a lot less leaders in readiness than you anticipated. So I’m looking forward to diving into this a little bit deeper. Getting this right has so much potential, not only for your next location, but just your current one as well.
Sean:
Yeah. All right. Before we get into it, let me thank our podcast sponsor, PlainJoe Studios. Our most recent Unstuck Church report found that the average church responding to our survey is growing by 12% year over year. And that means, of course, there are a lot of churches that are paying more attention to their worship space. So PlainJoe has a creative team that works with churches to create really beautiful, engaging spaces to help them better connect with their community. They have architectural design experts, branding experts that can come in and help you transform your space into an attractive, engaging hub. So if that’s an area that your church could use some help with, you can reach out to them today at plainjoe.net.
All right, let’s start with checkpoint—it’s actually number four on our list of 10, but it’s number one for today: staff leadership capacity. And here’s the principle behind it: the right leaders are required to replicate your culture. And we keep coming back to that phrase, you replicate who you are, and the people who do the replicating are your leaders. So if you don’t have enough of them or you have the wrong kind, you’re not ready to launch yet. And this is where we’ve seen a lot of churches get mixed up, because they confuse having a full staff with having leadership capacity, and those aren’t the same thing.
Here’s what I mean. Most church staffs are built primarily with specialists, gifted people who are great at doing the thing that they’re responsible for. The worship leader leads worship. The kids director works with the kids. And you need those people. But a specialist does the ministry. A leader of leaders builds and develops other leaders who do the ministry. And multisite is most successful with the second kind. Because when you launch a campus, you’re not just sending one person to go do ministry in a new building. You’re sending someone who can build a team, develop volunteers, and honestly really carry out culture without you in the same room. And if your staff is full of doers and short on developers, you’re gonna see that gap from the moment you launch your location.
So what are you actually looking for here? I think there’s a few things, Jesse. First, a future campus pastor who’s already been identified. Not just someone you’ll find in a few months before you launch that campus, but somebody who you can meaningfully have jump into the work now and help you build towards launch. Second thing, a campus team or a central team that’s ready to support that new location. The new campus isn’t gonna run on its own. There’s gonna be a team behind it. So do we have that team in place?
And then we look at some numbers because capacity shouldn’t just be a gut feeling, right? We shouldn’t just go with our intuition on this one. And there are two ratios I think worth knowing. First is your staff to attendance ratio. And the benchmark there for us is around 75 attendees for every one staff FTE. And your volunteer leader to attendance ratio, where the benchmark here is one leader for about every 10 attendees that we have at the church.
And then after you look at that data, honestly, just ask yourself about your team’s margin. Set gifting and ability aside in people for a second, and then just ask, can your current team actually take on more? Or are they already maxed out? Because if your staff is running at capacity right now just to keep the current location going, adding a location doesn’t add to their capacity. It just spreads people more thin than they already are. Which usually means for churches, there’s a stop doing list that needs to be written. And if you want your team to lead a campus launch well, something that they’re carrying today probably needs to come off their plate first.
Jesse:
Yeah. And there was so much there, Sean, that you said. So let me just maybe zero in on a few of them, especially if you’re a single site church considering launching your first multisite campus. So the first thing I want to zero in on is this. Not everyone who is on your staff and currently point leading at your first location—so we’re talking about your current staff—not every single one of those people by default is gonna be the person you’re gonna want to support that ministry across locations.
Sean:
Right. Yeah.
Jesse:
And I know that is like, what, how, really? I would say they may not even be the person you want leading at your second location either. So remember, in a multisite model, you replicate who you are. So think about this. Do you have people, even point leaders on your staff, who might be a few degrees off when it comes to your church culture? Just then imagine those people getting exponentiated in a model that replicates both their strengths and their weaknesses. And so this is kind of what multisite does. It really forces you to have more of a clear-eyed evaluation of who you have leading your ministries. And you’re going to want to have that evaluation before you just put someone in a position of leadership across multiple locations first.
Second, like Sean was saying, there’s a real difference between great doers and great developers. And churches do tend to reward great doers. For example, the talented worship leader who the crowd really responds to. The children’s ministry leader who is there 51 weekends out of the year, keeping the ministry going while consistently short on volunteers. Or the dynamic teaching pastor who draws crowds. So often, these are like the heroes. And they’re people who thrive in an environment where there’s likely already significant momentum and established growth.
Sean:
Oh yeah. That’s so true.
Jesse:
As opposed to environments where something needs to be built from the ground up, which is kind of what we’re doing in multisite. So what you need at your next locations are developers. They’re leaders who like to build teams. And they have a great track record of doing so. And they build relationships and credibility by working on things together. That’s what they love to do. They enjoy not just delegating tasks, but coaching up and empowering people to own more ministry leadership. So you might think that you have great leaders in your staff, but really what you got is maybe a lot of great doers, when who you need are great developers.
Last thing I want to zero in on. Sean, you talked about margin there, and that is the thing that always comes up when we really seriously consider launching a next location. Do we have the time and space, right? So I’ve never heard a good leader say, you know what, I just have all kinds of unclaimed white space in my calendar, and I’m really, really glad. I’ve only ever heard good leaders say, I’m not sure how we’re gonna get that done, but we’ll make it work. And I’m not trying to say that good leaders live without limits and shed good boundaries and act like they’re superhuman. I’m not saying that. But what I am saying is that good leaders, when they see an opportunity or they see something that God’s kind of pushing them into, they figure out a way to stop doing the things or to deprioritize the things in order to get the most important thing done. And I would even add this—and I know, I’m more self-conscious maybe, like you are, Sean, of sounding old.
Sean:
Wait, do I sound old?
Jesse:
Yes, you do. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.
Sean:
You sound just like my kids.
Jesse:
We’re in our mid 40s, okay? So we’re not old by the lots of years. But what that means is—
Sean:
Yeah.
Jesse:
We’re not new to church staff. When we got on church staff, we probably saw and we hung around the “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” boomer leaders, that burned the candle at both ends, and they really established a culture of fast-paced, hard work, or bad boundaries and some unhealth, depending on your perspective. But then what do we do? We watched some of them realize the effect that it was having on their families, and this movement for emotional health and mental health, and even the reemergence of the spiritual formation soul care crowd that the John Mark Comers brought back into the atmosphere.
So Gen Z starts from a very different place with a very different set of expectations for margin, for flexibility and work-life balance, than you and I probably did. All of that to say, I still think that good leaders don’t demand the margin, or they don’t just quit when they max it out. Good leaders still figure out a way—Gen Z, millennial, boomer, X, or whatever—they still find a way to just create more of it. I just find that to be true in every generation of good leaders in the workplace.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s so interesting. All right. Let’s shift to the practical side of this checkpoint. So if you’re a church and you’re trying to figure out whether you’ve got the leadership capacity for this, here’s where I think you would start. First, count your leaders of leaders. You actually need to sit down with your senior leadership team and honestly ask, how many of our staff are gifted to develop other leaders like Jesse’s been talking about? Not how many do good work, but how many multiply themselves? That number tells you more about your readiness than your total staff size does. Second, get in there and run your ratios. Actually do the math. Pull your staff to attendance number and your volunteer leader ratio and compare them to our benchmarks. If you’re way off, that doesn’t mean you need to stop working towards your launch now. Now you just know where you actually stand before launch and what you need to be working on.
And then third, name your future campus pastor or admit that you can’t yet. This is the one that churches often want to wait longer on. They’ll sort it out closer to launch. But the campus pastor can make or break the campus. If you can’t point to that person right now, that’s not just a small gap. We actually have a tool that we go through with churches as we go through this multisite launch process to help them understand what are we looking for in a campus pastor, and if they have candidates on their team right now, to actually vet those current candidates and look at their fit.
Fourth thing for me, Jesse, look at the margin like you’ve talked about and build your stop doing list. Ask your team where they’re maxed out at and decide what comes off their plate to make room, because you can’t ask a team that’s already full to carry something new without taking something away first. And if you go through this and realize you’re short, that’s okay. It’s better to find out now. It might mean you spend the next season developing leaders before you launch anything. I don’t think that’s a delay. I think that’s just the right thing. It’s just identifying the right thing to focus on for right now.
Jesse:
Yeah. And I know this is probably assumed or already clear for most of our listeners, but just in case it’s not, let’s make sure we are clear on what we mean by leader. So these are leaders of people. Leaders of people. So in your staff org chart, these are the people that supervise other staffers or volunteer leaders. If you have a volunteer org chart, these are the ones that help out with scheduling, or they lead volunteer huddles, or they lead small groups. Leaders aren’t just great at what they do. They do the work that requires them to lead other people in order to get that work done.
So it’s very possible—and I would say, gosh, more likely than not even, if I’m reflecting on some of the churches that we’ve worked with, even large churches, successful, healthy churches—it’s very possible that you haven’t really thought through this strategically. So just to get super practical, I would encourage you to think organizational charts. If it’s your staff organizational chart, make sure it’s updated. And if you don’t have a volunteer organizational chart, which, Sean, I’d say most churches still don’t—
Sean:
I agree.
Jesse:
Make one. We talked leadership pipeline. We’ll talk more about that, I think, here in a little bit. But challenge your staffers to get current on their volunteer rosters, period. Is everybody’s name in there, and their phone number and their email address? And then give them each a template to fill out for those rosters into an org chart. You’re gonna see very quickly which of your staffers are more doers of ministry, and then which of them really actually develop volunteer leaders and teams.
And the last thing I want to highlight here is, Sean, some of the stuff you said about campus pastors—broken record, broken record—but the best campus pastors are often your best people developers. Really, like, your best campus pastor candidate is your best developer of people. And that’s the reason that you need to identify them as early as possible. Because they and their staff, if you’re sending a bunch of people from your church, they’ve gotta get to the work of organizing and training and developing and deploying those teams for public launch.
Sean:
That’s some excellent coaching, Jesse. I hope churches are leaning into that, because that campus pastor one for sure is an area where when we step in with multi-stuck churches, I would say maybe one of the top three reasons—top five for sure—is they’ve hired the wrong person in that campus pastor role. So critical. All right.
Checkpoint number five, number two for today. And this is the one—it’s kind of a partner to the last one—and it’s staff health. And here’s the principle behind this one: the health of your campuses will be impacted by the health of your leaders. Right? That makes sense. It’s logical. And once again, you replicate who you are. But this is a two-way street, because you can’t just replicate your strengths. You’re gonna replicate your dysfunction too. And that’s the part I don’t think any of us really want to hear. We don’t want to be honest and admit—if your team’s unhealthy now, multisite doesn’t leave that behind. They don’t get magically healthy by adding a new location. It carries into the new location, and it spreads the unhealth. A tension that you’ve learned to live with at one site becomes now tension at two. Whatever’s true about your team today, you’re about to multiply it. So your current cracks eventually become these big gaps when you go multisite.
So what does a healthy team actually look like? I think a couple of specifics here. First, there’s relational strength. There’s a high sense of trust on the team, the ability to have healthy conflict, not avoid it, and accountability between people where leaders can hold each other to things without blowing up at each other. That’s kind of foundational, I think. Second thing, there’s a commitment to the mission of the church over the mission of any one ministry. In other words, there’s no silos in the church where every leader’s kind of protecting their own instead of pulling for the whole church. You can feel that. And multisite makes silos worse, because now you’ve added campuses to the org chart and given one more line to kind of draw this us and them reality—or they think it’s reality, but it’s not true.
And I think the way that we observe this—a lot of teams will recognize this framework. It’s Patrick Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of a team: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. You can walk your team through those five and get an honest assessment on where you’re healthy and where you’re not. We also use our own Unstuck Teams Assessment to put some real data behind it. I like that tool as well. But here’s my caution. A church can be growing, have the buy-in, even have the leaders, and still have a team that doesn’t trust each other. And from a distance, that church might look ready for multisite. The numbers, all the metrics might say go, but the health underneath it says, actually, let’s pause. Let’s wait. And you could use the numbers to cover up unhealth right up until you launch that new location, when the cracks you ignored start showing up in two locations now instead of one.
Jesse:
Whenever we’ve started a campus at a new location, we’ve seen some of this kind of play out. And we’ve done this a bunch of times now. Here’s how I’ve seen some of these dynamics present. There’s always some of those early adopters who are all in on the new campus from the get-go, all in. They feel like godsends, right? They just feel like gifts. And almost every time, though, those same raving fans eventually turn into sometimes your biggest detractors. Or they even just ghost you. And you’re gonna see this on some level, I think, during this pre-launch and launch phase of your multisite campus. You’re gonna see staffers that you thought were kind of coasting suddenly reengage, or you’re gonna see people brand new to your church just jump right in, or people in the location you’re launching in who maybe were church shopping or had some church hurt sing your praises and start giving right away.
Because why? Because the promise of something new masks old unhealth, or old wounds that just were never dealt with, until eventually, maybe a year in, two years into your launch, those things reemerge. And the reason I’m saying that is, I think when you’re in this phase of launching a campus, all of that stuff is really hard to see because there’s so much effusive praise or their willingness to serve or their financial support that it all kind of makes you want to look the other way. And so I think at this phase, if you’re leading one of these multisite initiatives, you kind of have a decision to make. And it’s more of a directional, philosophical, cultural decision than it is anything else.
Do you want to build a team that is healthy, but you have to take the time to do that? You have to have the hard conversations. You have to ensure alignment. You have to set good boundaries. You trust people with more leadership after they’ve proven worthy of that trust. All of that is the hard, slow, but good work of pastoral leadership. Do you want to do it that way? Or do you want to build a team that grows fast and just kind of roll the dice on some of that unhealth coming back to bite you and your team later? Because—I’m gonna say this from experience—it will. And you can’t always prevent all of that from happening, but you can mitigate it if you make the right decisions when you start.
Sean:
Yeah. And it’s hard to do when you start too late, right? Because there’s this urgency, you think, and we’ve got to go faster. And again, that goes back to the principle we started this whole series with, which was one of the reasons campus launches fail is they start too fast. It’s too soon. So that’s really important. I hope people pick up on that, Jesse.
All right. Shifting to the practical side of this checkpoint now, how do you actually assess whether your team is healthy enough to do this? First, of course, just get honest about trust within your team before you do anything else. Everything in Patrick Lencioni’s model is kind of built on that. So the real question is, does your team trust each other? Can people disagree in a meeting and still be fine afterwards? Or does everyone kind of stay quiet and then talk about it behind closed doors later? If the trust isn’t there, that’s one of the things to work on first. Not the launch. It’s actually the trust within your team.
The second thing to look for is silos. Walk through your ministries and ask whether your leaders are pulling for the whole church or just the part that they’re mostly passionate about. And a simple test is to watch when decisions help the church as a whole but cost one ministry. How does that leader respond? I think their answer tells you a lot about whether silos exist in your church. And then third, use a real assessment. Again, don’t just trust your gut on this. It’s hard to evaluate your own team’s health from the inside because you’re part of it, right? You’re there, you’re included with them. So walk your team through the five dysfunctions together, or use a tool like we have, the Unstuck Teams Assessment, which exists in our resource hub on our website, so that you’re working from something more honest than just your hunch, a gut feeling.
And then last thing, deal with what you find before you get to launch, not after. If the assessment surfaces a problem, that’s not a reason to feel discouraged. It’s actually, I think, a gift to you. You found it while you still have one location to fix it in, instead of discovering it now that you’ve multiplied into two, or sometimes even more than that.
Jesse:
Yeah. Of all the things you just talked about there, Sean, I think the one that probably has the most potential as a catalyst for health in the churches that I work with is ironically the same one that most ministry leaders avoid like the plague, because it feels the most risky and the most painful. But that’s getting honest. Being willing to say the hard thing—in love, of course. When we do that, we’re wanting something for them, not from them. And to say it, to be honest when you’re at your best, not when you’re at your wit’s end and just unload, right? But still getting honest. Even in the marketplace, where maybe relationships aren’t as prized as they are in the church, even in the marketplace, it’s difficult to do. And I think that in the church and for church people, it’s even more so. Because most of us are relators—not me—but most other church relational people have a really, really hard time telling hard truths to others because they fear it’s gonna threaten the relationship. And so they just don’t.
And then here’s what happens. When you don’t, as time passes, it gets harder and harder, because while you continue to build the relationship, you know that there’s this crack in this foundation that never got addressed. And you’re just putting more and more and more on top of that crack. But of course, like we said a few times already, in a multisite model, like any new and challenging initiative, it’s pretty weighty. It just is. It’s a heavy responsibility. And when you take that multisite yoke on yourself and you put it on your team and you start kind of driving forward, wherever there was cracks in a relationship that went unaddressed because things were left unsaid, that’s where there’s gonna be an eventual break. And that’s a little bit of the tragic irony of it all. We’re afraid that a relationship is gonna break because we’re gonna say the hard thing. But relationships break because you didn’t. And then you tried to build a relationship on top of it that lacked integrity and honesty. So put a smile on my face, pray up, and then just get honest.
Sean:
It reminds me of our friend, Lance Witt, Jesse. He says—I don’t know if this is his quote or not, I’m gonna give it to him—he says, “Clarity is kindness.”
Jesse:
Oh, that’s Brené Brown.
Sean:
Oh, Brené Brown. It’s so true. Just the ability to sit with—sometimes we feel like we can leave a conversation, let it go, not have it, string out a conversation over time. And we feel like that’s being more kind. But actually sitting down and being clear is really more productive and, I think, more biblical.
Jesse:
Absolutely.
Sean:
All right. Let’s go to the last checkpoint for today. And it complements the first two. It’s volunteer strength. And here’s the principle, and it’s short but: new campus launches require deep benches. It’s very simple, very clear. We’ve been talking about your staff, their capacity, their health, but your staff isn’t who fills the new campus. Your volunteers actually are. And this is where we tie back to something from our very first episode last week when we talked about buy-in. And I said at that point, the bench gets drained, both staff and volunteers. Because when you launch, you pull people out of your existing location to send them. This is the same truth from the other side. It’s not enough just to have buy-in. You have to have the depth to actually send people and stay healthy where you’re sending from.
And here’s the challenge I see most churches run into. A lot of churches look at how they run things on Sunday. And if everything’s getting done, they assume that they have the depth they need for launch. But what often gets masked is that you have a few people doing a lot of things. And if those people aren’t multiplying themselves by raising up other volunteers and leaders, well, now you have an issue when you start sending some of your best volunteers to launch this new location. So on this checkpoint, what are we looking for? Another couple of things here.
First, we’re looking for a high level of involvement on your volunteer teams, not just bodies filling slots, but real engagement. People who are actually serving, not just attending and then filling gaps here and there. Second thing, a leadership pipeline that’s full and balanced with people being developed at all levels. And that means you’re not just recruiting volunteers, but you’re actually raising up volunteer leaders who lead other volunteers. Because when you send a launch team, you’re not just sending helpers, you’re sending leaders. And if your pipeline is thin already, you’re gonna feel that the second that you try to staff a new location without gutting the current one. And the way that you observe this, I think, comes down to, again, your vital signs and some specific metrics, looking at your serving percentage and taking an honest look at your pipeline. Do you actually have measurable leadership pipelines defined?
You talked about this earlier, Jesse, with just kind of charting this out in an organizational volunteer structure. And as you look at that and you build out your structure, you’ll start to see, do we have gaps or do we have a full team? And you’re not building a hope that leaders are gonna show up once we start this new campus, they’ll appear. But in this way, you’re actually working through naming people who are serving and moving into leadership opportunities, and then some who are leading leaders. So take the time to evaluate your bench honestly.
Jesse:
Which is something that a lot of times we don’t take the time to do. There’s a phrase in sports that goes something like, winning covers a multitude of sins. You can kind of screw up a lot, but if you’re winning, nobody cares. The Bible says something a little bit different. But you get it. When things are going well, it tends to cover up some of the underlying things that aren’t. And in the church world, winning in that kind of way usually looks like full rooms. If the room is full or it’s getting full, we’re great, and everybody’s great. And everyone’s doing a great job because we have butts in seats.
But I think it was Andy Stanley who said one of the most dangerous seasons for a church is when it’s growing and the leaders don’t understand why. I think that’s super insightful. And, not that I could add something meaningful, but I’m gonna do my best. I would say even more dangerous of a season for a church is when it’s growing and the leaders do understand why, but they don’t care that those reasons aren’t good reasons. Or they aren’t sustainable reasons. Or that they’re shortsighted reasons. A lot of ministry leaders—and I can say it now because I’m one of them, lead pastors especially—we tend to be opportunists. We can see an opportunity to maximize it and capitalize it and produce growth and momentum from it, and then just move on to the next one. And that’s a valuable skill. It is. It’s just not very sustainable. That’s something that we have to consider as leaders.
One of the best reasons behind growth is solid volunteer leadership and volunteer ownership. That’s one of the best reasons. Like, if you can connect the dots between weekend attendance and a healthy, vibrant volunteer culture, man, that is something. That’s awesome. But if you can’t, or maybe you’re making, let’s call it more like optimistic assumptions about your volunteer culture simply because you have a lot of people attending, then, man, in the multisite world, get ready for a rude awakening. Because launching a second location is gonna feel almost like you’re trying to capture lightning in a bottle. And before long, you’re gonna find yourself scratching your head at why your multisite campus isn’t growing, and you’re gonna try a bunch of things to jumpstart that growth. And you’re gonna swap out staff and you’re gonna mess with the model and do building campaigns instead of just getting under the hood and taking a hard look at some of your volunteer systems and culture across sites.
Sean:
As we wrap up the last checkpoint here, thinking kind of on the practical side—because, Jesse, I just find that this is, multisite or not, going multisite or not, this is an area of volunteer strength that most churches struggle with right now. And if you want to know whether your bench is deep enough to launch, here’s where I think you start. First, pull your serving percentage. Get the real number. What percent of your adults and students are actually serving in your church? And this is one of the clearest signals of health, I think, that there is. And it’s an easy measurement. If a small slice of your church is doing all the work, you don’t have depth to add a location in the future. You have the depth to burn people out, honestly. So don’t do that.
Second, take a look at your pipeline and be honest about whether it actually exists. A lot of churches have volunteers, but no pipeline, meaning people serve, but there’s no defined path to become a leader or to grow in your leadership. So ask yourself, could you name the people who are one step away from leading, or one step away from leading other leaders? If you can’t, that’s the work that you have to do right now, building a pipeline before you need it.
And then third, run the launch team math. Picture actually sending a team to the new campus, the volunteers and the volunteer leaders that it would take, and now subtract them from your current location on paper. And what happens? If the answer is that your current campus falls apart, you found your gap, right? You’re not ready to send people, because you can’t send without breaking what you already have. And if you go through this and you realize your bench is thin, that’s good to know now. It means the next season is about developing leaders and building your pipeline before you launch anything. And like everything else in the series, I think that’s just healthy work. A church with a deep bench is stronger, whether they’re going multisite or not.
Jesse:
Yeah. Sean, you and one of our other Unstuck consultants and our Canadian friend and pastor—
Sean:
That’s right.
Jesse:
Jonathan Smith, the two of you just recently did like a few podcast episodes on this. And so if you’re listening to this, after you finish, just go back a few episodes and listen to that series. It was really, really good information and really well done. But I think there’s one thing I might be helpful in, in terms of clarifying what we mean by leadership pipeline. And we talked about this a little bit. I want to dive a little bit more deeply in, because I think that can be a little bit of a buzzword. And then it can also mean very different things in very different church contexts.
So as I listened to you and Jonathan work through that, what I heard you guys describe essentially, it did feel like a volunteer organizational chart. It felt like clearly defined, distinct levels of volunteer leadership, each with teams and spans of care clearly defined at every level. So in a past life—I mentioned this, I think you were in the same, I think you had the same job at some point in your career too, Sean—I was a worship leader, okay? And I eventually led our worship and production ministry as we became a multisite church. So if I’m a campus pastor who’s serious about our campus’s leadership pipeline, here’s what I’m gonna be asking that worship leader. First of all, do you have a current volunteer roster? That’s where I’ll start. And then secondly, do you have a clear volunteer org chart? Do you understand what your pipeline could look like? And then, hey, are you having your volunteers track their attendance, or are you doing so?
And after I’ve got some of that baseline stuff, you can really kind of dial into this. So pipeline-related questions like, how many producers have you developed? Or level four leaders, if you will. Are there any director-level people that you’re seeing potential in for them to jump up a level and eventually produce? Are there any team members that you think might eventually be able to jump up a level and direct? And so on and so forth. And see, when you have those pieces in place and you’re able to have those kinds of conversations, that’s when it really gets fun, because then you can work with your staff to answer those—here’s what they’re gonna come back with. They’re gonna say, well, how do I recognize leadership potential in people? How do we help apprentice the right people into higher levels of leadership? And even, you can start to ask them once they get good at it, how many weekends can you be off in a year? Which is so great, right? Because why? Because you’ve developed the kinds of teams and leaders who are capable of functioning at a high level without you. But I just don’t want you to be surprised. I don’t want you to be surprised if when you start for the very first time to lean into some of these pipeline conversations with your staff, that you kind of hit a wall of resistance. Don’t be surprised. Because remember, some staffers love doing the ministry more than they like developing the people within it.
Sean:
And especially in the example that you just used, where you and I used to lead in the worship and creative production world. They love doing the task. That’s why they got into it. Finding people who can do the task and lead—hold onto those people, right?
Jesse:
For sure. Yes.
Sean:
All right, Jesse, let’s bring this home. We’ve covered three more checkpoints for today: staff leadership capacity, staff health, and volunteer strength. And if there’s a theme connecting them, it’s that multisite is a people thing before it’s a building thing. You can solve the space problem. The harder question is whether you’ve got enough of the right leaders, and whether those leaders are healthy enough to multiply because you’re going to replicate your team and your capacity as they are today. So, Jesse, before I give you the last word, if a leader could take one thing from today’s conversation, what do you hope it is?
Jesse:
Yeah. And I’ll freely confess, this is a soapbox of mine. And if any of my staff are listening to this, they’re gonna roll their eyes when they hear me say it. But I still go back to have the hard conversation. I’ve said this out loud to so many of my own staff and executive team, as well as to so many of the pastors I’ve had the privilege of working alongside through the Unstuck Group. If we would just have the hard conversation, just do that one thing a little more consistently, it’s really like oil on gears that are grinding and overheated. There’s a reason your car’s dashboard light kicks on every 5,000 miles. I mean, at least if it’s not an EV, right? It’s possible we’re nearing the end of that metaphor, like the relevance of that number. But every 5,000 miles, your car needs the regular maintenance of an oil change. And as some of you listening might have found out in real life, you can delay those for a little while, but if you wait a little too long too often, you start to hear the engine just knock and eventually break down.
And I see a lot of churches running like this. The staff’s kind of banging into each other or knocking against each other. When you allow this to continue, it requires more and more resources from you—emotional resources and mental resources and just plain time—to manage and then manage around. The inefficiency a lack of honesty creates on a team is really, really costly over time. So just have the hard conversation. Do the regular maintenance is what I’m trying to say. Make this a value of your team, part of its habit, part of its culture. And then start reclaiming the time that you used to spend managing around a relationship for way more fruitful things.
Sean:
That’s good. Well, here’s what ties last week and this week together. The first three checkpoints were about your church. These three are about your team. And none of them require you to launch anything to start working on them. You can build leaders right now. You can do the health work right now. You can build your volunteer bench starting today. In fact, you should be doing all three whether you go multisite or not. It’s just healthy church work. multisite readiness, again, that’s the bonus.
So next week we’re gonna keep going. We’ll cover the checkpoints around your ministry model and your systems, getting into whether what you do is actually clear and repeatable enough to hand to a new location, because it’s one thing to know who you are. It’s another to have it written down well enough that somebody else can run it. So if today put words to a gap that you’ve been sensing, whether that’s leaders or team health or volunteer strength, that’s the work that we’re doing with churches every single week.
At the Unstuck Group, we walk churches through our multisite launch process where we help you assess your readiness across all 10 of these checkpoints, clarify what your model is gonna look like, build a clear phased plan to launch your very first location with confidence. And the goal of all that is simply that your first launch is healthy, sustainable, and reaches the people you’re trying to reach from day one. So if you’d like to start a conversation with us, head over to theunstuckgroup.com/multisite. And if this podcast has been helpful, would you do us a favor and leave us a review on whatever platform you’re listening on? It takes you just about 30 seconds or so, but it helps more church leaders find these conversations. Jesse, thanks for being here with me again. And listeners, we’ll see you next week.
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