What Ready-For-Multisite Looks Like (Part 1)
Here’s a pattern we keep seeing: more and more churches are rushing into multisite.
Churches are launching campuses without doing their due diligence. And they’re skipping the learning from the churches that have already gone before them—the mistakes they’ve made and the things worth repeating.
A move of God is not a substitute for doing your homework.
Because here’s what we’ve learned over the years—the number one reason campus launches fail is that churches start too fast and too small.
That’s why we’re starting this new series called “What Ready-For-Multisite Looks Like.” And we’re kicking it off with this question: should you even be having a multisite conversation yet?
- Getting clear on DNA
- Organizational Buy-In
- Evaluating Your Current Growth
You cannot drag an organization into multisite. [episode 460] #unstuckchurch Share on X If you ask five leaders why you’re going multisite and you get five different answers, you don’t have a problem of determining how to launch; you have a DNA problem. [episode 460] #unstuckchurch Share on X Multisite is not a growth strategy. It’s an evangelism strategy to extend the impact of an already effective church. [episode 460] #unstuckchurch Share on X
This Episode Is Brought to You By PlainJoe Studios.
Adding a new campus to your multisite plan?
If you don’t have a strategy for coordinating your placemaking and wayfinding signage, maybe it’s time to update across every campus. The creative and talented team at PlainJoe, a Storyland Studio, are experts at creating placemaking signs and wayfinding markers that will tell your church’s unique story and point your people in the right direction – from the moment they arrive at your campus.
Learn more at plainjoe.net.
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Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean Bublitz, managing director at the Unstuck Group. And before I introduce my co-host for this series, I wanna ask you, the listener, for something throughout this entire series. If you are a church that’s currently considering multisite, before you make any more decisions, I wanna ask you to slow down and just listen to this series, the whole thing. And I know it’s a big ask with everything else that you’ve got going on, but here’s the thing. It doesn’t cost you anything, and it’s only gonna take you four weeks. And it might save you from a decision that costs you a whole lot more than that.
And here’s why I’m making that ask. We are hearing from more and more churches that are just rushing into multisite. The conversation with them, it typically goes something like this. We’re launching a campus in a few months and because God is clearly moving here at our church. And I believe you; I’m not questioning the fact of whether God’s moving in your church or not, but, and I know this risk sounding a little sacrilegious, but a move of God is only part of what you need before going multisite. Yes, God’s moving in your church, and God still also expects you to steward your resources well. And those two things aren’t competing against each other, but a move of God is not a substitute for doing your homework.
So this is the pattern that we keep seeing. Churches are rushing into multisite without doing their due diligence and without getting an outside perspective. And they’re skipping the learning from other churches that have already gone before them. They’ve made mistakes. And they’ve also discovered things worth repeating. Because here’s what we’ve learned over the years from the research and a point we’ll keep coming back to in this series, the number one reason campus launches fail is that churches start too fast and too small. So that’s why we’re doing this. Slow down. Let’s make sure you’re really ready.
With that said, let me introduce my co-host for this series and someone who brings a ton of experience to this conversation, Jesse Tink. Jesse’s been a consultant here at The Unstuck Group for about a decade now. And he’s also the lead pastor of Prairie Lakes Church in Iowa, a multisite church that’s grown to seven locations. So Jesse, welcome to the podcast.
Jesse:
It’s great to be here, Sean, especially with a fellow geriatric millennial.
Sean:
I love being a geriatric millennial because I feel both young in being a millennial, Jesse, and old at the same time. I am literally the oldest geriatric millennial you could be being born on January 1st. So.
Jesse:
Yeah. And you know, you’re doing pretty well. You have more hair than me. Thank you.
Sean:
Well, a lot more gray hair too.
Jesse:
That’s right. Also true. Also true.
Sean:
So a few months back on the podcast, we did a series called Are We Doing Multisite Right? And that one seemed like it hit a felt need for a number of church leaders. It was specifically for churches that were already managing the tensions of multiple locations and wondering if they’d kind of drifted away from what they intended when they started. We’ve even given it a name. We call those churches multi-stuck. And there’s another type of multisite conversation that I have often with churches that reach out to us. Typically, things are going well at the church. They’ve got momentum, they’re growing, some of them very quickly. And they started to ask the question, should we do this? Is multisite the right next step for us? And are we actually ready for it?
So this series that we’re doing is for them. We’re calling it Are You Really Ready for Multisite? And I wanna lean in on that word really throughout the series. You know, most churches don’t go multisite just because they did a bunch of hard work at getting ready for multisite. They go multisite because they’re growing fast, and they’re trying to create more space. Or sometimes for churches, there’s just an opportunity that showed up. A building became available and the next thing you know, this church is multisite, whether they’re ready for it or not.
Jesse:
Yeah. And that’s exactly right. And we see that all the time. I think that’s what prompted us, you know, a few years ago now, Sean. It was you and me and Tony and Amy and Paul. We kind of gathered in Phoenix, and we looked at our process because what we were seeing with multisite churches was more and more churches reaching out who were multi-stuck, you know? They had launched campuses sometimes for several years and now had kind of grinded to a halt. And so really since then, we’ve been able to design a process that’s a little bit better support for multi-stuck churches. And then continued to hone in our process for churches gonna launch a second location.
But I’ve had a chance to serve both of those churches now over the years. And I’m just gonna testify to something. Okay? I’ve been in the room and I’ve watched leaders start to shed tears because they’ve just been frustrated with their model. And it kind of boils over. Or they’re frustrated with another staffer in the room. They used to be partners and now they’re not. I’ve heard plenty of leaders on the ground say, “Hey, where were you guys when we first launched?” You know, so many years ago, whatever, right? And I’ve watched a few churches now on multisite in front of them. In the room, they came to the realization that they’ve launched with the model that was producing more independent churches than it was one church in, you know, more than one location.
Sean:
Right.
Jesse:
And so here’s what I’m trying to say. It’s just a lot less pain to like get it right from the beginning than it is to course correct a few years in. It’s not impossible. It’s never hopeless. It’s just a lot less painful.
Sean:
That is right. Yeah. When we use a tool that we call the multisite readiness assessment when they’re considering whether they’re ready to go multisite. And there are 10 checkpoints as part of this readiness assessment, 10 areas where before you launch your first campus, you take an honest look and ask, are we ready here or are we not? And over the next four episodes, we’re gonna walk through all 10 together, but today we’re starting with the three that come first in those 10 checkpoints. And they come first for a reason. If you can’t get these three right, the other seven don’t really matter. We’re talking about specifically the clarity of DNA in your church, organizational buy-in, and then current growth in your church. Or to say it another way, do you actually know who you are? Is everybody actually on board for multisite? And are you even growing in the first place? Because if those three are fuzzy, you’re not ready to talk about how to launch, you’re really not even ready for the multisite conversation yet.
But before we get into that, let me stop and say thanks to our podcast sponsor, PlainJoe Studios. In our most recent Unstuck Church Report that we released, the average church was actually growing by 12% year over year. That was 16 quarters, four years in a row that we’ve seen churches respond to this survey and say we’re growing by, on average, double-digit percentages. And that means there are a lot of churches that are paying more attention than ever to their worship space. So the team at PlainJoe actually works with churches to create beautiful, engaging spaces that connect with their community. They have a team of architectural design and branding experts that can help transform worship spaces into something that’s attractive, engaging, and really becomes a hub for the community. So if that’s an area that your church could use some help, you can reach out to them today at plainjoe.net.
All right, Jesse, so let’s start with the first checkpoint. And it’s first for a reason. We call it clarity of DNA. And here’s the principle behind it. Before you expand, everybody has to be on the same page about why you exist and why you’re expanding. Not just the senior pastor, not just the staff that was in the planning meetings. And I think this one’s kind of tricky for churches because it’s easy to assume that it’s already there. We have our mission, we have our vision, we have our values. We did a retreat a few years ago. We preach about it once a year. It’s probably listed somewhere on the wall in the building somewhere. So let’s get this urgency to actually get to planning now.
But here’s why DNA comes first for us. You know, multisite’s all about replication. We say it all the time here. You replicate who you are. So if who you are is fuzzy, if your DNA is unclear here at the church that you’ve been leading in for years, then launching a second location, it doesn’t help clarify it. It just makes a blurry, fuzzy copy of it. So the question for a lot of churches is what does clarity actually look like? I think there are a couple things that we look for. First, is there real alignment on your mission, vision, values? And I don’t mean do they just exist? I mean, do your people know them? They can actually say them. They can lead from them. There’s a difference between having values listed on your website and then having values that show up in how your decisions get made.
The second, there’s a clear vision specifically for multisite. Everyone knows the why behind launching new campuses, not just that you’re doing it, but why it matters. And I think the way that churches test for this, Jesse, is a lot simpler than they think. I think that leaders just have to listen. Do you hear your mission, your vision, your values talked about by your leaders in their own words and without you prompting them and asking them what is it? And is it simple enough and memorable enough that they can actually recall those? And when your team talks about why you’re going multisite, is it all in the same language or is it five different versions depending on who you ask? Because, you know, if you ask five leaders why you’re going multisite and you get five different answers to that, you don’t have a problem of determining how to launch. You actually have a problem prior to that. It’s a DNA problem. And you just found it now, if you’ve identified it, before it costs you that campus that you’re launching somewhere in the future.
Jesse:
Yeah, that’s right. And that last sentence there might sound a little extreme, right? Like, if this is a little unclear, is it really gonna cost us this whole thing? Potentially, yeah. Because multisite is a strategy, right? It’s a direction. It’s something that you kind of do and can kind of change, but it’s a core strategy. And so it has this effect not only of like replicating who you are, but it also, to a degree, it shapes who you are. And so, you know, it’s not uncommon for us to kind of, you know, get on the ground with the church and see there might be a little bit of a gap between like the lead pastor who’s excited about it or the senior leadership team who’s excited about it and the rest of the staff. That’s not uncommon.
But let me just kind of maybe pull back the curtain a little bit more and just share some stories about why that is with some of the churches we’ve worked with and some of the implications of that. So, you know, we’re still walking through a succession moment. A lot of us are either like looking ahead to that, right in the middle of it, or we’re just on the other side of it. And so you’ve got maybe this new lead pastor who’s got this vision for expansion, and we’re gonna breathe some life into this thing again. And I listened to this Unstuck podcast, and they’re super excited, but then maybe hasn’t taken the time or even had the experience yet to really cast vision for why. ‘Cause it is a core strategy and it will. It’ll again, it’ll shape not just the direction, but even kind of the culture of your church.
The other thing we’ll run into a lot, you know, multisite as a strategy has been around for like 30 years now. It’s not new, right? It might be new to you, but it’s not new. And so it’s very possible that you might have someone on your staff, maybe even newer to your staff who came from a multisite church and maybe that multisite church wasn’t super healthy or maybe their multisite model at the church wasn’t super healthy. And so then they hear about this, you know, this new direction that you’re so excited about, and all they’re feeling is triggered. They’re kind of going back to like, ooh, I left that. I don’t wanna go back, you know?
Sean:
Yes.
Jesse:
And maybe the last thing, I just wanna say this out loud too, and this last thing, we’re still living through, again, a moment in our culture and country where mistrust of institutions is at an all-time high. And so when they hear a lot, a lot of people when they hear that, hey, we’re thinking about going multisite, their first question is why?
Sean:
Right.
Jesse:
And then their answer to that question is, are we just trying to be a megachurch? Are we just trying to chase numbers? Does the lead pastor have a huge ego, and that’s why he needs to be on the screen in four locations, right? And so, okay, so for all of those reasons, it is critical that you get clear on your DNA first before you consider this as a strategy. And the reason that’s the case is it’ll help your people fit the strategy into the church identity rather than the other way around.
So for example, right? Let’s say you have a heart for, you know, reaching people outside of the church. Okay. Is that articulated in a clear enough way where then you can kind of connect the dots between that heartbeat and a multisite strategy? How will this strategy help us be a church that’s like this? Developing leaders, going into the world and making disciples, loving your neighbor. There’s a ton of super clear connections between multisite as a proposed strategy and the values that drive your church. But those values have to be articulated clearly enough so that people can make the connection.
Sean:
Yeah. So, you know, let’s say you’re a leader that’s listening to this and you’re not actually sure where you stand right now. You think your DNA is clear, but you’re not certain. What do you do then? So here’s what I think the next step is. And it’s not really complicated, but it does take some humility. You have to have an honest conversation with your leadership team and your key volunteers. Who carries your DNA into that new building? It’s not just your staff. It’s your leaders and your volunteers. They are the primary carriers of who you are. They’re the ones who will embody your culture in a room that you’re not gonna stand in. So if they can’t articulate your DNA, if they can’t tell you why you exist and why you’re expanding in their own words, that’s not a knock on them. That’s your signal that there’s work to do to clarify it for them because whatever they can’t carry, they can’t replicate for you.
So go have the conversation. You know, ask your leaders and your key volunteers, why do we exist? Where are we headed as a church? And why are we even considering multisite? And then listen to whether the answers line up or whether it sounds like you’re hearing from five different churches. And if it turns out that your DNA isn’t clear, that’s actually okay. It’s better to find out now. But don’t try to bring clarity on your own. You know, schedule some time with your leadership team and work on it. And bring in an outside voice to help. You know, this is foundational stuff, and it’s genuinely hard to see your own DNA clearly from the inside.
So get help clarifying these foundational questions before you move forward, not after you’ve already signed a lease on a building. Because, you know, clarity here, you know, for church leaders, this is not just checking a box. It is the very thing that every other checkpoint that we’re gonna talk about gets built on.
Jesse:
And if that sounds terrifying, if doing that sounds terrifying, it’s all the more reason for you to do it. It’s kind of like stepping on a scale after you haven’t stepped on one for a while. You know? And you’ve kind of been, just eating and drinking whatever you want. Right? We can live, we know this from our own personal experience. We can live like ignorance is bliss. But I think when you, when you deliberately stay in the dark, it’s just a great way to bonk your head.
A ton has been written about how you do that and what should come out of that and how many words and how many statements and is it memorable and blah, blah, blah. And so if you approach this task with a little bit of skepticism or even, let’s say, you know, cynicism, I get it. We’ve all lived through the staff retreat and the paper charts and then they get rolled up and then we don’t ever see them. Here’s a few things that have worked for me on teams that I’ve led. We’re actually seeing our people not just say it, but embody it.
Five things super fast here. First is this: keep your list relatively short. Five to seven, I think is probably the sweet spot. You can go less than that. You can’t go much more. That’s first. Second is this. Make your list, make each of those items of your articulated DNA the right mix of present and future, of who we are and who we are at our best of authentic, but also aspirational, right? You know, someone inevitably, every single time when you go to do this as a team, well, is this who we actually are? Is this who we’re trying to be? The answer is yes to both of this. Okay? Hold those in really good tension secondly.
Third, words matter. The reason words matter is when you read those statements after it’s all said and done, they should inspire the right kind of pride in you. Like as the leader. Like when you read them, you should go, yes. Yeah. That’s exactly who we wanna be. Right? So words do matter. Take the time to pick the right words third. Fourth is this. As best as you possibly can, make your statements behavioral and concrete. Here’s an example. Maybe you’ve got something like, “At our church, we love lost people.” You could say it in that way, or something a little bit more behavioral and concrete might be something like, “At our church, we provide ways for people outside of the church to belong before they believe.” Right?
Sean:
I like that.
Jesse:
Like I can, I can point to like environments or strategies or ways in which we can do that. It’s behavioral and concrete, number four. And then here’s five of five. And it’s by far the most important. Okay? It is critical for you to find ways to embed your articulated DNA into your systems. It is. Once you have something that’s good, are you ever training to these things in that system? Maybe you have a performance management system or an annual review system. Do you kind of evaluate people along these things? Do you reward them according to these things? How about your hiring systems? Does this DNA appear in your job descriptions? Or how about in your interview questions? On the weekends, host sermon content, in your facility and decor, right? The more systems that you embed these values in, the more they will become true for your staff and culture over time.
Sean:
That’s great advice. I love that. Jesse, let’s move to checkpoint two. And this one obviously builds right on the first. This is organizational buy-in. And the principle here, it’s pretty straightforward. Full support is necessary to move the church’s reach beyond its immediate community. You cannot drag an organization into multisite. You have to bring it with you. And notice specifically the word full, because here’s where some churches get into trouble.
Buy-in at the top is not the same thing as buy-in throughout the organization. As a senior leader, you most likely get it, right? And you’re fired up about it. Maybe a couple of staff members who’ve been in the room, they’re fired up too. And because you’ve already spent so much time thinking and praying about it, you know, we make the mistake of assuming that the whole church is gonna be on board quickly. And a lot of the time it’s not. And you find out it’s not at the worst possible time, usually right when you need people to start giving and serving as you launch this new location.
Jesse:
Yes.
Sean:
So what are you actually looking for? Two things here, I think. First, leadership unity. And by leadership, I mean the whole leadership structure, your executive team, your staff, and your board, all in agreement around the same why. Second thing is congregational support. Your attendees are with you. They get it. They’re excited, and they’re ready to sign up and help. And that’s really how you observe this one. You listen, and you watch what people actually do. Listen to your leadership. Is everyone genuinely excited and rallied around the same why? Or are some of them just being polite to you?
Listen to your volunteers. Why are they excited about multisite? Do they talk about it like they’re part of the we? Or is this like something the staff is doing to them? And then, um, two questions that become two of your best indicators, I think. Are they signing up? And are they giving? Because they vote with their time and with their wallets. You can have all the verbal support in the world, but if nobody’s stepping up for the launch team and giving isn’t moving, you don’t have buy-in. You might have some permission from them, but you don’t really have buy-in. And those are not the same thing.
Jesse:
Right.
Sean:
So one more piece worth naming here, you need a strong launch team and core team because the leadership bench is going to get drained. Both staff and volunteers. When you send people to launch a new location, you’re pulling them out of your existing location. So buy-in isn’t just, do people like the idea? It’s, do we have enough committed people that we can send some and still be healthy here?
Jesse:
Yeah. Our church, you know, we became a multisite church in 2010, okay? So like 16 years ago now. And I was the worship pastor at the time, right? I think Sean, you and I have that in common. We do. In our story, right? But you’re talented. Mine was more of like a next man up scenario, is what mine was. Okay. But before we decided, okay, before we decided on going the multisite route, we were firmly in the, like, just build it bigger camp. Our church was growing quickly. We had just built this big, beautiful new building in 2005, but we’re already kind of exploring capacity things.
And so 2008 happened, and in our part of the country, we experienced like two things within three weeks of each other. The first was an EF5 tornado, that ripped right through a community just 25 minutes down the road. And then three weeks later, we had a 500-year flood that just devastated everybody.
Sean:
Wow.
Jesse:
And so, you know, we snap right into, you know, helping and traveling to different communities and helping, you know, rebuild and clean up and all these things. And it really shifted our perspective, okay? And it even changed, like, our future thinking about our church, right? ‘Cause sinking several million more dollars into a location while people didn’t have homes – just didn’t pass the eyeball test, you know?
Sean:
Right.
Jesse:
And then it also opened up our eyes to, like, a really a deeper, but very true spiritual reality, because for many of them, they didn’t have church homes either. And so we bought into this multisite strategy because we became aware of a spiritual need. Iowa is dotted. A lot of states are dotted with towns, communities, neighborhoods that just plain do not have a church where, how we say it no matter who you are, no matter where you’ve been, no matter what you’ve done, no matter what’s been done to you, God loves you. And you can just kind of crash land and look for him, you know? And it took two natural disasters for us to kind of really see that on a larger scale. But I would still say the mission, that mission is no less clear for any church anywhere.
Okay, so the question still remains. That’s a long story. But the question is, once we caught that vision, which is how we caught it, how did we grow buy-in? And three things, okay? First, we hired someone from the outside to help. And we got staff elders and key leaders into the room. The experience of having someone from the outside who had done it before, encouraged you, walked you through a process, that is so catalytic. It just is. It just is. It’s amazing. A good process and a good consultant will drive alignment and buy-in exponentially fast. It just will. Okay, first.
Second is this, what we did is we grew up buy-in by, you know, just traveling to multisite churches and experiencing it firsthand. You know, there’s a bunch of skepticisms and a bunch of fears and concerns and misconceptions that very quickly get answered when you see it for yourself. You catch the vision. It’s like going on a missions trip for the first time. You know, you catch the vision, and you become a fan and an evangelist for it once you’ve experienced it, number two. And the final one is this: as a result of that process, we developed a strategic plan and a communications plan around it. And we started having teams working on it. And we knew in advance how and when we were gonna talk about it. And just having that plan and a cadence of accountability drove buy-in along the way.
Sean:
That’s smart. I wanna talk about a couple practical things here, Jesse. You know, if you’re, if you’re a church that’s trying to build real buy-in or just assess whether you have it right now, the question is where do you start? And I think it starts with a well thought through, you just mentioned it, communication plan. You know, start by asking two questions before you say anything to anyone. Question one, who will this change affect? And question two, what questions will they have? Because buy-in shouldn’t just be a stage announcement, right? It’s the right information, reaching the right people in the right order, answering the questions they’re actually going to ask. And when you skip that, you can’t expect to get buy-in. So once you know who’s affected and what they’ll be wondering about, then you cascade the communication throughout the organization.
And the order you communicate in matters. You start with your board, then your senior leadership team, then your staff leaders, then your volunteer leaders, and then your volunteers. And then of course, your members and regular attenders. Not everyone needs the same amount of information to fully buy into this. Your board and your senior team need the deep version, the strategy, the cost, the risk that’s involved and the why. Your volunteer leaders need enough to lead their people through it with confidence. And your congregation needs the clear, compelling version, including what’s happening, why does it matter to us, and how they get to be a part of it. And when you do that, when you have the right people hearing the right thing at the right time in that order, that respects everyone’s role. And you can really build meaningful buy-in. If you get this wrong and your most influential people hear about major change of direction of the church secondhand, nothing erodes trust and buy-in faster than a key leader finding out something big from someone who should have found out after them.
Jesse:
Yeah. I think that’s true. And if I could just take a quick moment to talk to like lead pastors. So sometimes we fall prey to this myth that, you know, if we just kind of get up from the stage and say it, and we say it really, really well, and we say it in a way that’s connected to God’s word, and we say it in a way that’s really inspiring, it’s just gonna happen. And there’s a lot magically that is kinda like that. I mean I’ve witnessed that. I’ve even kind of done that a few times myself. This thing that we’re talking about, a multisite strategy and direction, it’s too big for you to just kind of get up there, grip it and rip it. It just is. And the worst thing that you could possibly do is get up there and start talking about it and get a bunch of excitement around it and then not have a really clear plan for how you’re gonna bring that into existence. So just a quick word of caution there if you’re starting to get maybe a little over your skis.
Sean:
All right. So let’s finish up with checkpoint three. And this is just as important as the first two. It’s current growth. And here’s the principle. Multisite is not a growth strategy. It’s an evangelism strategy to extend the impact of an already effective church. So let me say that another way because this is a misunderstanding I think that trips up some churches. Multisite doesn’t create growth. It multiplies what you’ve already got. So if you’re plateaued or declining and you’re looking at multisite as the thing that’s gonna jumpstart momentum for you, that won’t work. You don’t launch a campus to start growing. You launch a campus because you’re already growing, and you’ve run out of room to keep doing it where you are.
Remember what I said at the very top of the episode: the number one reason campus launches fail is that churches launch campuses too fast and too small. And this is the checkpoint where too small kind of gets exposed for churches. A church that isn’t growing doesn’t have the people, the momentum or the margin to send a launch team and to stay healthy at a new location. So what we’re actually looking for here are two specific pieces of evidence.
First, real growth at your existing site. The church is clearly growing, not just holding steady right now. And then the second is your current capacities are approaching their limits in terms of seats, parking, kids’ ministry space. That sounds like a problem. And in the readiness conversation, it’s actually evidence. It means growth has nowhere left to go in your current building, which is exactly the momentum that you need when you’re going multisite and when multisite starts to make sense. So the way that we observe this is through what we call your vital signs, your actual growth percentage and how well you’re optimizing your space, the space that you’ve already got, which is a question that a lot of churches haven’t really spent time finding answers to. They might assume that they’re out of room long before they actually are.
Jesse:
That’s exactly right. And, you know, so, I’m leading a multisite church in the middle of the country, right? In Iowa. We have three million people in our whole state, right? And so what I’m saying that because is there a degree of relativity to how big do you have to be before you launch? There absolutely is. The principles, whether you’re in a large metro area considering this, or more of like a, you I think you can call it rural or just a smaller metro, maybe you’re in a regional kind of community that’s drawing from, you know, smaller communities on the outside. The principles are still the same. You need to be large enough to be able to support the birth and the growth of that next site. And it’s something that we at the Unstuck Group, I think, recognize and are able to kind of contextualize pretty well.
Sean:
Absolutely. All right. So practically on this checkpoint, how do you actually assess whether your growth says that you’re ready? There are three things specifically that we’d encourage a church to look at. One, know your growth rate and be honest about it. Honestly, you need to be growing 5% or more year over year. Ideally, 10% is great, too. I gently push you here. Pull the actual numbers. Don’t go off of a feeling that things are busy right now.
Jesse:
Yes.
Sean:
You know, but so many churches have inadequate parking that we can drive by or we can walk out and look at, well, the parking lot’s full, but that doesn’t actually mean that our space is full. Two, maximize the space you’re already in before you ever talk about a new location. And there’s an unexpected way that this helps you prepare for multisite. Replicating services is one of the best ways to practice multiplying before you go multisite. You’re rehearsing the muscle. You’re learning whether you can recruit and build teams for more than two services. You’ll have to develop a deep enough leadership bench to multiply leaders across three or sometimes more options, not just across a couple of services on Sunday.
And then the third thing, project where your current capacities will actually hit their limits. I think, Jesse, this is one that very few churches have done. And I think what it’s one of the most important, if your current growth trends hold, when do you run out of auditorium seats? When does the parking lot cap you? When does your kids’ ministry hit the wall? Pull the real dates on it. And here’s why that matters. A healthy multisite launch, it’s gonna take you 18 to 24 months to prepare. So if you wait until you’re actually out of room to start planning, you’re already 18 to 24 months too late. You’ll be forced to launch too fast, and we’re right back to that number one reason that launches fail. So project those things now, not because you’re launching tomorrow, but more so that you don’t have to. So that when the day comes that you’re genuinely out of room, you’ve already done the work and you can launch from place of readiness instead of panic.
Jesse:
Yeah. And so that’s the right thing to do, right? But let’s just say the quiet part out loud right now. It’s very likely that you probably did wait too long.
Sean:
Yes. Yep.
Jesse:
And you hear what Sean just said, and this only adds to your anxiety, right?
Sean:
Of course.
Jesse:
But I think that’s where multisite as a strategy has still a very real advantage over like trying to build new or even building an addition because it’s possible that you can find something already built that’s workable, that you can get into relatively quickly, that would allow you to relieve some of these growth pressures that you’re experiencing even if you’ve waited too long. Maybe you have to renovate it or renovate it as you grow, but it’s often still a superior choice given like the cost and time of brand new construction. And, you know, because the on-ramp is usually a little shorter to that destination, there’s, there’s frequent spots of momentum along the way. You know, like, hey, we may not be in our building yet, but come to this information meeting. Or, hey, look who we hired or here’s the next preview night or come to this training, you know? That being said, okay, that being said, just three cautions before, you know, you kind of sprint down this multisite path.
First is this. As you’re thinking about this, please be serious around your brand experience and brand consistency. Okay? Here’s what I hear all the time. Hey, we can just go to some abandoned bowling alley. And we can get in there super quick and super cheap and all the people will go there and love it, you know? The question really is, will it allow you to provide the same essential experience as your original location? And now before you throw up your hands and go like, well, no, obviously not. It’s way too high of a bar. Multisite, again, it replicates who you are, and it needs to. And so your facility is a big part of that, whether you like it or not. There’s a real connection between what you provide in your worship experience, your guest experience, your kids’ experience, and all those environments those experiences are in. And then your church identity. There’s a connection between those two. And I’m not saying that the multisite location has to be like a carbon copy of your original, but what I am saying is you need to define the essentials of your brand experience. And then you need to leverage those as you think about selecting your next location. It’s gotta feel like your church when someone walks in.
Sean:
Yes.
Jesse:
And then it also has to function in the ways that your brand of ministry needs to function. Okay? This is not a satellite, and you are not the mothership. You know, this is. Those are bad multisite words, right? This is another location of your church that you would attend if you lived in that area, you know? And the real test of whether or not you did this successfully is exactly that. The right people will volunteer to go. They won’t need to be sold. Okay? That’s the first caution.
Second caution is this: be just as serious in your brand standards when it comes to your launch team. Apply those same standards, not just to the facility, but to the people you’re sending. We dive into this at greater lengths when we’re on the ground with churches, but just like you can kind of trick yourself into thinking that, you know, you can kind of fudge in your facility. You can also mistakenly think that you can kind of fudge on your leaders. So you need to budget time to identify and then build up a really solid core team. These are people who don’t just attend your church regularly, but they invite your friends. They’re people who don’t just serve regularly, but they lead teams. These are people who aren’t just fans of your church, but they’re owners of ministry. They’re people who, like you would say are great billboards for your church. And a lot of times I think when you take this part seriously, what you’ll discover is that you’ve actually got a lot more work to do than you may originally have thought, right? Like, because it’s great that someone has the right zip code, but do they have the right DNA? You know? That’s the second.
Here’s the last one, last caution. Get real about like how many people you’ll actually need to launch the next location. This is one of those things that I think when we start doing the numbers in the room, I see a lot of like eyes get wider, like, oh my gosh, r- really? That’s how many people we need? You know? And then they start thinking appropriately, well, what kind of impact is that gonna have on our sending location? Right? And we can, again, we can help you identify that number because there is a degree of relativity to it, but, you know, if you’re larger in a metropolitan area that’s higher, if you’re in a smaller metro area, it’s a little bit smaller. Generally speaking, generally speaking, your original sending campus needs to be large enough to not just survive, but to thrive. Like when you send the launch team away, this should create needed capacity for the next kinda tier of leader to step up and step in. And then your launch team, of course, needs to be large enough to sustainably support those core ministries of yours without burning everyone else out.
Sean:
That is so important, Jesse, for church leaders to hear. I mean, I’ve been with enough churches to know as they’re considering multisite. These are the things for the multi-stuck churches they wish they would’ve sorted through before they ever went multisite. So I really hope church leaders that are thinking about it right now are leaning in and listening intently to that. Okay. So we covered the three checkpoints. The first three for today specifically: clarity of DNA, organizational buy-in, and current growth. And if there’s a theme between all three, it’s that every one of them is about your church today. Not your church after you launch. Going multisite won’t fix any of these issues. It just multiplies them in whatever state they’re already in. So before I give you the last word, Jesse, if a leader can only walk away with maybe just one thing from today’s conversation, what would you hope it is?
Jesse:
You know, the reason that I got invited to be on our Unstuck team was that our church, Praire Lakes, we were an Unstuck client church. You know, we had become a multisite church in 2010, but in 2015, we had gotten ourselves pretty stuck. We had four locations. And as crazy as it might sound, we were seeing fewer people come. We were seeing fewer people come to Christ, fewer baptized. But then also like this weird mix of like all of us felt burnt out. We were like working super hard and not seeing fruit, you know? So enter the Unstuck Group. They really helped us diagnose that. They helped us see that we had expanded at the expense of some of our development, you know, which is what a lot of multi-stuck churches do. We had grew in a way that threatened our health rather than supported by it. And so they helped us put some language to that and have hard conversations around it. But the right ones. And then even reinvest in some areas that we had neglected. I mean there’s things from that 2015 engagement that we’re still doing today.
And then, you know, what we did is we joined a multisite cohort with the Unstuck Group that met in Tony Morgan’s basement. And then we hired the Unstuck Group to come out and do some staffing and structure. And then we hired them to do some Unstuck team health initiatives. And then along the way, Amy Anderson took pity on me and asked if I wanted to join the team. I know it’s supposed to be one thing, and I told you a story. Here’s why. One of the things I’ve been so very grateful for at our church and that was modeled for me was that asking for outside help was not only a wise thing to do. At times, it was like the only thing, you know? I had a senior and executive pastor, John Fuller and Chris Rygh still on our staff today, who modeled that kind of humility to me and our team. And they invited the Unstuck Group and others over the years in. And they gave me and other leaders a seat at the table. And then they took seriously the recommendations made, you know?
And so here’s, here’s my last word. If you are listening to this episode and you’re feeling like you should probably get on a call with Sean to talk more about the Unstuck Group and what we might be able to provide for your church, especially in this area of multisite, if you’re kind of feeling like it’s a good idea, but you’re stuck either behind fear because what you’re afraid of is what it might reveal, you know? Or maybe you’re stuck behind some pride because of what you might have to admit or undo.
If that’s you, okay? Let me just kind of humbly admonish you. Get over it. Get over it. Get over yourself, okay? And listen to me. Smile on my face. Join the club of the rest of us who learn the value of admitting that we did not have it all figured out and that we don’t have it all together and that we could really, really use some help. And if you do that, okay, you will tap into a world not of disconnected experts, but you’re gonna tap into a team of seasoned practitioners who just love the local church because all of us are in it. I’m in it. And we’ve made all the mistakes that we’re telling you not to make. We’ve paid the dumb tax. We have. And our sole interest is just seeing your church become the kind of church that you know in your heart God can make it into being.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s really encouraging, Jesse. And here’s why I wanted to start with these first three today. You know, none of them requires you to launch anything to start working on them. You can start on these today. Get your DNA clear, build buy-in, pay attention to your growth. That’s not pre-multisite work necessarily. It’s just healthy church work. The multisite readiness is kind of the bonus on that. So today was the checkpoints one through three, essentially the foundation – the are we even ready to have this conversation question. Next week, we’re gonna shift from the church to the team. We’re digging into a few more checkpoints, staff leadership capacity, staff health, and your volunteer bench, because you can have crystal clear DNA, you can have total buy-in, you can have great growth, and still not have the leaders to pull this off. You know, multisite doesn’t just stretch your building. It stretches your bench. So next week we’ll help you take a honest look at whether you have the team actually ready to carry this forward.
And, you know, if this episode has touched on something for you’ve been sensing and there’s more readiness work to do before you launch, that’s exactly the work that we do with churches every single week. We walk churches through our multisite launch process, helping them assess their readiness across all 10 of these checkpoints, clarifying their model, and building a clear phase plan to launch your first campus with confidence. The goal is just simply that your first launch is healthy, sustainable, and it actually reaches the people that you’re trying to reach from day one. So if you’d like to start a conversation with us, you can head over to the unstuckgroup.com/multisite.
And one last thing before we go, if this podcast has been helpful to you, would you do us a quick favor? Leave us a review on whatever platform you’re listening on right now. It takes about 30 seconds, and it genuinely helps more church leaders find these conversations. Jesse, thanks for being here and thanks for sharing Prairie Lake’s story. And we’ll see the rest of you listeners, next week.
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