Predictable Challenges of Leading a Growing Church (Part 1)
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When your church is in a season of growth, there are certain challenges that you are bound to run into.
The good news is these challenges are predictable. But just because they are predictable, that doesn’t make them easy to navigate. In fact, some of the pastors going through this season of big momentum would tell you it’s one of the hardest seasons they’ve led through, but it’s also extremely rewarding.
We’re kicking off a new series called “Predictable Challenges of Leading a Growing Church,” where we will be discussing the tensions growing churches face and, most importantly, how to combat them.
In this episode, Sean and I talk about what’s most important in a growing church—people.
ANTICIPATING THE PEOPLE PROBLEMS
- Predictable people problems to be prepared for
- How to get out in front of those problems, wearing both your leadership hat and your pastoral hat
- Resources to get people engaged
This Episode is Brought to You By Planning Center:
Planning Center is an all-in-one toolkit to organize and run your ministries. And what is a ministry without volunteers?
Planning Center helps you build a sustainable and balanced volunteer schedule that aligns ministry needs with people’s availability. Then, you can connect with your team using chat, where you can coordinate ministry details, make announcements, and engage in fun conversations with your teammates.
Get started for free at planningcenter.com.
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean here with my friend and teammate, Amy Anderson. Amy, any churches you’d like to brag on that you’ve been working with recently?
Amy:
Oh, yeah. In fact, I just got off a call today with I’ve talked about before Summit Church in Durango, Colorado. I started working with them coming out of the pandemic, like in 2021. And so I’ve worked with them for the past three years, and they, honestly, they’re like family. We have such a great relationship, but I was so proud of them, Sean. They have like doubled their attendance since we started working in 2021.
Sean:
That’s great.
Amy:
Here’s the reason that’s such a big deal. They are, they’re a mainline church, so sometimes that brings some limitations to changes you can make in what you can do. They are in a town where people are very transient, meaning they’re there for part of the year, they’re gone for the other part of the year. And then Durango is one of these towns where all you wanna do is be outdoors.
You wanna hike a mountain, you wanna go by the river, you wanna just be outside. They used to, well, they joke that the status of you in Durango is the size of your car topper or what you’re pulling behind it. So they just have, I mean, every church has the challenge of people with weekends and all this, but again, this steady obedience to their strategic plans. We’re getting ready to refresh them again in March. So it was fun to spend that much time with the church three years, but just pause and look at where we started and where they’re going. And I’m just so proud of them. God just has his hand on their church and they’re such a great church and their community, they’re so known for being that church where people go when trauma tragedies kind of happen. So yeah. I brag on Summit in Durango. How about you? Any churches you’d brag on?
Sean:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, first of all, way to go Summit. You’re an unstuck church. That is fantastic. It’s really great to hear. Yeah, it was with a great church in the Dayton area this week. Be Hope Church, and they’re knocking so many things out of the park right now, a great leadership team there. It was really fun to spend the day with them. They have a goal of developing a hundred new volunteer leaders over the next year. And they have a great plan to begin to address that. And that’s one of those kind of key health metrics that we look at for churches—that volunteer to attendance ratio. And theirs is good right now, but they know it can be a lot better. So clear goal in front of them. Great team right people around the table. So I’m excited to see what God does in their church in the next year.
Amy:
That’s awesome.
Sean:
Well, today, Amy, we’re kicking off a new series and this is a fun topic. We’re gonna talk about the challenges that you can expect when your church is in a season of growth, like these churches that we just mentioned. And the good news is, is that these challenges are predictable, but just because they’re predictable, that doesn’t necessarily make ’em easy to navigate. In fact, some of the pastors who are going through this season of big momentum would tell you it’s one of the hardest seasons they’ve led through, but it’s also extremely rewarding.
Amy:
Yeah. We brainstorm this because really, working through the first six months of the year, the common challenge was all around growth, which is so different than maybe what we were talking about five years ago with unstuck, keeping churches unstuck, getting churches unstuck. We actually invited our consultants in to just brainstorm the series, and that was across the board what they were facing as well. And I always appreciate Paul Alexander on our team, who is the executive pastor at Sun Valley Church in Arizona. But he described these growth challenges as good things. But they still end up feeling like crises. And so there’s tensions to manage to borrow that line from Andy Stanley in this growth phase. So, as we close out the year, I can’t believe we’re closing out the year. I know over the next three episodes, we’re going to equip our listeners with just some practical wisdom for navigating the emotional pieces of leading a growing church, the structural pieces of leading a church, and then of course, the people-driven complexities of leading a growing church.
Sean:
Well, Amy, that’s actually where I wanna start today. In part one of this series, we’re gonna talk about the people side of growth. So where would you like to begin?
Amy:
Yeah, I like to start with people because at the end of the day, people are the most important. We exist as churches to help people meet and follow Jesus. And we just have to keep that front and center. We have to keep people in front of us, not letting people become mere numbers in how we view them, how we talk about them, how we treat them, not letting people become expendable in how we view them, talk about them, and treat them, and continuing to respond to people like Jesus did in grace and truth. And so that’s why I like to start on the people side.
Sean:
Absolutely. So what are some of the predictable people problems that church leaders might need to be prepared for as they’re leading through a season of growth?
Amy:
Sure. Lots of things come to mind. The first I think is just if you’re a growing church, you’re going to hit a point where you don’t have enough staff and volunteers. I know that we’ve talked about this on the podcast several times, but that has been a headline issue this year for churches. Just where do we find staff? How do we reengage volunteers? And you get, when you’re shy of people in those spaces, we get those repetitive use injuries. We start using all the same people all the time. And your staff maybe don’t have a life outside of the church. So that’s one predictable one.
Another one is you’re gonna discover leadership inadequacies, meaning you’re going to start to notice that some of your team members have hit the lid. When I do staffing structures and we assess leadership capacity, just like how, what they’re leading out of now, what their potential is, that is always a huge learning on site. Most churches in these growth season, they start to see that people are doing ministry. Like they’ve got maybe too many doers on their staff. Balls start to get dropped because you’re asking people to lead above their capacity. They really don’t have the skillset to do the things we want them to do when we move them beyond their capacity. And then I actually think the staff get frustrated because they probably used to be great at their job and now they feel like they’re not, they’re scrambling a little bit.
And maybe a third one, not surprising coming from me, but in these seasons of growth, you will need to restructure and maybe more than once, as you are growing, you’re gonna be adding staff, you’re gonna be moving people to new roles, you’re going to start to just sense this discomfort in your structure. Like it’s not working the way we need it to work. And then of course, man, one church that I was talking to this week was a headline issue, tensions between staff members. As relationships with colleagues change when you promote some people to new levels of leadership. And by the way, most of the time that goes well. In fact, another call I had today, in a restructure. We did, they’ve been in it six months now. And I was just checking in because the weekend leader who’s in place now, now has the former weekend leader reporting to her. So just checking in and it’s actually going well, but they, those don’t all go well and people get unhappy and tensions arise. So also it, restructures they get disruptive, meaning that home team, that team one can start to shift for people. So those are probably the top three, right? We don’t have enough staff and volunteers. We don’t have a high enough leadership capacity, and we have this need to restructure, in order to address the growth are kind of the three headlines in this area for growing churches.
Sean:
Yeah. It just makes me think, Amy, of all the, you know, I’ve talked to several hundred pastors over the course of the last year who reached out to the Unstuck Group. And of all those growing churches, you know, two of the headline questions around these people related issues, one would be, do I have the right people in the right roles? Now based on the growth that’s happened in our church, and then what are the priority hires for us going forward? How do we really think through and be strategic about who we hire first, second, and third, and what are the right indicators that we’re ready for that? So, all that you mentioned there just brought me back to those common questions that I hear from pastors. So, you know, those are all the staff related people problems, but I think you can also expect a few other issues as well.
You’re gonna have a lot of people who are, at your church, they’re new to your church and they’re consuming more or than they’re contributing or maybe they’re not contributing at all yet. New people, it takes them a while to get acclimated and to really get engaged. And I’ve worked with a number of churches that are in this momentum season, and one of the causes for alarm for them is they start to see some of their key metrics begin to dip over time. The percentage of people who are serving in their church starts to actually go down. The percentage of people in smaller groups in their church actually starts to go down. Their per capita giving actually starts to dip. And I encourage those churches a lot. Don’t be overly concerned about it, because you have to remind yourself that in those seasons of growth when you’re reaching new people, it takes them a while to acclimate. A new people not doing yet. They’re not serving yet. They’re not in a smaller group yet. They’re probably not giving yet. It’ll take them a while to onboard, but it just speaks to the need for us to have really good systems to help people get connected to our church over time.
I think churches also in that season need to reevaluate what healthy looks like as they continue to grow. As you look at your groups, as you’re serving teams at your key ministry areas, you’re gonna have more people. And what that turns into oftentimes is more need. And rather than adding more or completing tasks and being focused on that, you might have to take more time to listen, more time to give people opportunity to process the change that you’re navigating through. We were on a call with our good friend, pastor Jonathan Smith up at OneChurch.to, and he just had some great wisdom. He said, “Sometimes, I have to tell the leader side of me to sit down while the pastor side of me has to get up.”
Amy:
Oh, that’s good.
Sean:
And he’s just thinking through and being intentional about those roles, especially in seasons of change where he needs to lean into pastoring people sometimes and a little less into the leadership side of what he does.
Amy:
And I might add, Sean, I think that it’s the front facing, sometimes we have to tell that leader side to sit down so the pastor side can stand up. But behind the scenes in growth seasons, we actually need to have the pastor side sit down and have the leader side step up to think through these challenges.
Sean:
That’s right. Yep. That’s a good clarification. Amy, before we move on, I wanna take a minute and thank our episode sponsor Planning Center. Planning Center is an all-in-one toolkit to organize and run Church ministries. Planning Center helps you build a sustainable and balanced volunteer schedule that aligns ministry needs with your people’s availability. Then, after that, you can connect to your team using chat, where you can coordinate ministry details, make announcements, and engage in fun conversations with your teammates. You can get started for free today at planningcenter.com. That’s planning center.com.
Okay. So, let’s talk solutions. If you’re a church leader in a growing church and you wanted to get out in front of some of these issues that you’re definitely gonna run into, what are some of the things that you would encourage them to do, Amy?
Amy:
Yeah. Well, first would probably just be this acceptance or the anticipation of just discomfort on the people side of growth. Meaning when you’re a growing church as a leader, you’re gonna get uncomfortable with some of the things that you have to lead through. And to quote our friend Paul Alexander again, I thought he said it well. He said, the larger the church, the more discomfort a leader is going to experience. And he said that because these are the kind of moves you need to make, no matter how comfortable it is, you need to adjust on the people side. And part of the solution, for some churches, if you’re in a high season of growth and you are a church over a thousand people in regular attendance, this is the stage where as a lead pastor, you need to have an executive pastor in my humble opinion.
At this stage, what that does is it allows the lead pastor actually to be the pastor, and then it has someone on the team who has the responsibility and the time to think through specifically about the people and staff side of things. Now, in a lot of the work I’ve done this year, it is not uncommon for me to work with a church who goes, you know, we did that executive pastor thing and something happened where they had a bad experience. And often I see churches without that executive role on it, an overcorrection due to a bad experience. Another reason some churches don’t have executive pastors is the lead pastor actually feels a little guilt. Like, well, I should be doing these things. And I think one of the fears too is that, and this might be a little bit of the overcorrection, the lead pastor’s afraid to get too distant from the team, or the team is afraid that the lead pastor’s going to get too distance from the team.
But I have to tell you, when you structure right, and you have the right senior leadership in place that will protect those challenges. So here’s why executive pastors are important. Executive pastors make vision actionable, they drive strategic initiatives, they drive strategic planning, and they ensure that we have a healthy and high performing team because both of those are important. So, as a senior leadership team, you should be talking about the people side. You should be anticipating those things Sean said earlier about what are the priority next hires, which department’s gonna get the go ahead to move next. It is all of this. Having the XP, getting the right senior leadership team, the right conversations, all that is under this umbrella is that it’s better to drive these issues, anticipate them, get ready for them than to chase them. Because the church is the fastest paced organization on the planet.
The second thing, for lead pastors, I would just say increase your self-awareness in these times of growth. Most lead pastors that I work with are actually pretty self-aware to some degree. But none of us know fully what it’s like to be on the other side of the team. And by the way, that’s why I think team-based leadership is such a blessing because we get ourselves surrounded with people who are watching our back. But think it’s important in this self-awareness to understand lead pastors your own personal wiring, right? You hear us talk about the strengths wheel and the upper right quadrant is that fast paced, mission focused people and some lead pastors are there actually more lead pastors I see are on that fast paced people side.
But we have to recognize that a lot of other people are in different quadrants. They work differently, they work a little slower. And so I think it’s important to understand your wiring. And then I would say understand the wiring on your team. This is one of the most helpful conversations we have when we’re on site with churches because we get to look at maybe the top 10 to 12 leaders and see how they are naturally wired. And it is so revealing. It is not uncommon at all, Sean, to have the majority of the team, you know, 10 outta 12 in the room on the bottom half of that strengths wheel where they are just very people focused. But I’d also add, it’s not uncommon to have the majority of the people on the left side of that wheel. And that those are the people that I say they are wired to take a step back before they take a step forward.
And so they, you know, that slower pace need time to process. There’s a lot of strengths when the team is on that side, right? They, when they make a decision, it’s very well thought through, but there’s also challenges to that too. When we have a team that’s really weighted on the slower side of the wheel, they can be too slow to make needed even urgent changes. They can get caught in that cycle of ready, aim, aim, aim, ready. So I just think that mostly pastors are, are typically wired a little bit on the, the faster pace side, have that awareness, but learn about your team and lead pastors. I think if that describes your team, if you kind of relate with that, you probably need a few more. Let’s go people around you in this growth season. And, and probably some more people who are driven to actually get those results. And if you’re listening and you’ve never done an assessment like this with your team you can bring us in. We’ll do that. Or you can do it yourself. We recommend Ministry Insights’ Leading From Your Strengths or even The Working Genius. It’ll just give you a little bit more information about your team members.
Sean:
Yep. Absolutely. And it’s those kinds of tools that help us get a sense of how balanced our team is and gifting. Right. That’s really what it’s about. And the healthiest teams have a sense of balance. And so pastors, if you’re listening and you don’t know, or maybe you’re sensing there are some aspects of your team that are out of balance, people who are really gifted in one way, but you’re missing or you have gaps in giftings on another side. Definitely lean into one of those tools or reach out to us. We can help you with that. Amy, one of the things that we get asked by pastors, we’re serving is where do I find staff to join our team?
Amy:
That is definitely a question that pops out in these growth seasons. And actually, that’s where I was going next. Finding staff is the Achilles heel for most lead and executive pastors right now. So my third solution in this discussion is to make it a priority to actually get new people at your church engaged. Again, if we’re in it, it’s harder if we can get ahead of it. This is really important. But it relates to the question because again, we’re trying to talk about how to get ahead of some of the people challenges in our church. And you, you know, that old adage, I think it’s an adage, when’s the best time to plant an oak tree? Right? 20 years ago, then what’s the best time, you know, second best time? right now. Well, when’s the best time to raise up future leaders? Right? It’s right now. We need to continue to invest in the people that God has already and brought that God has already brought to our church. So make it a priority to figure out how to get more people engaged so that you can get to know them, they can get to know you. And what this does is it just increases engagement at your church.
So getting new people involved in the life of the church, but also help your Christ followers take a next step, make that important thing to talk about. Most churches I see have in this area of helping people take their next step, kind of an overreliance on announcements to attain this. I you know, ministry leaders tend to think, boy, if our pastor would just announce that people need to do this, they’ll do it. But to quote TD Jakes, these are the kind of announcements you actually have to preach. You have to preach your announcements to call people into their next steps of engagement. And when you preach this, I always lean into, there’s such a power of being in the crowd. I think about Jesus teaching in the crowd and how thousands responded. There’s something about sitting under a gifted teacher, giving God’s Holy Spirit time to work and to speak to you know, me to other people. So that’s another reason why I say preach this next step when you make it a priority. In fact, we were at the Grow Conference, Sean this past July, a group of us from Unstuck and Chris Hodges. I liked the way he approached it. He was talking to our crowd. He would actually demonstrate what they do when they talk about people stepping up into serving. He would actually say, we don’t need you. We actually don’t need you. But it’s what you need. It’s what you’re designed to do and what it’s designed for. So lead pastors, this is just something we need to preach regularly to call people out. And by the way, just while I’m on this subject of engagement, I also just wanna remind our ministry leaders. We need to make it easy. You know, as my colleague Chad Hunt preaches to his team and the churches he works with. We need those easy first steps where we can start very low commitment both in time and relationship. And then each engagement step after that should begin to call people up to more time and relational connection. But we need this bridge that helps us get, you know, out of the seat and taking some small next step, which I call engagement steps before we take those bigger steps onto our discipleship pathway.
Sean:
Amy, I know in my experience, I’ve actually seen a lot of people also who are in a marketplace job right now move into ministry. So what about those people?
Amy:
Yeah. So I guess what I was just covering is just to make sure you’re looking at getting your current people engaged, because that’s where future leaders can come.
Sean:
Sure.
Amy:
But I just wholeheartedly believe on this topic, Sean, of people who are at your church who are in the marketplace, some of them are ready to move into ministry. Some of them are ready to move into ministry. I think churches did this really well 20 years ago. I mean, I heard pastors regularly challenging people to shift from success to significance. And that was my story. I was full on in corporate America, loved my church. I actually was pretty involved. I was serving, we were in a group. All of that. But our pastor boldly started challenging some of us to step out of our marketplace role and into ministry.
And the truth is, God was already at work my heart about that. Did I take a pay cut? Yep. Was it a big decision? Yep. There was five of us in our family, and that was a pretty good salary that I walked away from. But here’s an example. I was just talking to a pastor this week and he has a lot of people challenges right now. He’s a growing church. They, they’ve got parking lot issues, but they have staffing challenges right now of building out their team. And so we were in a conversation about exploring just potential leaders within the church, and he literally just dropped his face in his hands and said something to the effect of, but they’re making so much money, we could never match that. And here’s what I would say. Don’t say no for them. Nobody said no for me. They made the bold ask and through prayer and, you know, processing with my small group, I made that change. And God has blessed me immensely and put me on a path to where I am now. So don’t say no for them.
There are a lot of people that, you know, I’ve seen over the years step out of corporate into ministry. So pastors be paying attention to who those are. And I would challenge you to regularly start, you know, to challenge people that maybe God is moving in that direction. So pay attention to who God’s brought into your church. And just remember in those cases, those types of leaders, they’re not gonna respond to a need or a job description. They’re gonna respond to the problems that you see that need to be solved at the church.
Sean:
That’s good. Yeah.
Amy:
The last thing, Sean, when we’re talking about getting ahead of the growth challenges on the people side is to just pause pastors and assess the leadership capacity of your ministry team.
Determine, you know, who has more capacity, leadership capacity, and maybe who has hit their lid. We don’t wanna over promote people in leadership roles. So for those that are in ministry leadership roles, just again, a challenge to make sure you’re envisioning your ministry leaders to their core responsibility, which is to be a team builder and equip the body to do the ministry. So that’s really what should get rewarded under this umbrella. Make the wins clear. What does success look like for your ministry leaders in this season of growth? And I say that because it’s gonna be so easy for them to be busy, and we want them to be so focused, we want the ministry leaders focused. So make the clear wins, celebrate those wins that they’re living out at staff meetings, one-on-ones, make sure you highlight those stories of kind of the behind the scenes work to raise people up, volunteers up into leadership roles, and then of course, hold them accountable to those lead activities that will impact their wins.
So what I mean is we’re gonna get really busy in these seasons of growth. Make sure you have conversations about how they need to be spending their time and then hold them accountable to that. For instance, if you’re the group’s leader, you should probably have a certain number of people you need to connect with each week to ask them to take a leadership role. Just activities like that. So, yeah. And I’ll just say it one more time. If leaders, you know this, you’ve got someone on your team and you’re thinking about moving them into a bigger leadership role and they don’t have the leadership capacity, don’t do it. Don’t move a warm body into a role because they’re comfortable and familiar. Make sure you’re putting leaders in leadership roles.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good advice. I’ve made that mistake before. Listen to Amy.
Amy:
Haven’t we all?
Sean:
Amy, you know, one of the other questions. So we talked about staff and we’ve talked about volunteer leaders, but one of the primary questions has been around just kind of engaging more people in serving and volunteering. Do you have any resources you would point pastors to?
Amy:
If you need to engage new people in serving roles, let me just point you back to a podcast series we did back in July. It’s called Serving as Spiritual Formation. And those episodes, I believe are 355 through 359. That would be a great resource.
Sean:
That’s good. Yeah. Also just a quick plug. If you missed our Momentum and Misalignment webinar back in November and where we talked about navigating rapid growth without getting stuck, it was a great event. But we’re gonna get some of the highlights of that up on our YouTube channel in the next few weeks. So that may help as well. All right, Amy, let’s wrap up today’s conversation. Any final thoughts? Anything we left out?
Amy:
Yeah, let me end with this. Sean, the, the people challenges at growing churches are predictable. And if we don’t do something about the people side, if we don’t do that well, there’s also going to be some predictable outcomes that really aren’t great ones that can ensue. So, for all of our listeners, I’m just glad you’re listening today, that you’re working ahead of these challenges. Most churches, when they’re addressing the people side of things, often need help. As they’re leading a growing church, they need a third party who can bring some fresh eyes to this people side of their ministry. They often need help stepping back and developing a thoughtful plan that’ll determine things like you talked about at the top of the hour. Sean, priority hires priority actions. So of course this is something Unstuck offers, and we would love to walk alongside you if that’s what you’re facing at your church.
Sean:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, leading a growing church is fun. It’s a lot of fun, but dealing with the sensitive people problems is not fun. So if you really like that, just kind of objective ally in making those difficult personnel decisions for a restructure, we’d love to talk. You can reach out to us through our website, and get directly to me and we can help you figure out how to get the right people in the right seats going forward. Pastors always tell us they love how we gave them clear direction, phase steps and help them just wisely lead through the changes with love and care, I would say, at the same time in an appropriate timeframe with those people changes. So start a conversation with us today at theunstuckgroup.com/start. Next week, we’re back with our second episode in this series. Until then, have a great week.
