This Isn’t Working Anymore (Part 2)
Everyone has opinions about multisite.
Advice often gets shared like it’s one-size-fits-all, but multisite is complex; what worked for one church in one city at one moment may not work for another church.
There are best practices you can follow, but the truth is that multisite comes with a lot of nuance.
In this episode, we’re continuing our “This Isn’t Working Anymore” series by getting into the nuance that tends to get left out of conversations about multisite.
- “Acting your age” as a multisite church
- Launch, multi-stuck and adding locations: the phases of multisite
- Building your own multisite strategy
Multisite is complex, and what works for one church in one stage can actually be harmful for another church in another stage. [episode 448] #unstuckchurch Share on X If there are cracks in alignment around the why and the how, those cracks will become huge gaps over time. [episode 448] #unstuckchurch Share on X When multisite is done in a healthy way, it is a strategy that really drives momentum and sustains health and growth in churches. [episode 448] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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Transcript
Sean:
Before we start this week’s episode, I want to stop and say thanks to our podcast sponsor Planning Center. If you’re still organizing things at your church through a bunch of spreadsheets, maybe group texts, sometimes you just say, well, just email Tom — Planning Center was actually built just for you. It’s an all-in-one church management platform that handles volunteer scheduling, guest tracking, check-ins, event signups, and online giving. So instead of chasing down information across six different platforms, it’s just there in one place so you have less administrative chaos and more time for actual work in the ministry. Check it out and get started for free at planningcenter.com.
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, your host, joined by my teammate Tiffany Deluccia, and this is episode two of our series, This Isn’t Working Anymore, where we name the leadership approaches that used to work and ask the honest question about whether they still do, and then we’re going to figure out what to do instead. And today we’re talking about multisite, specifically the advice that gets shared without any nuance—and that lack of nuance can create real chaos for multisite churches.
Tiffany:
Sean, you and I have been doing this for ten-ish years now, and one thing we’ve seen is there’s no shortage of advice out there on the topic of multisite.
Sean:
Right.
Tiffany:
Your pastor friends have opinions, there are books, there are conference sessions, there are churches you can tour and leaders you can call who will happily tell you exactly what they did.
Sean:
Exactly.
Tiffany:
I remember one time I shadowed our founder, Tony Morgan, when he was facilitating our multisite launch process with a big church that was about to start a second campus, and they had just this really smart team of people sitting around the table. And they all had different perspectives about multisite based on the churches they had served at previously — the ones they’d been following kind of closely. And a lot of it was just assumptions from the outside looking in. So it was really eye-opening to see it playing out in real time, how each person had a different take on what happens when you launch a campus, whether for good or for bad. But I could see how easily churches could put plays into practice without a lot of real evidence-based wisdom.
The reality is what worked for that church in that city in that moment may have nothing to do with what your church actually needs right now. multisite isn’t one-size-fits-all, and the advice often gets shared like it is, honestly. So today we’re getting into the nuance that tends to get left out of these conversations. If you’re considering multisite, this is the episode you may not have known you needed, and if you’re already multisite and things feel more complicated than you were told they would be — well, now we know why you’re still listening. So let’s name the big tension first. We’ve done an entire series on multisite recently. Why did this topic make the cut for this series specifically about what’s not working anymore?
Sean:
Well, it really started with us. We built our multisite consulting process about a decade ago, and in that period of time we’ve learned so much about the nuances of how to better coach churches in different phases of their multisite journey. The multisite conversation, whether that be in books or online or now in places like ChatGPT, is often built on highlights and anecdotes — not what’s really happening behind the scenes. Leaders are trying to read between the lines from the outside looking in. And there are, of course, those tours and podcasts and conference stories that they’ve heard or engaged in. But multisite is complex. What works for one church in one stage can actually be harmful for another church in another stage.
Tiffany:
What I hear you saying is that leaders are essentially trying to reverse engineer someone else’s success, but they’re doing that from the outside without knowing the full story.
Sean:
Yeah. Our teammate Paul Alexander calls it the importance of acting your age in multisite.
Tiffany:
Yeah, that’s good.
Sean:
And there can be some big issues here. It’s confusing momentum with readiness — like saying we’re growing, so we should add a campus. Sometimes it’s copying someone else’s model instead of building one that’s aligned to your mission field. You have a unique community where you’re doing ministry, and it’s not like another community from the church across the country that’s also doing multisite. You have specific ministry strategies that have been successful for you because of that mission field. You also have a current capacity — you have lids on your facility, you have lids on your leadership team. So those are important factors.
And I think additionally it’s about underestimating the operational and leadership shift that needs to be designed and clarified before you go multisite. Things like decision rights — how do we make decisions when we’re not in proximity to each other? Our staffing model, how we structure our team, some of our systems — and our systems create behaviors for people within our organization. And then just even the pace that we move at — that’s important too. Because of all of this, it’s creating tension between our central support and our campus teams because roles, authority, and decision rights weren’t clarified upfront.
It’s easy to think, we’ll just add another location and so-and-so from our team will help them get the weekend going — kids’ ministry, groups, and on and on. And you’re right about that if your church will only ever be a two-location multisite model. Because you have a lot of agility when you’re at two locations and everyone who’s launching that new location has been a part of your church for years. So the culture is going to transfer quite easily. You can keep your arms around it at that point. But if you hope to ever be more than two locations, your agility as an organization lessens and the circle begins to widen. There’s more complexity.
And there’s also a hard truth to all of this: your early multisite decisions will either make your future expansion easy or make it really, really difficult. Ask any three-location multisite church that didn’t play the movie forward and now they’re having to pivot because of that. A young multisite mistake is building your model around being a church with only two or three locations and not actually playing the movie forward about what would need to be designed if you were a church of, say, eight or ten locations.
Young multisite churches often think our church is different, so they knowingly violate some of the multisite best practices thinking that this is going to play out differently for them. And even though these best practices come from over a decade of learnings around predictable outcomes for multisite, they still kind of disregard them thinking, well, we’ll be unique. When we created our multisite process, it was built by a team of five people who had over 60 years collectively of multisite experience between them. So the process is not based on opinions or feelings. We really based it on data and experience.
Tiffany:
So let’s get into the framework that actually shapes how our coaching for churches has changed, and why we’re including it in this upgrade series. The broader conversation out there tends to flatten multisite into one phase — that’s what we’ve noticed. But launching looks nothing like being stuck. And being stuck looks nothing like scaling. The stakes are different, and the questions are different. And honestly, the courage required at each stage is different. I was hoping you could walk us through each of those stages, because I think this is where a lot of the generic advice falls apart.
Sean:
Alright, so the first stage we’ll call launching. You’re a healthy, growing church. You’re either out of or running out of space. All of those optimal service times have been exhausted and you’re ready to try a new strategy to multiply your church in a new location. A lot of churches at this stage are, in addition to multisite, looking at expanding the footprint of their building. And for most churches right now, they’re looking at multimillion dollar price tags that just don’t make sense to them. So it actually in many ways is better stewardship to think multisite.
And for these churches, there are lots of opinions around things like where you should go, what your multisite model should look like, what makes a good campus pastor, and on and on.
So for churches that are launching, you need a process that brings alignment and unity before you launch — because you will replicate who you are. And if there are cracks in alignment and unity around the why and the how, you will lead into a multisite landscape and those cracks will become huge gaps over time. You’ll need a process that incorporates multisite wisdom and experience to the planning. For most single-site churches, that wisdom base is not on the existing team. You don’t have a lot of people with good multisite experience. And of course, again, there’s a plethora of opinions.
Tiffany:
Well, and it’s what I was thinking about earlier — you get people on the team who may have had bad experiences at other multisite churches and then they’re bringing their baggage to the equation.
Sean:
Exactly. Even if the church has a team member who used to be on staff at a multisite church, that’s not broad wisdom and experience. It’s experience with one church. And it may not have even been a good experience. Team members can often be clearer on what they think shouldn’t be done, based on those bad experiences. So when you are first launching, you’re building something brand new — there are a lot of unknowns, and unknowns create anxiety for a lot of churches. That’s one of the conversations we actually go through with churches that are going through the first launch process: what’s bringing anxiety for you? How do we begin to address and solve those anxious areas? The good news is the wisdom and experience is out there, but the bottom line here — you need to have a clear proven process so that you don’t create chaos both now as you’re trying to launch and then in the future post-launch.
Tiffany:
Okay. So launching is the first stage. What’s the next?
Sean:
The second one is what we call multi-stuck. These are churches that have been multisite for some time — they’re already in it. The problem is that the way they’re doing multisite doesn’t feel like it’s reproducible. Sometimes it’s because financially they’re too stretched and there are constraints there. And this often in those churches comes from overstaffing. In other words, the way you’ve built your multisite model requires you to overstaff — to pay more people to do things. Our multisite survey we did in Q4 2024 showed that a rotating teaching team between locations was the most expensive form of multisite, and having a video teaching team was actually the least expensive. So that’s one of the most common constraints we see multi-stuck churches run into.
For these churches, there’s often misalignment gaps that have formed too. They’ve been doing multisite long enough and maybe one campus pastor wants to do a certain thing the way they feel it should be done. Another one wants to do that same thing but totally differently. And instead of a team being focused on what they have in common — which is one of the strengths of the multisite strategy — they’re now dealing with campus teams that want to focus on what they want to do differently.
The other thing, and this is the last one: there is tension for multisite churches. One big tension at this stage is the tension that exists between central and campus teams, and it’s often rooted in the central teams being too large. So, back to staffing a little bit. I’ll go back to what Paul Alexander, one of our consultants, says about acting your age when it comes to multisite. For whatever reason, many churches in this stage have central teams that were just built too big. So the perception is that campuses are understaffed and central is overstaffed. When we don’t understand the unique stage of being around three locations or so, these are common tensions that just become prevalent.
So the bottom line for churches in this phase of multisite — they need some strategic planning and analysis on what they need to shift in order to launch new locations in a healthy way in the future. In fact, we’re working with a church right now that’s doing just that. They’re actually in the midst of a senior pastor search. And while they’re doing that, they paused and they’re using this time to evaluate their multisite model. They were asking, what can we work on while we don’t have a senior pastor in place? So in addition to feeling the tensions in their model with staff members, their vital signs report — the data report that we do with every church — was showing overstaffing and stalled growth. They know something needs to change, but they brought us in to help them discern what the changes need to be specifically. And I just love how proactive they are in this season of trying to identify the next lead pastor at their church. They’re using that time wisely and working on their model.
Tiffany:
That’s good. So what does the next stage of multisite look like — that whole idea of it’s actually working out but you need to scale up. What does that look like?
Sean:
Absolutely. The last stage, and specifically how we help churches, is all of those churches that are ready to launch new locations. Maybe there are three or four locations now. Some of our churches are at eight or nine locations, and multisite is working. When multisite is done in a healthy way, it is a strategy that really drives momentum and sustains health and growth in churches. So at this stage, they recognize complexity multiplies when they launch those new locations, and there’s just the reality that the church needs to tighten up systems to be a larger multisite church. Remember, those cracks can become gaps in multisite over time. So these churches are typically wiser now because they’ve experienced a little bit of that and navigated through it. As they get ready to launch again, they want to know where they need to increase clarity.
And often for these churches, this is around clarified decision rights to scale health for all of their locations — who gets to make what decisions. And we’re going to capture that and document it, because we are not doing ministry in proximity to each other. So we have to move from a tradition of telling people who we are, what we do, and why we do things that way, to documenting it — more of a written tradition — so that as we scale, everybody can be on the same page. The last thing here is that they realize launches take more time and planning. They want a longer-range plan. Multisite is working for them, and they want to have a plan that they are working rather than just coming back to the drawing board and restarting every single time. So that’s a lot of the type of work that we’re going through with churches who are scaling and adding to their healthy multisite strategy.
Tiffany:
That’s such a great framework. If a leader is sitting there thinking we should just get the playbook from the big multisite church my friend works at — what are the questions they should be asking instead, from your perspective?
Sean:
Well, it goes back to a little bit of what we talked about last week. What problem are we trying to solve? That’s a great question to begin with. We need to have determined: who is our mission field? Who are we trying to reach based on where God has placed our church? Do we have space constraints within our facility, our parking, our kids’ ministry, or even volunteer leadership? Do we have a clear discipleship pathway that people are engaging in? And very importantly for multisite churches, do we have a clear leadership pipeline where leaders are being trained, apprenticed, and reproduced at a level that we can sustain our multisite growth in the future?
The other question I think they should be working on is: what is actually replicable about who we are today? We need to look at our strategy, what we’re doing to reach and disciple the people in the communities around our campuses. The culture within our organization — do we have a healthy, reproducible culture? Of course, our systems — the way we organize our people and do what we do — those are the things that drive behaviors for people on our team. Are those replicable? Can we actually reproduce those from one location to another?
And then maybe the other question: what stage are we in? What’s the win for the next 12 to 24 months? If churches can clearly discern it — it’s obvious if we’re in the launch stage, right? If we’re one location, we’re launching a multisite strategy. But for some churches it’s a little more difficult to say, are we multi-stuck or are we in a place where we’re ready for healthy expansion? That is a great thing for them to be working on discerning in this time period. Those are key questions I would encourage leaders to have in their mind.
Tiffany:
We’ve actually worked with several churches who got to the multi-stuck stage and decided to un-multisite because that was the healthy decision to make. And then several of them have spun off new campuses that have then launched their own campuses in the future. So it doesn’t have to be the end of the line, but you need to be having a really clear conversation at that point.
Sean:
We told that story of Stonecreek just a few episodes ago on the podcast. We had Mike Reinsel from their team on, and they had a multisite location, recognized they were multi-stuck, and launched that location as an independent church. That new church is thriving and doing amazing. And Stonecreek has come back and recalibrated their multisite strategy and is now engaging a more healthy multisite strategy on this side. That’s a great example of a church that did the right thing. They paused, they said something’s not working — what needs to change? They created an intentional plan and then moved forward, and now we have even more healthy churches because of it.
Tiffany:
That’s awesome. All right, let’s get practical, because I think there are probably at least three different kinds of leaders listening to this episode right now, and each of them is in a very different place. They need something different from this conversation. So let’s start with a leader who’s considering multisite for the first time. They’re at a healthy growing church. Maybe they’re out of space — we’ve heard from a lot of you that you’re out of space. Underneath all that excitement, they might be recognizing that we don’t know what we don’t know. So what does that leader need to hear most right now?
Sean:
So this is what we’ve learned, again over our decade of doing this and helping multisite churches, and what we’ve incorporated into our process. I really think these are the key steps. First of all, they need to build confidence about their multisite model that they’re going to deploy in their campuses — both their first launch and future campuses — that’s actually built on clarity and not just hype. Again, back to where we started: there are lots of different resources you could look at and say, this is the way to do multisite. But is that the way to do multisite well? And is it the right way for your church? You need clarity around how you answer those questions. So don’t just borrow someone else’s strategy. Really dig into what’s right for your church. After that, they need a step-by-step plan that sequences the work over time.
We need to know what the next 12 to 24 months look like. For churches that are going multisite for the first time, we tell them: from the time you start planning for it, you’re thinking about a launch timeline of 18 to 24 months. So you might be two years out from grand opening for this new location. What are you doing in the meantime? What are the right steps to get you there? Do you know the steps from now to the first three months? Do you know three to six months and six to twelve? You need a really clear sequence plan of what those steps look like. I would also say a readiness assessment so that you are prepared and ready to go. As you start your multisite journey, you know the key areas where you would say, green — all systems go, we are ready.
And then also the areas where you would say, we need to pause for a minute — there is something about our current ministry strategy and what we’re doing that we need to focus in on. A couple of examples of that: most commonly for churches, they feel underprepared in terms of their volunteer bench — the number of volunteers they have on their team and who they’re prepared to send. And secondly, their staff’s leadership capacity — having people in leadership roles who are great equippers, who are able to build teams and release people for ministry and multiply themselves in different ways. Those are usually the two that come to the surface for most church leaders when they say, this is an area of weakness for us. And then the last thing for churches thinking about launch: really a proven strategy that you can own. Not one that’s borrowed without all of the information, but one that you’re confident is the right strategy for your church.
Tiffany:
That’s good. Let’s talk now to the leader who’s already in it. Something hasn’t worked out the way they hoped. Maybe they had momentum at one time and it stalled out. Or maybe there’s just that tension you were talking about between campus and central — everyone knows it exists, but it’s hard to diagnose. We call that being multi-stuck, when it’s hard to diagnose but there are lots of different tensions happening. What I love about framing it that way is it’s really not a failure label. It’s a diagnosis. So what does that leader need most right now?
Sean:
Well, you just said it honestly — you start with a diagnosis of what’s broken. And that best comes from an outsider, because it’s hard for us to be objective when we’re so close to it. We need to look at our strategy — there are some things we’re doing in how we prioritize our time, people, and financial resources that aren’t really leading to the healthiest outcomes right now. For many multisite churches, honestly, it’s on the staffing side. We don’t have leaders in leadership positions. Something about our structure is unclear. Communication lines aren’t correct. Reporting lanes or span of care have gotten murky over time, and there’s some cleanup that needs to be done. Of course, we’ve talked about decision rights. One of the main points of tension for multisite churches is: why did that person who’s not connected to my campus make a decision that impacts us so significantly? Who gave them the rights to do that? When we haven’t clarified that ahead of time, real tension will begin to build between central teams, campus teams, and campus-to-campus teams. So we’ve got to solve that problem.
And then sometimes it’s just culture. Have we diagnosed the culture that exists within our church? Sometimes in senior leadership, we can get a little disconnected from what’s actually happening, especially as we’re not in proximity to some of our other campus leaders. And there might be something that needs to be addressed within the culture of our team. The other thing I would say is we really need to chart out a path forward that starts to reduce that tension and builds real alignment between our central and campus teams. We need to make sure that we have unity in purpose, direction, and strategy between our central teams — who are primarily our lead strategists. And our campus teams, who are really primarily our implementers.
For these churches, a really practical next step: let’s develop a short list of focused priorities for the next 90 days that are going to lead to some real wins. We need some early, short-term action steps that are going to generate some success. And that success is going to be part of what helps pull our team together. And then for many churches, a plan to restructure and clarify the roles within their team so that execution in many of these areas can actually happen.
Tiffany:
Then there’s the third leader that we talked about — the one who’s been doing this for a while and multisite is working, but they’re about to cross into new territory they haven’t navigated before. There might be more campuses in their future. There’s more complexity, and more moving parts than any system they’ve built was really designed to handle. So what does that leader need to understand before complexity starts winning out?
Sean:
Well, this is where complexity starts compounding. What got you from one campus to two or three won’t automatically get you to five or eight locations. So at this stage, the big question becomes: are we still operating on personality and heroics — or do we have the systems and decision rights that scale across all of our locations?
Tiffany:
That’s a great question.
Sean:
You can have success based on personality when you’re maybe at two or three, but not when you’re at five or eight. So you have to get really clear on central versus campus — what’s owned centrally, what’s contextual locally for your campuses, and then who has the authority to decide. Some of this is back to decision rights, which impacts multisite churches at every stage. Staffing becomes a strategy conversation, not just a hiring conversation. Roles that were combined early on — you had people wearing multiple hats — those eventually create bottlenecks and tension within your organization. Some of that you have to begin solving on the structure side. And then I would also say you need a replicable scorecard — clear definitions for your campuses about health and performance and what success looks like, so that you don’t have nine different campuses measuring success all differently.
Tiffany:
Is that really common?
Sean:
You know what’s interesting, Tiffany, I still talk to churches that may have eight or nine locations, and the benchmarks that we set in our vital signs assessment are almost groundbreaking for them. Just the fact that they would be able to look at any individual campus — they may have a campus of 2,000 people and a campus of 500 people, and of course those numbers are going to look very different — but when we look at our benchmarks, some of the percentages built into those — how those apply to every church, and now they can take them and apply to their campuses — that is really, really helpful for them. Even churches that have grown and scaled to this point still struggle with setting some of those benchmarks and monitoring progress and wins. The real win from all of this is to get ahead of the complexity that’s coming. Clarify your model, clarify your structure, and build in rhythms to your team and your planning that are going to keep you aligned as you continue to grow and as you add more locations in the future.
Tiffany:
The thought that I keep coming back to is that the churches that navigate multisite well aren’t necessarily smarter or more gifted than the ones that get stuck. They just got honest sooner — about what they didn’t know, about where they actually were, and about what their church actually needed at the stage it was at.
Sean:
Absolutely.
Tiffany:
This has been a great conversation. Where would you like to leave leaders before we wrap up today?
Sean:
Multisite can be a healthy strategy, but only when it’s built on clarity and nuance for your church. It’s so important that you don’t try to borrow someone else’s outcomes. You build your own plan for your mission field and for the stage that you are at in your multisite journey, whether you’re going multisite for the very first time or you’re adding campuses and trying to solve some of those areas where you may be multi-stuck. And if you’re feeling anxious or feeling stuck, that is a signal to slow down. Get perspective — especially outside perspective — so somebody can be very objective about where you’re at, and then get a good plan in place for the future. How do we begin to move these things forward? Because multisite doesn’t make ministry easier. It doesn’t lessen complexity within your church. But when you look at the outcomes — in terms of people in leadership, in terms of overall health, and in terms of more people coming to know Jesus — it’s hard to argue with the fact that multiplying more healthy churches produces more of that.
Tiffany:
Well, and this is really why we’ve upgraded our entire consulting process around multisite and why we’re sharing this now. We’ve put a lot more nuance into how we specifically help churches in each of these different phases in the most strategic way that leads to the healthiest outcomes.
Sean:
Exactly.
Tiffany:
Well, if you’re listening right now and thinking we could use help with that, here’s where to go next. If you’re a healthy growing church and you’re considering your first campus, our multisite launch consulting process is built specifically for that moment. We’ll help you assess your readiness, get your team aligned before you launch, and build a clear sequence plan for your whole team. When I shadowed Tony in the multisite launch process a few years back, I could see the whole team just breathe a sigh of relief when they started to see the plans get broken down into those first three months, three to six, six to nine.
Sean:
That’s a great feeling.
Tiffany:
They all said, now we know exactly what to do. You don’t have to figure it out as you go. And then if you’re already multisite and something isn’t working the way you hoped — if you’re feeling that tension that Sean was talking about, or momentum is starting to stall out, or the roles aren’t clear — a model that made sense at two locations is starting to strain at three or four — our multisite unstuck process is really designed to help you diagnose what’s actually going on and build a focused plan to get healthy and moving again. Either way, you don’t have to piece this together from the outside looking in. You can start a conversation with our team at theunstuckgroup.com/multisite. And next week we’ll be back with a third installment of our series. Between now and then, have a great week.
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