Own Your Role in Breaking the Growth Barrier (Part 3)
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Crossing the 2000 barrier isn’t just about adding more seats on Sunday.
This barrier represents a significant shift in how a church needs to operate. At this size, it’s common to see ministry silos develop and a realization that your leadership structure needs to evolve. As the leaders of the church, you have to make some and changes to your mindset and to how you lead.
In this episode, Sean and I dig into what makes the 2000 barrier so challenging and why so many leaders feel the weight of it. We focus on helping you own your role by unpacking the mindset shifts that senior pastors, executive pastors, and boards must make to lead effectively at this stage.
When we're constantly working in the ministry and are not spending time to work on it, a complexity creep shows up. With a lack of planning comes a lack of focus. [episode 414] #unstuckchurch Share on X The investment into delegating to others will pay you back significantly in the margin to do other things that only you can do. [episode 414] #unstuckchurch Share on X Vision attracts and it repels. Choose who you might lose. [episode 414] #unstuckchurch Share on X The goal isn't just growth in numbers. It’s also growth in health and mission impact. [episode 414] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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More Episodes In This Series
Own Your Role: Breaking the MultiStuck Barrier – Episode 415
Own Your Role: Breaking the 1000 Barrier – Episode 413
Own Your Role: Breaking the 200 and 500 Barriers – Episode 412
Transcript
Sean:
Well, hey, podcast listeners. Before we start today’s episode, let me tell you about our podcast sponsor, Planning Center. Are you struggling to keep your church organized and connected? Planning Center is the all-in-one church management software that solves your administrative challenges. You can effortlessly track first time guests, manage volunteer schedules, and create easy ways for your congregation to get involved all from a single platform. Whether you need a check-in system, event signups, or an online giving solution. Planning Center helps you nurture your community and keep people connected. Visit planningcenter.com to get started for free.
Welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, your host here with my teammate Amy Anderson. And today we’re continuing our series on breaking common church growth barriers. You know how it can feel, the numbers rise, sometimes they stall two steps forward, maybe two steps back. As you work on these barriers and maybe your church has a history of hovering around a number. I hear that a lot from church leaders, a familiar kind of attendance line that you just can’t seem to cross. So in this series, we’re helping you tackle the real reasons that churches stall out and then what it takes to lead past those barriers. Today we’re focusing on the 2000 attendance barrier. And Amy, why is this threshold in particular so significant for churches?
Amy:
Yeah, good question. You know, the 2000 barrier, it represents a significant shift in how a church needs to operate. At this size, it’s common to see ministry silos develop and a realization that your leadership structure probably needs to evolve. That climb from a thousand to 2000, a lot happens during that time. And you as the leaders, you have to make some mindset shifts and changes as to how you’re leading. So we’re gonna focus this episode on helping you own your role in leading the church forward.
Sean:
Yep. All right. Let’s jump in. So what do you think is the underlying tension that starts to creep in as churches try to break this 2000 barrier?
Amy:
All right. Listeners, say out loud what you think. Here’s what I think. I just think they’re so busy. They have so many people, 1200, 1600, 1800 people attending, and that’s a lot of people to be led by anybody’s standards. So the pace and the volume of ministry has grown, and at this size, it’s easy just to get caught up again in the Sundays coming right, it’s 52 weekends. Additionally, there can be an enormous weight, I think, on the lead pastor. In other words, Sean, they don’t wanna mess this up. Of course, they don’t wanna mess up this big beautiful movement of God. So they work hard to keep the quality on the weekend high. And as we said last week, they’re also trying to lead the largest organization they’ve probably ever led. So likely they are running multiple services, 2, 3, 4 on a weekend. They’re outta space, likely. And all that. And here’s a tension. Often they don’t take time for perspective and they don’t take enough time for planning. In other words, again, they don’t spend time working on their ministry. So I think that’s the big tension at this 2000 mark.
Sean:
That’s good. So that’s when, when that’s the tension that you’re managing. There’s just so much to do and it’s all fast-paced and it’s all good.
Amy:
It’s all good.
Sean:
What issues start coming into focus for these churches that are gonna keep them stuck below this 2000 line?
Amy:
Yeah, we touched on this briefly last week, but I think it’s true at this phase as well. And that’s just complexity creep. Again, when we’re constantly working in the ministry and are not spending time to work on it, complexity creep shows up. And that’s just because with a lack of planning comes a lack of focus. And we know that churches add too many programs in ministry sometimes without a strategic focus. And as you grow, it’s gonna be tempting to keep adding without evaluating what you already have. And this can lead to resources getting spread too thin across too many initiatives.
You know, Sean, I worked with two large churches this past year, and both of them found themselves in this position. And in both cases, the revelation came after a senior pastor transition. So with the previous senior pastor, which I suspect was caught up in the whirlwind and lacking strategic focus. That senior pastor style was to hire a leader and then commission them to go and build their ministry. And those leaders did: women’s ministry, men’s ministry, young adult ministry, recovery ministry, people with Orange Chair Ministry, you know, just find a ministry and go. My point is, is that none of these leaders were working together. They were just gathering women, men, young adults, specific age groups who, and those ministries were kind of becoming churches within the church.
So then the new pastor, the successor, you know, starts and within a few years realizes that all the ministries are very siloed. And the leaders were very embedded in their ministry, not the ministry, their ministry. And so when this happens, churches can become so focused on maintaining all those programs that they lose sight of the mission. And that’s when the lead pastor realize the church might not actually be living out their mission and they start to fear leading through the needed changes that need to get made.
Sean:
Yeah. Okay. So complexity creep, that’s the first issue. That might get ’em stuck, then what’s next?
Amy:
It’s related, but the second thing that can get them stuck is just holding onto traditions that they might need to let go of. Churches this large typically have experienced some run of growth in the recent past. The challenge is that not everything a church did in the past will necessarily lead to future health. So many times it’s the very large churches that have the biggest challenge embracing new. They become too big and they lose their ability to be nimble and welcome change so they can get predictable. So it may take a new set of voices either inside or outside the team just to bring some new perspective.
Sean:
Yeah. And that goes back to sometimes the senior pastors just not wanting to mess this big beautiful thing that God has done up.
Amy:
That’s right.
Sean:
When it comes to having a hard time embracing the new, I’d also add that many churches struggle to come to terms with this reality, and that’s that they’re personality driven. There is commonly one voice that the church hears from, and this is usually because they just haven’t started developing a teaching team, or they are just not investing enough time into equipping new teachers to get really good, quite honestly. And here’s what’s true. The lead pastor can’t carry 48 weekends a year if he or she’s going to lead that large of a church. And I know that many lead pastors really love to teach. So giving some of these opportunities away, it can be difficult to do, but as the church grows and scales, so will your role.
And Amy, let me add to that, that I believe some of the hesitation to give teaching away also comes from the concern that there aren’t enough A+ teachers to delegate to. And many pastors fear that if the church experiences I’m talking about on the weekend, A+ one weekend, and then a B minus the next weekend, that attenders are, they’re gonna lose confidence. And when they can invite friends and neighbors, and I actually agree with that.
Amy:
I do, too.
Sean:
That’s why one key shift, one key shift for a season is to spend time developing new teachers. Bring them along with you in the process of writing your messages and developing your message. Don’t just delegate task to them. Include them in the process. And I think over time, what you’re gonna find is the investment into delegating to others, equipping them, training them, will pay you back significantly in the margin to do other things that only you can do.
Amy:
Yeah. You know, Sean, I just, I had to double down on this one. I’m just thinking back to my ministry years. And when I first started in ministry, our lead pastor was carrying the lion’s share and he was a master communicator. But when he had a weekend off, he was outta energy, he was tanked. And it was like, “sayonara” and then his fill would come in. And I, especially when I was on staff, I’m like, did anyone look at this message? This isn’t us at all. But, you know, our lead pastor didn’t even look at the message, provide any feedback. Fast forward 10 years later, as we had been working towards this teaching team, he had two guys around him. The three of them sharpened one another, went through messages together on Mondays. Debriefed together on the weekend.
Sean:
That’s good.
Amy:
And the whole tide of our teaching just rose. And pretty soon no one cared who was teaching ’cause that investment was made. So if you’re like my lead pastor originally, like once you hit a weekend, you’re outta gas. Just get a team around you and start trying to solve this. How do we carve out some of your time to invest in those other communicators? ’cause you don’t wanna put a B minus on the weekend. You don’t wanna lack predictability. You want people to feel confident they can invite every weekend. But what Sean, I think you’re saying is long term, it can’t be you every weekend.
Sean:
That’s right. Exactly, yep.
Amy:
All right. The next tension that’s on my mind, Sean, and I do see this less and less these days, but I know it’s still out there, is that these churches trying to break through the 2000 mark is that they haven’t shifted to a staff led structure. And as I mentioned last week, this is a headline issue for churches that are still lay led. As churches grow the demand for paid professionals to drive day-to-day decision making, it increases at some point it becomes impractical for volunteer lay leaders to continue making day-to-day decisions regarding people, property, money. So by the time most churches get to this size, they’ve already eliminated ministry specific boards or committees. Most of them have. And at this size though, the next step is for the lay leadership teams to release day-to-day decisions to the staff, and instead elevate their focus to the overarching mission, vision and ministry resourcing.
In just a related issue in the run from a thousand to 2000, some of those early leaders hit their lids. Sometimes the lay leaders recognize this and that makes it even harder for them to release control. Did that make sense?
Sean:
Yes, it does.
Amy:
We’re running from 1000 to 2000 staff leaders hitting a leadership lid, which actually fires up the lay leader more. But when these churches do shift to becoming staff led, one thing you need to consider is that you might need to restructure, right? And if there are leadership lids with some existing leaders, you may need to make some strategic hires or make room to promote some gifted people who are already on the team.
Sean:
That’s true.
Amy:
This was so critical in our journey. We didn’t really get the flywheel going to push through these barriers until we had the right leaders, especially around the lead pastor, but then that next level as well. So I don’t know, Sean, anything else you wanna highlight before we move on to some solutions?
Sean:
Yeah, yeah. The last one I’ll mention that can cause a church to get stuck at this size is that the other systems and strategies have not been developed, particularly around communications. And a lot of times for attenders, I mean, it’s very possible that the church is just feeling too big for them now, right? It’s lost some of that personal feel that they had when the church was smaller. And this is actually a systems issue if people feel lost in the mix, you know, we talked about it a few weeks ago actually in our communication series, if you miss that check out episode 409. But essentially churches at this stage need to strategy to effectively connect people in relationships. And they need to actually measure that strategy, and then make changes quickly when they see the performance indicators in that strategy start to lag. That’s really critical because of the scale and the size of the church at this point.
Amy:
It is. And let me just do a shout out again to Orchard Church and Brighton. That’s exactly what triggered Shellie Dameron to re kind of re-engineer those first easy engagement steps.
Sean:
That’s right.
Amy:
She said to me kind of offline, she goes, Amy, it’s all about relationships. If people can find three relationships, they will stick at your church. And so she re-engineered because people were actually getting missed. They were getting lost. And they have a big church now. You know, probably bigger than 2000, but, even more, right? You’re at 3000, 4,000, you change things if people are getting lost in the mix. Sorry to jump in.
Sean:
Nope, that’s good. The other thing I’d add to that, Amy, is just in my experience, most of the systems churches at this size have, are very focused and they begin to focus on the people already connected to the church. And faith, again, we’ve just got so many people connected to our church, that the primary amount of our time and focus drifts that direction. And very few large churches actually have developed effective what we call reach strategies and systems. And that means strategies for connecting with people who are far from God or spiritually curious at this point. And this easily becomes one of the reasons why the churches at this size gets stuck. Okay.
Amy:
Yeah. I’ve been encouraged lately though, with the churches I’ve worked with, they’re starting to think about this more. In fact, one of the participants’ in the cohort, he had a funny title like digital reach strategist. But they’re doing it. They’re experimenting. How do we get good communication systems out with the people who have made themselves known?
Sean:
Love to hear that.
Amy:
And how do we use digital systems to fish for new people?
Sean:
That’s great. I love that. Well, let’s talk about now how each leader needs to shift their approach. So starting with the senior pastor again, what’s their primary responsibility in breaking the 2000 barrier?
Amy:
Yep. Well, complexity creep and holding onto traditions too long. Both fall at the senior pastor’s feet. So senior pastor, you have to be the one that opens up the door to reevaluating ministry, programmings and traditions in light of the direction that the church wants to go. And depending on the size and impact of the changes that need to be made, you may need to start reenvisioning the congregation, like we talked about last week, back to the purpose of the church, back to the mission. You might even need some fresh vision. You know, these foundational aspects, they need to be in place before making sweeping changes. We’re just people. We need to be reminded of the vision, reminded of the purpose. Let that pave the way, let that be the broader why behind the changes. And if the changes are big, you also have to come to terms with the fact that some people will probably leave your church over the changes.
Sean:
That’s right.
Amy:
But if you don’t change, you’re gonna lose other types of people. Vision attracts and it repels. So kind of your choosing who you might lose. And we don’t like to lose anybody and I get that. But anytime, you know, people don’t like change. Churches really don’t like change, but you’re in the seat to drive that change. But just help ’em understand why. And then the third primary responsibility in breaking the 2000 growth barrier is what you talked about, Sean. It’s to develop that teaching team. As the primary spiritual leader. You’re responsible for driving that and continually investing in and developing those teachers.
Sean:
Good. Okay. Executive pastor, where do they need to shift their focus to?
Amy:
Yeah. Well as you just mentioned, Sean, I think the headline is the executive pastor needs to be the owner for ensuring that the systems and strategies that the church are developed, the XP needs to have their radar up for gaps. And they’re responsible for ensuring the church has a great strategic planning rhythm. Second, if the vision and direction, it’s not clear, it’s your responsibility to call out that senior pastor in love—like not confrontational. But you need to watch their back. You need to watch their back if vision and direction isn’t clear. ’cause it’s probably clear in their mind, but you can’t really build solid systems and strategies without clear direction.
Sean:
Yes.
Amy:
And then third, if staff leaders are hitting their leadership lids as the primary leader of the staff team, you need to start sounding that alarm.
Sean:
That’s good. Alright, then let’s address the board’s role in this. How should church governance evolve to break through this 2000 barrier?
Amy:
Well, by the time most churches get to this size, again, they’ve usually already eliminated ministry specific boards or committees. But if the lay leadership team has not truly released day-to-day operations of the ministry to the staff, you need to know you guys are contributing to the stuckness, right? They’re contributing to the stuckness if they don’t let that go. So this is a really good time to get super clear on the role of the board and establishing best practices for serving and lay leadership at the church. If we had to create a job description for a church board member, these would be the primary responsibilities. I said it last week, model spiritual leadership to the congregation, provide encouragement and accountability to the lead pastor. Protect the established mission and vision of the church. Give input on significant financial decisions and advise the lead pastor as requested on the strategic decisions as staff leadership is processing. If any of you follow working genius, we want our board members using their discernment geniuses and their galvanizing geniuses. We do not want your wonder, your invention, your tenacity. We want you to live in those spaces.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good. Right. Speaking of last week’s episode, actually last couple of weeks episodes you’ve been sharing the swing thought concept each week. So, we don’t have to go back and rehash the whole concept ’cause if they haven’t listened to the last two weeks, they need to go back and listen to those two weeks.
Amy:
That’s right. A little cliffhanger.
Sean:
That’s right. Talk us through the swing thoughts for the senior pastors, executive pastors and board members for this 2000 barrier.
Amy:
Great. Alright. Senior pastors, your swing thought, make room, make room for new teachers on the platform. Make room to try new strategies. Make room for new direction and for new people. If your focus is on maintaining the teaching load you’ve always had and the complex menu of programs that have been added, you will not have the energy or the brain space to lead your church forward. So you need to make room, evaluate your current ministry portfolio and consider what your church might need to stop doing and what you personally might need to stop doing.
Executive pastors, your swing thought it’s gonna sound familiar. Get leaders in leadership roles. Get leaders with a leadership gift in leadership roles. If people are hitting their leadership lids as the primary leader of the staff team, you need to be making plans for change. You need leaders and roles to build and equip others and build, like you said, Sean, the systems and strategies within their areas that can support the mission.
You can’t be responsible executive pastors for setting strategies and systems in every single part of the ministry in a church this size. If you are, it’s an indication you don’t have leader of leaders on your team. So you need to be supervising people who can do it, who can do those things.
And then for the board at this size, your swing thought, own your role. When the church staff and board are aligned on the mission together, the church can thrive. Rather, you know, than focusing on what you’re giving up, if you’re making this shift and handing things over to staff, take this time to make sure every member of the lay leadership team understands their job description and knows how to serve in that position well.
Sean:
That’s good. Alright. Before we wrap up this episode, any final thoughts?
Amy:
Yeah, just a couple thoughts. Again, if you’re reaching the 2000 barrier, just congratulations. You’ve obviously been doing some great things in your mission field to reach people. And just remember breaking that 2000 barrier, it just requires intentional leadership development and organizational redesign. And, you know, the goal isn’t just growth in numbers, right? But it’s also growth in health and mission impact. So we wanna avoid slipping into that maintenance mode because we aren’t able to push through this barrier. And if we do that, we’re gonna experience a decline. So churches that have successfully navigated this barrier, they focus on alignment more than activity. And when you navigate this growth barrier, you’ll be on your way to sustained health, which is a very fun place to be in the church life cycle.
Sean:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thanks for joining us for this episode on breaking the 2000 barrier. And if you’d like to dive deeper, you can join us on September 18th at 1:00 PM Eastern for a free live webinar that we’re doing on breaking Big Church Growth Barriers. It’s a one hour webinar and we’re gonna cover things like how to recognize when you’re hitting that 1000 or 2000 attendance ceiling, some of the key practices of churches who break through these barriers, and then of course, the metrics and the vital signs to monitor as you continue to grow as a church.We’re gonna leave the last about 15 minutes or so at the end of the webinar for some live Q&A with Amy and I to address the questions that come up during the webinar.
So we really think you’re gonna leave the webinar with a much greater sense of clarity on how to break through those barriers that are in front of you. You can sign up to be a part of it at theunstuckgroup.com/webinar. And let me add to that, if you’re a church leader that’s facing these growth barriers, we’d love to help. Our team has worked with hundreds of churches of all sizes to help them find alignment and get unstuck and just make a greater kingdom impact. So you can visit theunstuckgroup.com to learn more, and then tune in next week for the last episode of this series where we’ll be talking about some common multisite barriers. We’ll see you then.
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