Own Your Role in Breaking the Growth Barrier (Part 4)
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“Where did all our momentum go?”
We hear this question often from the multisite churches we serve. It is so common for a multisite church to get stuck at 3 locations. Having three locations is amazing and exciting, but if you are continuing to grow, it can suddenly feel very frustrating if your multisite model becomes the barrier to making room for new people.
In this episode, Sean and I break down a growth barrier that isn’t discussed often: the “MultiStuck” barrier. We talk about the common tensions multisite churches feel when they get stuck at 2 or 3 campuses and start to lose momentum, and we provide solutions to break through the barrier toward sustained health.
The middle of a little bit of planting and a little bit of multisite is where multisite churches get stuck. [episode 415] #unstuckchurch Share on X Autonomy actually contradicts that phrase of being one church in multiple locations. A multisite church strategy is replicating who you are. [episode 415] #unstuckchurch Share on X One of the most courageous things that you have to do when analyzing your church's health is deciding what you stop doing. [episode 415] #unstuckchurch Share on X Get fresh perspective on everything your multisite church is doing through the lens of replicability. [episode 415] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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More Episodes In This Series
Own Your Role: Breaking the 2000 Barrier – Episode 414
Own Your Role: Breaking the 1000 Barrier – Episode 413
Own Your Role: Breaking the 200 and 500 Barriers – Episode 412
Transcript
Sean:
Hey podcast listeners, before this week’s episode, I wanna say thanks to our podcast sponsor, Planning Center. Planning Center’s an 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 one single platform. If 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. My name is Sean, the host of the podcast, and I’m joined as always by the managing director here at the Unstuck Group, Amy Anderson. Amy, today we’re actually gonna wrap up our series on breaking common church growth barriers with one that we don’t actually hear people talking about that often, and it’s less of a direct attendance growth barrier, but it really does reflect an attendance growth barrier, quite honestly. We’re calling this one the multi-stuck growth barrier—when multisite churches get stuck at two or three campuses and then start to lose momentum.
Amy:
Yeah. We’re talking about this Sean because it’s so common for a multisite church to get stuck at three locations. And being three locations, it’s amazing, it’s exciting. But if you’re continuing to grow, it can suddenly feel very frustrating if your multisite model becomes really the barrier to making room for new people. And we know this is common because this is exactly where many of our hundred plus multisite clients have found themselves over time.
Sean:
Yeah, that’s right. So Amy, you work with literally dozens of these kinds of churches every year, or more if you count the dozens of church leaders that are part of our multisite cohorts. So why do churches often get stuck at this two or three location mark?
Amy:
Yeah, several reasons come to mind as I think about those plateaus. But I think one of the most common reasons is that the multisite model that they’ve designed, it just has too much autonomy in it. Often they’ve blended like church planting strategies with multisite strategies. So of course church planting is go reach a new mission field, whatever it takes, you know, pull all the stops out. Whereas multisite’s a little bit more disciplined. You go where you’re already reaching people, it’s the same mission field, and you’re using the ministry strategies that have been working all along at the original location. So this challenge can enter early in with a multisite launch where local location leaders, they suddenly want the freedom and the autonomy of a church plant while having the resources and support of the multisite church.
So the problem is for most churches, you can’t have both. You have to pick a model. Are we church planting or are we multisite? What I’ve seen time and time again, Sean, if you try to live in the middle of a little bit of planting and a little bit of multisite, this is where multisite churches get stuck. Sometimes they even split apart and some locations shutter. And I’ve heard, you know, some pushback on this. Like, well, splitting apart, that’s a kingdom win. Now we have three churches, but talk to any pastor that’s had to un-multisite and they will likely tell you that not all the locations made it and it was a very painful experience.
Sean:
Yeah, yeah.
Amy:
And here’s the deal. We also have to recognize that adding autonomy into a multisite model, it’s expensive. It’s expensive with people’s time, it’s expensive with resources. You have to pay more people. For instance, if you’re, you know, giving autonomy to campuses to teach, you have to pay more people to cover teaching. And then because so many people are preparing messages, we have to pay for more ministry staff, and then we also need more central team members to support. Right? When we think of the operations area and all that, because they’re not supporting one church, but they’re supporting three varying churches. Again, you often sense this communications is already thin in most churches. You ask them to support three different locations running three different plays, and anyways, it just, it gets expensive.
And I would be as bold to say that autonomy actually contradicts that phrase of being one church in multiple locations. Right? A multisite church strategy is replicating who you are, what’s working. So you’ve had a healthy growing church that you believe should be replicated. So when campus pastors wanna start creating new ministry strategies for location, this is when we start to see these churches deviate from what we would call our multisite best practices.
So for example, at Unstuck we have nine best practices that result in some very successful predictable outcomes for churches going multisite. One of them is that video really works, right? You have an excellent communicator, or better yet an excellent teaching team that’s drawing people to come and hear God’s word and how it applies to their life. And that’s in part why you have been a growing church and wanna expand through multisite.
Sean:
Right.
Amy:
Well, this autonomy creep goes instead of replicating through video, what’s been working, let’s rotate live teachers or let’s have campus pastors teach live. The opinion is live teaching is the draw where in reality the best teaching, I believe is the draw. So that’s one reason these churches get stuck. Autonomy is hard and it’s expensive to replicate. The second reason is that some multisite churches just find themselves overextended with too many programs that are competing for attention and resources across multiple locations. Right? Single site churches get complex and then we multiply that. So as these now stuck churches went multisite, they probably didn’t do the pruning and bring the focus they needed to their core ministry strategies. And honestly, even once they went multisite, some locations have continued to add more ministry programs and events. And I’ll add the common thing I see is that every campus, they just wanna have event after event after event. Have you been in those churches?
Sean:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Amy:
Again, I’m probably being too bold sometimes, but my perspective is that every church already has 52 major events a year. So I just, why do we feel the need to continue to hold more events. You know, in multisite it’s important to find that sweet spot where you’re offering enough opportunities for relationships to develop without resorting to adding every program everyone ever thinks of.
And just for perspective, I just shared this with a large multisite I was working with, when I was at Eaglebrook, which is a multisite church in the Twin Cities where I served for 13 years. We had, we limited campus pastors to two events per year where they could fire up their entire building, their worship centers and all that. And when they did that, they had to let us know what the purpose was. They had to let us know what are the results of this event if we do it well. And then we evaluated it. And so our campus pastors were just so laser focused on if we wanna have an event, what’s the win? How does it help us accomplish what we believe God wants to do through our location this year? We evaluate it and we learn if it went well, we shared it with other campuses. If it didn’t go well, we failed forward. So complexity, replicating complexity is another reason I think they get stalled.
Sean:
I think that’s great Amy. And quite honestly, I don’t think that generally people in our culture today are looking for more to do.
Amy:
Right. I agree.
Sean:
So more events on the calendar at the church at different times other than when I’m already regularly there, less likely to be effective. Right? And more likely just to create complexity without specific results.
Amy:
It reminds me of Nate Bargatze’s routine. He said like, when you’re in your twenties, someone’s like, let’s go here. And you’re like, I’m all in. Let’s go. When you’re thirties, you’re like, well, who’s gonna be there? How long will we be there? And then in the forties you’re like, Nope. Can’t go.
Sean:
I’m offended you even thought I would come.
Amy:
Well, and lastly it just made me think of this. There’s also like structural or model factors in place. Often churches implement what I would call an ineffective multisite model that isn’t truly replicable. They might be structured with major ministry silos, again at the original location, that don’t communicate well across locations. A good example of this is when a sending location maybe has this large women’s ministry, right? It’s a headline. It’s been in place for years that can be difficult to replicate at a smaller location.
Sean:
Right.
Amy:
So then what I see is often the church starts bringing everyone back to this original site for events and for ministry. And I think that works against making the new location feel like a legitimate church. And the key here is if new locations are launched too small, it can leave the sending location, having to support several undersized locations where the brand and the culture don’t really translate effectively. Right?
Sean:
Yeah. Yep.
Amy:
And the other structural component that I see, Sean, is that they’ve got these solid and dotted lines messed up, right? In stuck multisite churches, I often see like all the kids staff at locations reporting to the kids’ pastor at the sending location. The group staff are reporting to the central groups leader at the sending location. And that’s really backwards. Ministry leaders need to be reporting to their campus pastor at a location that’s the solid line. That central strategist is a dotted line.
Sean:
Yep. That’s good. And Amy, would you agree that sometimes these churches are stuck because just they haven’t properly financially planned for new locations? I’ve seen situations where churches don’t plan for that ongoing expansion beyond those initial campuses and then they just find themselves in a really tough spot.
Amy:
Yeah. It’s not as common as the first two that I just mentioned, but definitely. And that’s is that sometimes when they have launched too many too small; they don’t play out how it is. So it’s a compounding issue. Multisite by its nature is complex. And in a complex multisite model, again, 52 weekends a year over programming, dysfunctional structures, it’s easy to take your eye off the ball with financial planning. Hey, did I miss anything Sean, when it comes to multisite churches hitting a plateau?
Sean:
Good question. The only thing I think I’d add is that a lot of times they’re missing a structure and a plan for how they develop more, I would say leaders, but also artists and volunteers as well ’cause we’re gonna need all of them to launch new locations in a healthy way. Because of that, they don’t have what we call a deep leadership bench. Meaning if they send 200 leaders and volunteers out to launch a new location, they don’t have another 200 that are prepared to take their place at the sending location right now, and you know this as we do our readiness assessment, this is one of the most common areas that shows up as red, a caution. That we’re not prepared.
And it’s really critical because it’s the people that carry the culture from our sending location to this new location. And you need to be prepared to send your A players, both leaders and your A givers as well to launch this new location. And typically what leads to stuckness is churches launch with a bench that’s just too thin. They don’t send those A players that carry the culture and their volunteers and leaders get tired, they get burned out. And the new campus really quickly drifts away from resembling the sending campus, which is the campus that’s experiencing that health and momentum. And quite honestly, that’s one of the reasons we see the momentum start to slow at the sending location is now we’ve created a problem over here, maybe another problem over here, and we’ve got fires to put out and we’re trying so desperately to put those fires out that it quells the momentum at our sending location as well.
Amy:
Yeah. Good thoughts.
Sean:
So let’s shift to the solutions. I mean this is a really good list of the common challenges that we see for multisite churches. So on the solution side, what’s it take for a church to break through this multi-stuck barrier and really get that momentum going again? What solutions have you seen work?
Amy:
If you’re a church that’s two, three locations and you’re feeling stuck, my first bit of advice would just be to assess your multisite model. Do you truly have a replicable model that maintains the DNA of the church while allowing some contextual adaptation for each community? Often ministries like student ministries or local outreach, they need to have some contextualization in new locations due to the size of the new location and local ministry opportunities. But honestly, beyond that, the other ministry should be designed as identical as possible. So just assess how are you doing that area of having a replicable ministry model.
Second, I would just audit your programming across all locations. And are you trying to do too much? Yeah. Like, is there a clear discipleship path that works at every campus? Right. Because without clear steps that you’re pointing people to—that’s what we mean by discipleship path. What are those big steps you want people to take. If those aren’t clear, then what we have a tendency to do is just gather a lot of crowds through events and through programming. So audit that programming across all locations.
Sean:
Amy, if I can add to that, that might be one of the most courageous things that you have to do through this process is decide what you stop doing. Because if you’re a growing church that has momentum and you’re prepared to launch a new location, if you’re at that point in the life of your church, it’s likely that your church has been around for a while and there are some things that have worked that have led to that health. And so to look and have a pruning conversation and say, there are actually some things we’re going to stop doing can be really difficult because there’s a lot of fruit that people could point to and say, well, this has created great outcomes for us, but we know it’s not the best for us for the future. So I just, a lot of leaders that are leading multisite churches, that’s one of the hardest things for them to do as they’re moving towards a healthy multisite model.
Amy:
Yeah, for sure. Third, just assess where each location is at on the church lifecycle. Leaders need to recognize that different campuses maybe at different stages on the church life cycle, and not every campus then needs the same kind of approach or resources or energy. So if you’re not familiar with it, the church life cycle is an assessment in our Resource Hub and it blends both objective data and subjective data to help you understand if you are a church or a location growing in health and momentum or if you’re losing momentum and declining at the multisite church I worked at Sean, you know, there were seasons where we had campuses in many phases. We had some in launch, we had some in momentum growth, we had some in sustained health and we had some in maintenance. In fact, the one in maintenance was actually our original location where the church had just been for decades. So we had saturated that community for a long time. So they needed different attention and different resources when they found themselves in that season.
And we recently did this exercise, kind of plotting all locations on the church lifecycle, with a large multisite church on the West Coast. I think they have 21 locations, both in California and internationally. So plotting where each location was on the life cycle, it was just eye-opening for them. It gave them some clarity as to what attention each location needed to get back to a place of health. Yeah. So if you wanna take that assessment, you can access it through our Resource Hub, but I would take a look at your church as a whole and then individually on the life cycle.
And, the last thing I’d mention just for some of the next steps is, as you mentioned Sean, really examine your leadership pipeline. You know, multisite growth requires developing leaders who can replicate the church’s culture and values. So just how deep is your bench? Do you have a system for it? Do you have someone who’s championing that leadership pipeline? So maybe not all of those apply, Sean, but again, for our listeners, however you’re stuck. I hope we’re helping you diagnose what it is right now.
Sean:
Yeah. Yeah. Those are great options for solutions there. Let’s say a church has been stuck at maybe two or three campuses for a while. But they’re starting to think about future expansion actually. What would you encourage them to do? What should they know?
Amy:
Yeah. Well I would say first, if you realize that too much autonomy has crept into your multisite model, I would really start by determining what needs to be pulled back in and identify where locations can contextualize for their location’s unique context. So just have that conversation about what needs to be identical, where can we allow some autonomy. And any autonomy you allow in, it still cannot work against maintaining alignment with the overall church vision.
Next, if certain campuses are consistently underperforming or draining energy from the whole system, you just need to figure out why. What is the cause. You have to get to the answer of that question. And then of course, boldly take the necessary steps to get them back to a place of health. Or in some locations it means shutting down the location. And I know that sounds harsh and that has other repercussions, but sometimes it’s necessary for the overall health of all of the locations. So it really depends on why they’re stuck.
Lastly, I would say if you’re two or three, you feel stuck, but you’re looking to the future. I would just say actually pause new campus launches until you’ve done this work, until you understand the underlying issues that’s causing the stall. Because you have to remember, when we multisite, we are replicating who we are. So if there’s unhealth in your systems, you wanna get healthy first and then replicate. That’s right. Otherwise you’re just gonna replicate that unhealth.
Sean:
Alright. Right Amy. So let’s talk about how each of the key leaders needs to own their role and starting with the senior pastor, what do they need to be focused on?
Amy:
Great. By the way, you know, Tony used to always say to us, the leader senses it first. So if you’re a senior pastor kind of leaning in ’cause you’ve been sensing this, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to focus on clarifying the vision for multisite and open up the conversation about what needs to change. I think that needs to be your role. Clarify the vision. Why are we even going multisite? And then open up the question of what needs to change and then pass it off to your executive pastor. So executive pastors who are listening, you need to do the needed analysis. So one of the roles you can’t delegate is making vision actionable. So if the lead pastor has clarified that and they want to launch more locations, you need to lead the work of assessing what’s working and what’s not. And again, would start with analyzing how identical and independent are our ministry strategies. I would review the vital signs for each location and understand where they are in the church life cycle. In other words, do the diagnostic work on the model because your data is telling you a story. And then board members, you have a role too. You know, multisite is typically a significant financial investment. And I really believe it’s your role to oversee the development of a sustainable financial plan for expansion.
Sean:
Yeah. So Amy, throughout the whole series, we’ve been giving leaders each in their different roles, a swing thought. And that is just, you know, a simple idea that you can focus on in the moment. You’ve talked about that in each episode. So let’s do it again here. What’s the swing thought for the senior pastor, executive pastor and for the board roles?
Amy:
Yeah. For the senior pastors. Your swing thought, your area focus is reestablish “the why.” Reestablish “the why.” Why are you a multisite church? Why does each campus exist? Why are you doing this? From clarity about why, then you can effectively begin to evaluate, well actually your executive pastor can, where the how is not delivering. So you reestablish the why. Executive pastors think replicability. That’s a hard word to say, Sean.
Sean:
It is a hard word.
Amy:
I want to say replicate-ability. So, whichever one works for the executive pastor, but.
Sean:
Probably depends on what part of the country you live in how you say it. I would guess.
Amy:
We might need to do an episode on talking Minnesotan ’cause there’s a lot of words we make up, up here that are just better.
Sean:
That would be fun. I think I’d learn a lot.
Amy:
So replicability: Get fresh perspective on everything your church is doing through the lens of replicability. Where is there too much complexity? Where do campuses feel very different? And I say that word feel because you know this, if you’re kind of a person on the team that gets to go to the multiple locations, which by the way, this typically is not the senior pastor. You can sometimes walk into a room and go, this just feels like my church. And other times you’re like, this doesn’t feel like my church. Your job executive pastor to figure that part out.
And then for the board, I would just say, your swing thought will be mission over methods. You guys need to support the lead and executive pastor through changes that need to be made. And so I want you to use your discernment gifts as they make ministry decisions and then use your influence to support them with the congregation. The reason I said your swing thought is mission over methods is you need to be anchored in why we do what we do and that it’s more important than how we do that. People don’t like change, but your influence as a board member, your influence is to help lead the why that will help the staff team actually navigate the needed changes.
Sean:
That’s good. That makes a lot of sense. Alright, so we’re gonna wrap up this series. Before we do any final thoughts from you.
Amy:
Yeah. It was fun to talk about this, you know, breaking the multi-stuck barrier. You’ve heard it, it requires honesty about what’s working and what isn’t and where you’re really hoping to end up. Yeah. In fact, one church I just worked with, they’re at three. They’re multi-stuck. I said, what would it look like if you were six? And that was kind of mind blown. They recognized we can keep up this complexity at three, but if we really went to six, it requires different systems. So I just think many churches, you need to admit your current approach isn’t sustainable for growth beyond where you are now.
We have to remember that healthy multisite expansion isn’t just about opening more locations, it’s about multiplying disciples and it’s about impacting the communities that we serve. So we wanna do this right. And this barrier, honestly, Sean, I think it can be a gift if it forces us as church leaders to step back and strengthen the foundation before taking on more. I really feel bad for churches that continued that expansion when at three they had all the symptoms of being multi-stuck. It’s just a harder step back. Once you’ve spread yourself too thin. So if some of this podcast has resonated with you today, again, I think it’s a gift because I think it’ll help you step back and actually strengthen your model before you continue to expand to more locations.
Sean:
Well, thank you listeners for joining us for this final episode of our series on owning your role in breaking church growth barriers. If you’re a church leader facing any of the hurdles that we’ve talked about, of course we would love to help. Our team has worked with hundreds of churches of all sizes to help them find alignment, get unstuck, and then make a greater kingdom impact. You can actually visit us at theunstuckgroup.com to learn more about our process. Next week, Amy, we’re back with a brand new series. We’re gonna talk about everyone’s favorite topic: Management. Yes.
Amy:
Management. I love management. That’s gonna be fun.
Sean:
It is gonna be fun actually. If you’re a senior executive pastor and you want to make sure that you’re optimizing all of the other leaders on your team to lead their teams well this series is gonna be for you. So come back next week. Until then, have a great week.
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