Predictable Challenges of Leading a Growing Church (Part 2)
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Continued growth can feel like an engine.
As a leader, you’re seeing results. You’re running on the high of seeing the fruits of all the effort, intention and faithfulness. You and the team have been on mission, and you’ve sensed God’s blessing and hand on the ministry.
And then it all starts taking a toll, and if you’re not careful, things can go sideways.
In part 2 of our series “Predictable Challenges of Leading a Growing Church,” Sean and I talk about the emotional side of growth.
PREVENTING BURNOUT
- Consistent tensions that emerge during sustained growth
- How to recognize and respond to growing pains
- Encouragement & next steps to consider
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, and I’m here with my friend and teammate, Amy Anderson. Amy, where have you been recently?
Amy:
I actually just got back last night, 10:00 PM made my way home. I was back working with a church that I’ve spent the last year and a half with a great church in Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh area. Central Assemblies of God. I just love Pastor Kurt and his team out there. And, we spent the afternoon working through building out the action level of their pyramid. It was actually pretty fun to watch the team kind of negotiate their goals and they never wanted to knock ’em down. Kind of funny, they just wanted to up ’em a little bit. When we do that work, what we walk away with is just real clarity for every team member.
Sean:
That’s good.
Amy:
Here’s what I own. And now I’m gonna go back and look at all these events and activities that I had planned and see how are they actually gonna help me hit my targets this year so that we see the life change. They’re just a joy. They’re the most hospitable team, and I really enjoyed my time.
Sean:
That’s great. Of the pastors that we work with, a lot of ’em are asking that question. I know my staff are working on a lot of things, are they working on a lot of the right things, though?
Amy:
Yes.
Sean:
And that working on that action level of our strategic alignment pyramid really helps the team get focused on working on the right things. So I know pastors love that part of what we do, so glad you get ahead a chance to do that with them as well. Well, this week we’re back with part two of our series on predictable challenges of leading a growing church. Last week we talked about the things that can start to feel like crises related to the people side of growth. And today it’s kind of an extension of that, but from a different angle, we’re talking about the emotional side of growth.
Amy:
I’m glad we’re talking about this because this is the part of winning that can actually catch us off guard. I know it caught me off guard. When I was in full-time ministry, our church was successfully growing, 20% year over year. It was so much fun. As a leader, we were seeing results, but you’re running on this high, if I could say it that way, of seeing the fruits of all your effort, your intention, your faithfulness, you and the team, you’re on mission, you’ve sensed God’s blessing and hand on your ministry, and all of that is great, but I will add a but to that, that it can start to take a toll on you, on the team. And if you’re not careful, things can start to go a little sideways.
Sean:
Yeah. Well, Amy, you and I were both on senior leadership teams in roles at churches who were experiencing a lot of growth. And maybe we can start off just by identifying some of the consistent tensions that start to emerge during that sustained growth period.
Amy:
Let me actually start on the staff side of this. Again, not going back to last week’s conversation, but on this emotional side. I think first continued growth can actually start to feel like it’s an engine or a machine. Staff might start to wonder or verbalize like, when is enough enough? Going back to my experience, I remember after a year of 40% growth, when we moved into a new larger building, the next year we were relatively flat in our growth. I remember thinking, oh, good. We’re getting a break. Because leading up to that year of 40% growth with our move, we had been running three Saturday night services, four Sunday services, and we even thought that when we move, we might be able to go back to just Sunday only, but not a chance.
The growth spurt required that we still had two on Saturday and two on Sunday. So even we had, that’s actually what sprung us into multi-site. Six weeks later, we had to then reopen our old campus. When we think about growth like that, what’s behind this is burnout. Staff burnout. They give their all to the mission. They want to be a team player, but the grinds like the one I just kind of walked through, they can lead to burnout if we don’t pay attention to the health side of our team. Let me highlight this common challenge of multiple services. When you get beyond two or three services, most staff have spouses that are on different rhythms in the church. They probably have kids that they’d like to spend some time with.
And if they get really greedy, they probably want to have some friends outside of the church team as well. When we’re in these grinds that can shift workloads from what I call hard doable, where it’s a stretch to hard destructive. In those heavy growth seasons, to quote Jonathan from One Church.to, it’s important for the lead pastor or the executives at the church to say to the leader in them, it might be time to pastor the team right now. So, those are the headlines that come to mind. What tensions would you add, Sean?
Sean:
I think more on the congregational side. People in the congregation often in those seasons of growth, actually feel a sense of loss when there’s change happening. That old version of the church that they first started coming to and really loved, really connected with, they begin to drift from that. Things start to look different. It was funny, one of the churches that I worked at, our initials of the church were CCC, and had a volunteer on our team that said, CCC, that stands for Church of Constant Change, because we were growing, we were experiencing that momentum, but there was always change happening. Things were constantly changing.
People connect with our church and they stay connected with our church because there’s something that they love about our church. But as growth happens, things inevitably change. And there’s a sense of kind of loss of mourning when things change and become different. Now, that doesn’t mean things don’t change for the better. Certainly most of the time they do. But still we experience a little bit of loss from the congregation’s perspective.
The other thing I’d add too is pastors and leaders often like church when it feels big and there’s lots of momentum. We love these seasons. We get some energy from this. We get excited about this, but the people in our congregation tend to like church when it feels smaller. When it feels more relational. And so there’s a little bit of tug and pull here when, for us as leaders, we want to help kind of climb the next mountain and address or solve the next challenge. But really our church is just trying to get more relational, more connected, and feel a bit smaller. Those are some of the tensions, I think come up on the congregation side that are pretty common for churches when they’re going through the season.
Amy:
I can relate with those. I noticed in our church, it was especially some of the founding people of our church. Now our church was around since 1949. So when we started to go through our growth curve, it was actually in the nineties, but we had many people who were there who laid the bricks of our church, and we had to use a lot of vision to bring them along. I remember that sense of loss, and that actually leads me to one additional tension. And that’s just fatigue. Specifically around change fatigue, making room for more people and serving more people. It often requires that we make changes to our ministry strategies. Like if you add a third service on Sunday morning, you’re probably moving everyone’s cheese. That’s a reference to a book on cheese. Who Moved My Cheese? Remember that book?
Sean:
Yes, absolutely.
Amy:
Great book, by the way, if you haven’t read it. It’s kind of timeless. If you had a nine and a 10:30 before, now you have something like 8:30, 10, and 11:30. So everyone’s schedules and patterns are disruptive. Or maybe you’ve had small groups meeting in your building for years, but now you need the space for other programming for students or something along those lines. On the staff side, you’re probably adding roles. You’re moving people around to accommodate the growth. Some might even be working for a new leader.
Any of those changes in and of themselves, you need good change management. But in a time of growth when so many things are changing that leads to that change fatigue. And here’s the thing with change, I’ve said it before, even good change is that people immediately feel a sense of loss. You’ve shifted their normal, and the change cycle is similar to a grief cycle. Again, keeping in mind that even positive change creates those feelings of anxiety, fear, and loss.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good. Well, Amy, before we move on, I want to take just a minute and thank our podcast sponsor this week, Planning Center. Planning Center is an all-in-one software that helps you organize your ministries and to care for your church. It has an easy to use, efficient platform of products where you can organize event details, create signup forms, schedule volunteers automatically and much more. And you can actually get started for free at planningcenter.com.
So let’s shift gears to talk about some of the solutions to this. Unfortunately, all of those things we mentioned are kind of unavoidable, right? It’s not a matter of preventing them from happening. It’s more of a matter of recognizing when they’re happening and responding in a way that really promotes health in our church.
Amy:
On the solution side, I’ll pick up where I just left off. I think the first solution is to acknowledge the grief in the change cycle when it comes to leading through these changes. Sometimes just naming the feelings and acknowledging to the team that you recognize that they might be feeling this way goes a long way. For example, I was working with a church this past year, and they went through a large needed restructure about eight months ago. We had spent three to four months preparing for that restructure. They rolled it out with a very good plan, but what they didn’t anticipate prior to the communication was the grief cycle or the change cycle. Most of the changes were really good and beneficial to the team.
I actually encourage them to have a celebratory meeting with the team after you’ve announced it all. On our follow-up call a few weeks later, they shared the reactions and the mood of the team and it wasn’t great. And they were surprised by that. I was surprised by that. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. That’s when it actually triggered me to pull out the change cycle to walk them through it. Their reaction was, they wished they would’ve led with that instead of trying to get them excited at their meeting.
I now built it into my process when I do big restructures so that I can coach churches in advance of that. This church taught me one thing, which I think is a great word picture for leading through change. I’ll call it watch the pace of the gear shifts. Here’s what I mean. If you’re a leader in charge of the change, as you roll it out, you’re probably already excited about it and you’ve been thinking about it for a while. You’re ready to make the announce changes and then throw it into fifth gear. Like, let’s go. Think of a speedboat, just pump it all the way up.
But here’s the reality. The people on the other side of that change need you to pay attention to the passengers who aren’t holding onto that throttle. If you’ve ever been in a speedboat, if you aren’t ready for fifth gear, you’re gonna be flying off the back of the boat and into the water. When leading change, you need to lead your people through it, acknowledge the emotional side of it, and pay attention to the pace of your gear shifts. Because not everyone may make it through the changes, but you’re gonna give them the best chance to navigate it if you do those things well.
Sean:
Now that is a Minnesota example if I’ve ever heard one.
Amy:
What can I say? We have 10,000 lakes, so I know my way around a boat. The second thing I would encourage pastors to do in seasons of high growth is just not to forget to thank your team members. Yes, you are probably making the same sacrifices. They are maybe even more, but you’re the leader and a thankful word from you might just be what they need. Being the leader of the team, when you notice your people, it just goes a long way and it costs you very, very little. So a simple thank you would be solution number two.
Number three is just to inspect how your team members are doing. Here’s one thing that I used to do with my direct reports when we were, well, I felt like we were always in growth seasons. And by the way, I actually still use this with my team members at the Unstuck Group, and I learned it years ago from a message series that Pastor John Ortberg gave. He called it the Flow. The concept is, we have a level of ability each of us, and then different seasons bring different levels of challenge. If your level of challenge is low compared to your ability, you’re probably bored. Now that doesn’t happen very often in churches, but you do have those seasons. If your level of challenge is higher than your ability, then you’re in the stress zone. You don’t quite have what it takes to be able to get done what you need to get done. But when those two things are equal, our ability and our level of challenge, he calls it being in the flow.
Every once in a while, either if I’m just sensing we’re in a high stress time, or just I mark it on my calendar to do it at least a couple times a year, I’ll just ask the question, where are you guys at right now? I’ll walk through the model, are you bored? Are you in the flow or are you stressed? And it just makes what was invisible visible on the emotional side of our team members.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good. You know, another solution that comes to mind, Amy, is just continuously telling stories about the life change that’s happening in our church about the ministry, great ministry outcomes that are happening. Because I think, again, going through that grief cycle, like you’ve mentioned, people experience loss, they feel that very personally. But when we can see what the change is leading to in terms of more people coming to know Jesus in terms of more people taking discipleship steps, maybe more people being baptized in our church, whatever that might look like in terms of outcomes, when we can tell those stories about real people who are being impacted because we’ve made this change, we’ve initiated some change, this momentum in our church has helped us to reach new people we weren’t reaching before. And then celebrate what God’s doing in their life. That can really help us as we begin to get on the other side of just, you know, grieving a little bit of that loss for ourself in what once was, and then looking to the future and seeing that vision really, and keeping that mission in focus for us of what we’re trying to accomplish together. So telling those stories through, you know, your weekend services, through, communications, emails, whatever it might be, however you can tell those stories effectively doing that I think will help keep people focused on the ultimate mission that we’re on together.
Amy:
Yeah. You know, bottom line for me is just my counsel would be to just take time to listen to people. Our teams are not a means to an end. They’re not cogs in the wheel. They’re real people who need to be envisioned what you were just saying. They need to be inspired and they need to be cared for. They’re on mission with you. They want to reach others for Jesus. But the challenges of constant growth are real. And if we want them along for the boat ride, we have to pay attention to the health side of our team when the performance side of our church is running on all gears.
Sean:
That’s good. Alright, Amy, so let’s leave listeners with just a few next steps to consider. What would you encourage them to do?
Amy:
Yeah, so here’s a little lead pastor humor. I think it’s funny some of them, some get a reputation for perspectives on things that are going on in the church from their family members. For example, when our lead pastor used to say things like, “Hey, I’ve heard from several people that,” you know, fill in the blank.
Sean:
Yeah.
Amy:
Behind his back, we would joke that the several people were his wife and his son. Also, a lot of lead pastors have this intuition or gut feel that they trust. And honestly, they’re often right. But again, here’s my counsel. When it comes to inspecting the health of our teams, we can’t trust our gut. Most staff members are gonna put on a great face for the lead pastor. They want that pastor to see them as a team player, a high performer, someone who would jump on a grenade to see the mission lived out. But that may actually be the mask they’re wearing. So instead I encourage pastors to leverage a quantitative tool to inspect the health and performance of the team. These are typically confidential. I’d say they’re objective, but they’re kind of subjective. Because we’re asking people a bunch of questions, but it’ll give you an objective look at the subjective views of your team members to give you a more truthful and realistic perspective on how the team is doing.
At the Unstuck Group, we have our unstuck teams assessment in the Learning Hub. And that is one that every church that engages the Unstuck Process we go through. And I’ll tell you what, most of the time it’s really affirming, it is exciting to look at the results and just to see, you know, that the leaders are trusted and people feel like they have the job that they’re designed to do. But there are those ones that come back and the first reaction when those scores are lower, or our final question is kind of a big reveal as well. You know, at first the lead pastor feels a bit frustrated with the scores. And frustrated with how the team feels. But again, we just made something that was invisible, visible. And you can take the results from an assessment like that and then begin to work on how do we improve two or three things in our culture over this next year.
There’s other ones too. There’s the best Christian workplace. And so they, ours and theirs kind of assess the same thing. Theirs goes much deeper. It segregates information more deeply. The reports are very long. And some churches love that level of details. I would call ours a little simpler. We’re just inspecting six areas of team health, team performance, personal health, personal performance, culture and systems. So whatever your bent is. But my advice is to do one of them on an annual basis. So you can not only see how you’re doing right now, but a year from now you can see how you’re trending and if you’re heading in the right direction. Any other resources come to mind for you, Sean?
Sean:
Yeah. And just to follow up on that, Amy, for everybody who’s listening the unstuckgroup.com, you can search for our learning hub or go to our learning hub page there and access that assessment. A couple of books come to mind and I wanna give a plug for our good friend Lance Whit. Lance is a pastor and a great thinker when it comes to how churches or how church teams balance health with performance and with experiencing outcomes. So he’s written a couple of great books, one called Replenish on how we focus on caring for our souls personally. And then the other is called High Impact Teams. And that’s really where he digs into how we balance health and high performance. So I’d recommend both of those books by our friend Lance Witt. Amy, we’re gonna wrap up today’s conversation, but before we do any final thoughts from you?
Amy:
Yeah. To the senior pastors who are listening today, just remember that you can’t delegate being the culture champion. And that’s really what we’re talking about here. You are creating culture every day in the way you respond to challenges, how you set future direction, how you celebrate wins. And if your church starts to feel like a machine during a season of growth or if change fatigue becomes overwhelming, it comes back to you. So you’re the only one who can lead out of that. So I just encourage you, if there’s things that you’ve resonated with today just to take one of the next steps we talked about to continuously drive your culture towards a healthy place.
Sean:
Yeah. It’s so important to lead your church forward from that season of momentum growth into a season of strategic growth that we talk about in the church lifecycle, so that you don’t get stuck and stall out. And, you know, churches really can get stuck in any phase of the lifecycle, even in those phases where they’re growing. So don’t ignore, if you’re seeing warning signs, don’t ignore those for too long. That’s where we come in. We help pastors lead unstuck churches. So, if there’s any way that we can serve you and your team, we’d love to you can start a conversation with us today at theunstuckgroup.com/start. Next week, we’re back with part three of our series. So until then, have a great week.
