Multisite Model Best Practices – Episode 440

Are we doing multisite right? (Part 3)

You can start multisite for all the right reasons. Healthy momentum, strong mission, genuine desire to reach more people. And then a few years in, you find yourself looking around thinking, “Wait… is this actually producing what we hoped it would?”

Alignment feels harder. Decision-making feels heavier. Outcomes aren’t quite matching the vision you had in mind when you started.

And that’s where a lot of churches begin asking a really honest question: Did we choose a model that’s leading us to different results than we were hoping for?

In this episode, Sean and I shift from problems to solutions. We share Multisite Model Best Practices you can actually benchmark against as you’re evaluating where your multisite church might feel stuck.

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We launch with a really great core team and somehow we don't think about all the volunteers we just sent to this new location, which left our sending location with an empty bench. [episode 440] #unstuckchurch Share on X In multisite, you replicate who you are. So if you are not healthy when you go into multisite, you actually will spread that to the new location and kind of get stuck. [episode 440] #unstuckchurch Share on X I just think it's important to understand that not all models produce the same results. [episode 440] #unstuckchurch Share on X

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More Episodes in this Series

Multisite Church Case Studies – Episode 438
Top Challenges of Multistuck Churches – Episode 439

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Transcript

Sean:

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Welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean here with Amy Anderson. And here we are. It’s the final episode of our series: Are We doing multisite Right? And by this point, some of you may be thinking, I’m pretty confident we’re not alone in this, in what I’ve been hearing. So over the last two episodes, we’ve heard real stories from real churches navigating real multisite tension. You know, we’ve talked about what’s working, what’s not, and a few things that probably felt a little too familiar for comfort, to some of our listeners. So, today we’re gonna bring it all together and talk about where churches go from here. But first, Amy, can you catch everyone up? What have we covered so far?

Amy:

Yeah, absolutely. In episode one, we heard from three pastors who generously shared their multisite journeys. Nick Cleveland from Grace Church in Wooster talked about their experience with both live and video teaching. Pastor Christy Gibas from the Table Church shared about moving their five locations from independent towards more identical. And Mike Reinsel from Stonecreek walked us through their experience of un-multisiting and then trying again. Then last week in episode two, we recapped the top challenges that get churches, what we call multi-stuck, meaning it’s hard for them to move beyond three locations with their current model. And then today in episode three, we’re gonna shift from problems to solutions. So we’re sharing some multisite model best practices that you can actually benchmark against as you’re evaluating where your church might feel stuck.

Sean:

Perfect. Excellent recap, Amy. And before we jump into the best practices, I do think it’s worth saying most churches don’t launch multisite with bad intentions, right? They launched because things are going well at their church. There’s growth, momentum, opportunity, and it feels like the next faithful step and, and good stewardship also. But somewhere along the way, some churches start to realize, you know, we may have started this before we were fully ready. And that usually doesn’t show up, all at once. It shows up in little signs like misalignment, confusion, tension between campuses. And that all slowly starts to add up. So, before we talk about what healthy multisite looks like, let’s start here. What are some of the warning signs that a church may have jumped into multisite a little too early?

Amy:

Yeah. Interesting way that you asked that. What are some of the signs? I would say first when attendance or engagement at your locations are plateaued or declined. Often I think this can happen when a church is not healthy enough yet to go multisite. In multisite, you replicate who you are. So if you are not healthy when you go into multisite, you actually will spread that to the new location and kind of get stuck. Meaning if you’re not healthy enough, if you don’t have that momentum. So what needs to be healthy, right? When you launch number one, there needs to be momentum at the church. The church needs to be in a place where you are reaching new people. You know, our friend Paul Alexander at Sun Valley always says, go multisite because you have to. Right? Because you’re running out of space and you, you’re capturing that wave of momentum to launch into a new location. 

You also have to have a strong volunteer bench. And a strong volunteer leader bench, because I don’t know you’ve seen this, Sean. Right? We launch with a really great core team and somehow we don’t think about all the volunteers we just sent to this new location, which left our sending location with an empty bench. So all this to say, if health and momentum are not in place, then you’re redistributing those challenges to a new location. Going multisite will spread not fix those challenges. So you ask like, what are the, what are the signs you might have done it. That’s why I say if attendance or engagement at any of your locations is plateaued or declining, it might have been ’cause you went too early. 

The second symptom that comes to mind is that there’s just more tension and frustration than there should be between locations. So this often shows up when the planning for multisite was incomplete. Right? When we lacked clear model, we lacked clear decision rights. You hear it in the form of people talking about us and them. that language has just emerged. I think it was Pastor Christie in episode one of the series that she was just fatigued by all the tension. So much that she wanted to throw the towel in. So that’s a real one. And there’s also this lack of one church in multiple locations feel to your locations. In other words, the different locations don’t really feel like the same church. They kind of have different cultures. Sometimes there’s a sense of competition between campuses. Those type of things are all indications we might have launched too soon.

Sean:

Yeah. Okay. That’s, it’s an important foundation, Amy, for where we’re going today. And I think a lot of leaders listening, you know, this isn’t just theoretical, it’s personal to them. Because you can start multisite for all of the right reasons. Like you mentioned, healthy momentum, strong sense of mission, a genuine desire to reach more people. And then a few years in, you find yourself looking around thinking, wait, you know, is this actually producing what we hoped it would? Not in a dramatic hair on fire kind of way, more in that slow sort of creeping tension that builds over time. You know, just the alignment with your team and the campuses feels harder. The decisions and the decision making feels heavier. And then all, many times outcomes just aren’t quite matching the vision that you had in mind when you started this whole thing. So that’s where a lot of churches begin asking the really honest question, did we choose a model that’s leading us to different results than what we were initially hoping for?

Amy:

Yeah, good point, Sean. And as we’ve mentioned throughout the series, your multisite model is somewhere on a spectrum from, if you go identical, that’s more of the franchise model where we’re gonna reproduce like Chick-fil-A does the same product, same experience, regardless of where you go, all the way to the spectrum of a highly autonomous campus. And that’s where we give away a lot of decision rights and just let that church do what they need to do to reach that community. And I just think it’s important to understand that not all models produce the same results. And when you’re a smaller multisite church, say two to three locations, the problem is it’s easy to manage the autonomy and the creativity between locations. It’s kind of embraced. Right? We can handle it; we can get our arms around there. It’s like, you know, the parents who have one kid, there’s a lot more flexibility than when you have three or four kids and you need more structure in place.

Sean:

Oh, I know.

Amy:

Yeah. You have five. 

Sean:

Yes. 

Amy:

Crazy man. 

Sean:

Yes. 

Amy:

So I just say that because you need to manage that creativity, autonomy or play the movie forward because that autonomy gets very difficult as you continue to expand. And just like in church planting, right? There are best practices for church planters. They follow these practices; they have conferences about ’em. What do we need to do as a church planter to set ourselves up for the best possible outcomes? Well, there are best practices for multisite leaders as well. Best practices that lead to predictable outcomes. 

Sean:

That’s really helpful. And honestly, I think this is where a lot of confusion starts for churches because there’s a perception that there are lots of healthy multisite models, but in reality there aren’t lots of different ways to do multisite and stay healthy. So, let’s just try to get really clear for our listeners, if a church is trying to evaluate where they are or where they should be, what do they need to understand about the different multisite approaches that are out there?

Amy:

Yeah, well, let’s just talk about church planting for a minute. That’s the one on the far end of the autonomy spectrum, right, highest autonomy and independence. I think the biggest benefit with this model is that it gives the new location permission to kind of fine tune their ministry strategies to a specific local context. With very little red tape or control coming from the sending location. So that’s the benefit. The downside is often like lack of funding and support for developing ministry strategies. Right? As well as the tendency to overwhelm the central support services like finance, hr, communications because those teams are not really supporting one church. They’re really supporting multiple churches in a unique context. That’s the downside. 

And what I mean by lack of funding support for ministry strategies, the efficiency of the multisite model is we’re creating one strategy in the various areas of kids, students, groups, serving. And then we’re handing that to the campus. That’s the efficiency. They don’t have to create it. When you’re doing more church planting, highly autonomous, the people at that location need to create those. So if you want a unique context for your campus, if you want to give autonomy and decision making and campus pastors who will teach most Sundays, I would say consider church planting over multisite. Look at church planting best practices over multisite, best practices. 

And I think this ties back well, Sean, to Mike’s story at Stonecreek. That’s kind of what they did. They had an amazing leader, an amazing communicator. They went to a new area, and that area, that mission field was significantly younger than the mission field their church was in. That’s why they gave the autonomy. They just didn’t play the movie forward because eventually all of that autonomy just created too much tension. So that’s that one. 

Let me jump to the middle, which we often call local expression. I call this dreamland, I also call it Death Valley. But this is where we want a model where we want the efficiencies of multisite and we want the flexibility of church planting. So I get it. But the bad news is it rarely works. 

Sean:

Right. 

Amy:

It rarely works. I know someone always throws me some name of a church, that’s the exception. But for someone who’s on the ground with churches three out of four weeks a month and in just real time environments, my view is this model rarely works over the long haul. You just can’t have the benefits of being the same when you’re not. And you can’t have the benefits of being autonomous when you’re not. And this usually lends itself to eventual church planting. That’s exactly, again, going back to Stonecreek’s story; now, they’ve had a wonderful ending because when they, when they separated and made their, their second location its own church. They had the funding and the backing, and they were there to help that become a good church plant and healthy. It’s just that not all churches can afford that.

Sean:

 Right. And it wasn’t intentional. I think they would say they unintentionally planted the church and most leaders prefer to be intentional with those types of moves. 

Amy: 

Yep. And then of course, the third end of the spectrum, well, we did one end, we did the middle, the other end of the spectrum is the identical campus model, the franchise approach. This is where we see the most success in sustainable church multiplication. So the benefits include things like the efficiencies we were talking about. You can create one strategy for kids and then replicate it. You can create one strategy for how you do volunteer leader development and then replicate it. And all of that is just great stewardship. Right? Central services is efficient. And what I mean by central services, those areas that support all campuses, like finance, hr, it, communications. Because they’re supporting one church model in multiple locations, they can get those efficiencies. Also, our data shows it helps you reach more people faster. The challenge with this model, the challenge with being highly identical, I think the biggest challenge is the tension and frustration when we’ve put entrepreneurial leaders in place on our campus teams.

Sean:

Right.

Amy:

Those leaders are more wired to be ministry strategists or lead pastors at a church plant because they have that leadership gift and that influence, we sometimes choose the wrong leader. That campus pastor role is a very unique role. Also, this model may limit where you can launch future locations because you need to go where your mission field is. And so that’s just a clear thing. If you are going outside your mission field in a sense like where Stonecreek went, then we probably wanna approach it more of a maybe leveraging multisite ideas to intentionally plant a church. So our recommendation, we don’t hold back from it. We really encourage churches to pursue an identical campus model, which in most case requires video teaching for consistent vision, leadership, teaching, and unity across all of the locations.

Sean:

That’s good. That’s a helpful overview of those models. Appreciate that. And honestly, just hearing you lay those models out reminds me how many churches don’t actually choose one of these. They just slowly drift into something in the middle and hope it works out. But the model that you choose really does shape everything. It shapes your leadership structure, your teaching approach, your decision making, even the kind of leaders who will thrive on your team. And if you don’t get clear on the model, you can end up with cap campus pastors who are frustrated, central teams who are confused. And then you’ve got campuses that are pulling in just slightly different directions over time, which leads to misalignment. And that leads to one of the most important pieces, I think of this whole conversation, the role of the campus pastor because what that role looks like can be very different depending on which model you actually are trying to lead through. So what should churches be looking for in a campus pastor, and how does that change based on the model that they choose?

Amy:

Yeah. Well let me speak to it from, if you’re working in that highly identical multisite model, and again you said it, but choosing the right campus pastors, arguably the most critical factor for multisite success, having the wrong type of leader creates this alignment gap that will widen over time. So in a highly identical model, here’s some of the key characteristics. Number one, they have to be a hundred percent aligned to the vision, the mission, and the DNA of the church. In other words, if they have an ax to grind with any of those things, they are not the right leader to put in front of the congregation. It’s also why we say that campus pastor for your launch should be on your team 12 months before they launch that campus. One because they need the time to put the launch plan together. But second, they need that time to really assess fit in the culture. Especially if you’ve brought them in from outside. 

They need to be a strong relational person. They need to have great influence. Right? These are the people magnets, these are the people that we are saying bring this mission to a new community and help compel people to take next steps and to step into volunteer leadership so a relational person. You know, we do the Strengths Wheel. Every campus pastor I’ve ever talked to is on the bottom half of the wheel in a highly identical. They tip towards people first. They also have to have a demonstrated ability to lead through other people, and primarily volunteers, meaning it’s such a team building role. We’re looking to raise people up into volunteer leader roles, give ministry away. And sometimes the challenge is when we hire people from our church that have worked in a corporate environment, they’re probably good leader managers, but they’ve been used to hiring people all the time.

Sean:

Right. 

Amy:

But we’re looking for someone who has built volunteer teams effectively as demonstrated in the past. They need to have a bent towards execution. So, you know, one of the mistakes I have seen is people have put more shepherding people into the campus pastor role, maybe to work against this entrepreneurial feel, but you still need a leader who’s bent towards execution. They need to have that gifting, obviously a passion for the community, and then the skills to be a second cheerleader. Great books out there on that. But you’ve got someone in a campus pastoral who really wants to be the lead pastor in a highly identical model. It’s gonna not gonna work. 

Sean:

Right. 

Amy:

It’s not gonna work. So here’s how we describe it as Unstuck. In the identical model, the campus pastor should be more vision carrier than vision creator. They should be more builder than entrepreneur. They should be more galvanizing than inventor. More empowering than controlling. And here’s the key. More missionary than preacher.

Sean:

That’s good. And it really can’t be overstated that who you put in that campus pastor role will make or break the campus. So no pressure or anything. Right? Seriously though, we’ve seen this play out over and over again. You can have the right strategy, the right location, even the right timing of launch. And if you don’t have the right leader in that seat, the things get complicated really fast. And before long, you’re having conversations that you just never plan to have, which is why structure and decision rights, they matter so much here too. Because the model you choose isn’t just philosophical. It has very real implications for who decides what and how leadership actually functions day to day. So could we talk about a little bit about that side of things? How should churches be thinking about structure and decision rights as they align these different models, the model best practices, I guess.

Amy:

Yeah. One of my favorite topics, let’s go. Well, being a multisite church means you’re committing to a matrix structure where you have solid lines and you have dotted lines, which by nature is more complex than a standard reporting structure. So because of that, clarity is essential. So here’s some key questions you need to answer and define. you have to answer the question for people: who do I report to and who has influence in my role? Right? So we need to know who the manager is, who’s the person that actually is gonna oversee this person, help develop this person, provide feedback and development conversations, really have the authority over that employee. And then who has influence? Because again, we’re in the matrix. 

So if I am a student pastor at the Lake Elmo location, okay, I am under the leadership of the campus pastor, that’s who I report to, but the central strategist over students, man, they have some influence in my life because they are really gonna be my coach for how to do student ministries. They’re not my boss, but they definitely have a role of influence in ensuring that I’m up to speed and have the competency skills to do my job. Whereas more so my boss, they’re gonna pay attention to my chemistry, they’re gonna pay attention to my character. They may do some coaching in the competency area, but those two leaders, the one I report to and the one I’m influenced by, that’s just a normal part of being in a multisite church. So every staff member needs to know who do I report to, and then who is influenced in my role. 

Okay. Second question. Who are the strategists over each of our core ministries? Every core ministry, the weekend service, your discipleship pathway, kids, students, they all need to have an identified church-wide leader over that ministry. And I’m intentionally saying strategist Sean, because I think the word central, I don’t know. I think it just means too many things to too many people. 

Sean:

Sure, yeah.

Amy:

But your strategist is the one who is owning the strategy. The ministry plays for that ministry area that are going to be executed at all locations. Often in multisite, especially early on, going from two to three to four to five campuses. These strategists are kind of player coaches and often they’re at the sending location. So yes, I am the kids pastor at our sending location, and I am setting the strategies for student ministries for all of our locations. Okay. The next question then would be what role support all locations? So this is actually what I call central services. Yeah. But these are the folks on the finance team, hr, IT, communications, it’s central support services that we are not replicating at every new location. We’re just keeping it centrally at the sending location typically to run all those plays. So when you start to say central, I would just caution you early on a multisite, you might wanna say more things like, these are central services and these are our central ministry strategists, but most ministry strategists are gonna be player/coaches for a season. 

Sean:

Yeah. Okay. 

Amy:

The last big question, and you alluded to this, is who gets to make what decisions For every possible scenario, there are five decision rights. These are things that central decides. These are things central decides with input from the campus. These are things we want consensus between central and campus. Number four, this is where campus gets decide with central input and then just campus decides. So there’s a spectrum there all the way from central to campus. It should be crystal clear to the entire team where decision rights lie for every ministry approach. Whether you take our recommendation on the model or not, don’t neglect to clarify decision rights to a very detailed level. And this is always a living document. I mean, I would start with some form of decision rights, like who gets to determine what the worship set is? Who gets to determine our serving tiers? questions like that. And then every time there’s a disconnect, you go back and go, all right, we didn’t have clear decision rights. Let’s add that to our playbook so we have clarity next time around.

Sean:

And this is so important. We actually spend a fair amount of time in our process talking about this. We have a pretty extensive document of all the different types of decisions churches make. And you know, I’ve worked with churches where they develop their decision rights document and it could be a dozen pages long. 

Amy:

Oh yeah.

Sean:

And, but it’s so critical. Again, you talked about if you play the movie forward, you’re beyond two or three locations for everyone to have one document where they can look and see how does this decision get made at? And it takes a lot of pressure off of you. You realize someone else makes that decision. Okay. I don’t have to worry about that. I can move on with my life. Right. So helpful to have that. 

Alright. Let’s get really practical here. If you’re leading a multisite church right now, and you’re feeling some of this tension that our friends in the interviews talked about, like it isn’t working the way you hoped, or maybe even it feels like it’s made things more complicated than healthy. What should our listeners do first? Where do they start when multisite isn’t turning out the way that they planned?

Amy:

Yeah. I probably sound like a broken record, but I would start by gathering a team and assessing your current model. And I would include a mix of central strategists, people creating strategy, and then some campus leaders as well. And then I would make a list of first what’s working, what feels healthy, what do we need to optimize that, that list. And by the way, you might wanna fill that one out first because everyone’s gonna come loaded for what’s broke. But let’s remember we aren’t doing everything wrong. 

Sean:

Right. Yeah. 

Amy:

There’s good things to celebrate my guess is. Then I would ask what feels stuck, right? What might we need to change so that we can get healthier? We’re making no decisions in this conversation. And you might have different opinions in the room. Someone might say something stuck that somebody else feels like is working. It’s about hearing the conversation. And then the third column would be what just feels confusing right now? And what’s gonna happen is this gonna, this is gonna expose where clarity is lacking. So I mean, give yourself a 90 minute meeting. Take 60 minutes to have these conversations to fill up that whole chart: what’s working, what feels stuck, what feels confusing. Listen to the campuses; listen to the strategists. You’re gonna get a lot of information about what it’s like to be in their shoes at the locations and in their roles. 

And then once you’ve created the list, you wanna look for themes and priority areas that need attention. This is one of the exercises we do with multisite churches that are around three locations but are feeling tensions in their model. In fact, Sean, I went back to Christy’s church, the Table Church. I went back to their chart from this conversation. And, their top issues were lack of clarity around decision rights, lack of documented processes and procedures, leadership development felt stuck, which by the way, when you go multisite leadership development gets exposed. Because you, you need more leaders. And then number four, aesthetically very different locations. And she rolled all that off when we interviewed her, but I thought it was really interesting to go back to the charts. So a conversation like this will let the key tensions be named and rise to the top for evaluation because that’s what you’re gonna do after you fill those columns out, you’re gonna wanna have a conversation, what are the most important things that we really have to take a step back from and do some thinking and praying about. 

And then from there you need to make some decisions. We have tons of content in our Unstuck Resource Hub, formerly called the Learning Hub, from past webinars, blog posts to a bunch of podcast episodes that could be some help as you decide what next steps you need to take. Or of course we facilitate this process with churches all the time if you need some support from us. But that would be how I would work. I wouldn’t just put head in the sand and ignore the tension because especially if you’re in the multi-stuck place right now. My guess is you’re gonna continue to grow. You’ve got some secret sauce. God’s got his hand on his church that has allowed you to expand to this, and you don’t want your model to be your lid to continue your mission. 

Sean:

That’s good. Well, Amy, before we close out this series, what’s the big takeaway that you don’t want leaders to miss from these last three conversations?

Amy:

First I would just say multisite is great. It works. It comes with a lot of challenges, but when it’s done right, it produces significant kingdom results. All of our data shows it how they grow faster, they reach more, they baptize more. So it’s a good strategy. Multisite churches are growing faster and reporting more faith conversions than any other churches, including new church plants. But I think the bottom line that we’ve been trying to get across is that there really are predictable outcomes to different models and decisions. And you don’t have to go into this blind or try to untangle it alone.

Sean:

Well, this wraps up our series: Are We Doing Multisite Right? I’m kind of sad about it, Amy. I know I enjoyed this one. But here’s what we know: Multisite can be an incredible strategy for reaching more people like Amy just said. But it only works when there’s real clarity, real alignment, and real structure behind it. Without that, things get complicated fast. So if you’re leading a multisite church and you’re feeling any of that complexity right now, this might be the right moment to take a step back and get a clear plan for what’s next. And that’s exactly what we help churches do through our Multisite Unstuck process. So if you’d like a candid conversation about where your multisite strategy stands and what it would take to strengthen it, I’d love to connect with you. Just visit theunstuckgroup.com to get started. Thanks for being with us for this series. And next week, we’re back with our episode unpacking this quarter’s Unstuck Church Report. So, we’ll see you then.