5 Common Core Issues in Churches (Part 2)
Churches everywhere, no matter the size, are struggling with this: the lack of a deep leadership bench.
One of the most common pain points we see in churches is not having enough leaders in the pipeline. This puts them in a constant reactive mode, often filling positions out of desperation rather than developing leaders intentionally.
New leaders don’t identify themselves; you won’t drift into success here. You have to be intentional to take the time to work on your leadership bench. We’ll show you how.
In part two of our series, “Five Common Core Issues in Churches,” Sean and I talk about the symptoms of a shallow leadership bench, how to build out a leadership development framework and what to start (and stop) doing if this issue sounds familiar to you.
Creating these clear pathways and language for your leadership pipeline, it helps both your ministry leaders and your volunteer leaders understand how to grow and take next steps within their leadership capacity. [episode 435]… Share on X Hero-making churches celebrate leadership development as much as they celebrate attendance. [episode 435] #unstuckchurch Share on X Someone on your team might need to stop doing something else for a season so that you can find a leader to invest in this. [episode 435] #unstuckchurch Share on X A healthy system will likely produce your future staff leaders. [episode 435] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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More Episodes in this Series
The Strategy Issues – Episode 434
The Engagement & Capacity Issues – Episode 436
Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean here with Amy Anderson. And last week we started a new series of podcasts on the five common core issues that churches are facing right now. And after serving more, more than 750 churches now, Amy, we’ve noticed a pattern, no matter the size, the style or the model, most churches wrestle with a similar set of challenges. They show up in different ways, but the root issues are surprisingly common across the board.
Amy:
Yeah, they really are. And as we said last week, the good news is if the challenges are common, the solutions can be common too. So. Just to the listeners of our podcast, you are not alone if you’re resonating with these challenges, and you are not the first church to navigate these obstacles.
Sean:
Right. Before we get into today’s topic though, let’s stop and say thanks to our podcast sponsor Planning Center. Planning Center is an all-in-one church management software that’s really built to help churches simplify administration so they can actually focus more on people. You can easily track first-time guests, you can schedule volunteers, you can manage check-ins, create event signups, and even accept online giving all in one place. Planning Center really helps you, better nurture your community, reduces your stress as a leader, and then keeps everyone on your team engaged so you can learn more about Planning Center and even start for free at planningcenter.com.
So in our last episode, we tackled the first two issues, strategies to reach your mission field and also strategies for financial health. Today we’re diving into one of the, I think, most common pain points that we see in churches. Honestly, this is the issue that seems to be true, no matter the church’s size, and that’s the lack of a, what we call a deep leadership bench. So why has this surfaced as such a critical issue for churches?
Amy:
Yeah, I agree with you, Sean. Churches everywhere are struggling with this. They don’t have enough leaders in the pipeline, which puts them in kind of a constant reactive mode. And they’re often feeling, I do a lot of staffing and structure. They’re often just desperately trying to fill, positions. Like we need a warm body. Rather than having this bench that they can build intentionally, you know, of the leaders in the church.
Sean:
Yeah. Okay. Well, let’s jump right into it. So what are some of the symptoms that would tell a pastor we have a leadership bench problem?
Amy:
Well, I mean, I think if you look around and the same people are doing everything and they’re serving in multiple areas and they’ve been doing it for a long time. I think that just, you know, lets us know there aren’t a lot of new people serving at the church.
Sean:
Right.
Amy:
And then because of that, the leaders that we do have in place, volunteer leaders, they’re burning out because they’re often stretched too thin and there’s no depth in that leadership pool. And I think in other churches, just my word, I think my word of 2026 is gonna be constrained. Churches feel constrained to take on any new initiatives because there aren’t enough people and there’s not enough volunteer leaders to support them. And, you know, when that happens, Sean, I just think the end result is that growth is going to stall because you’re gonna start to hit lids, organizational lids because of this lack of a leadership bench.
In fact, I was just meeting with a ministry team and they were going through our strategic planning process and this was the conversation that was in play. They currently have 35% of their church engaged in serving where the benchmark is 50%. So they’re under that one. And their volunteer leader ratio, meaning how many leaders they have per their average weekend attendance is at 20 to one. So one volunteer leader for every 20 people that attend their church. And you might just go, wow, that’s really good. It isn’t. The benchmark is 10. We wanna have one volunteer leader for every 10 people that attend our church. And you know, this church, they have dreams of shifts they need to make in order to make room for people on the weekend service. They’re a growing church, and they are bumping up to that 80% capacity market, one of their locations. And so they had a great idea of a great solution of how to open up more seats, but that was just quickly followed with several reasons why they couldn’t do it. Partly financial, but the bigger reason was actually they don’t have the leadership bench to pull it off.
Sean:
So, Amy, what’s interesting about what you just said, I mean, you described a church that’s growing right now. And I think a lot of us would assume this is a stuck church or a declining church problem, but, we haven’t seen that to be the case. It’s actually a problem and a challenge for churches of all types, right?
Amy:
Yep. Yep.
Sean:
Why do you think, why do you think so few churches are being intentional about this right now?
Amy:
Yeah. Two big reasons come to mind, Sean. The first, I think time and pace is a big part, you know? Churches, it’s a relentless pace. And leaders, the leaders of those churches are often just caught up in the whirlwind, in this case, the whirlwind of growth, right? And so there’s just no time set aside to think strategically about solutions to it. Because of this, most churches focus on filling immediate needs, like I said, rather than building a system, a development system and culture of development so they can build that bench. So I think that’s the headline reason. Second, I think the current senior leaders, they just might not model leadership development from the top. And they often don’t hire leaders onto their team. So they hire specialists and doers and shepherds, and suddenly they’re overstaffed, but they feel completely understaffed, and the people who are on their staffs don’t know how to do leadership development. And if you’re a growing church, like the one, I worked with last week, and so many of the churches this past year, that growth causes more stress and it actually magnifies this issue.
Sean:
Amy, another reason that I’ve seen it, and this is gonna be similar to what you said, maybe just supportive of what you just said is that there just a lot of churches haven’t taken the time to do the hard work of working on the ministry rather than in it. They’re caught up in that whirlwind. And not having enough leaders has put them in this kind of indefinite survival mode right now.
Amy:
Yeah. That’s a good way to say it.
Sean:
Where they’re just trying to get through next week and just trying to get through the week after. And when you’re living that way, there are some simple things that just start to get missed. Like asking, if I had more leaders than I needed, how many leaders would I have? I think that’s a great question.
Amy:
It is.
Sean:
What short term goals could I set for myself to begin to chip away at developing that leadership bench? Maybe how can I help my current leaders apprentice and raise up other new leaders? You have to be really intentional to take the time to work on your leadership bench. And unfortunately, you know, new leaders don’t identify themselves. They don’t just step up and say, okay, hey, I’m ready to lead today. If they did, none of our churches would have issues. Right?
Amy:
And the funny thing is, they’re often waiting to be asked. We’re often waiting to be asked. And yeah, those two things in tandem, don’t create more leaders.
Sean:
That’s right. Okay. So let’s move to some of the shifts that churches need to make then. What do you think they need to do?
Amy:
Yeah, that’s a great question because no church will drift into success here. Nothing will change unless you create a plan and set aside some time to build out and work on the plan. And I actually feel like this is really doable. So if you find yourself in this situation, hopefully there’s a nugget or two in here that’ll help you begin just to get some traction on building your bench. So first step, you need to find or appoint a leader to champion this work, right? New initiatives start with having the right leader. So if you’re a large church, you should assess your leaders and determine who has a great history of raising up leaders and building teams. If you’re a smaller church, you might wanna identify a high capacity volunteer who’s had a great history of raising up leaders and building teams. Regardless, either way, you need someone who’s already demonstrated they have the capacity to be a leader of leaders and can develop them.
And just one quick caution here. I would encourage you to avoid hiring someone from the outside. Maybe they come to your church, they’re in your congregation, but they’re a secular leader because secular leaders know how to hire. They don’t always, I would not assume they know how to build out this leadership bench, which is primarily volunteers and volunteer leaders. Okay.
Sean:
Oh, that’s a good point.
Amy:
But find your leader first. Do that. Then one of their first steps is to create the leadership pipeline process for your church. This is a definition of what the leadership levels are at your church, within your volunteer roles, and what you’re going to call them consistently at your church. Many churches will define these roles by identifying the leadership level of the role and the core responsibility. So commonly I hear this. Level one is we have a volunteer. This is an individual contributor. A specialist, and their core responsibility is to do specific tasks. So things ushers, greeters, people who work at your cafe, just their singular roles. Then the next level I often hear is something they’ll call like a team leader. So again, this is still mostly an individual contribution, but they model to others how to serve in their particular role. So I often use the example, especially in first impressions, like you can have team leads, like an usher team lead who models for your ushers. This is how we usher, but they’re still ushering, right? You can do that in guest services like greeters and parking lot. So they’re a specialist. Their leadership level is a specialist with a little bit of management in there.
And then we get to the bigger dog volunteer leaders. And these are the coaches, these are people. Volunteer leaders who actually lead other people. They recruit and they build volunteer teams. They delegate tasks, solve problems, improve systems. So it’s not about what they can do anymore when they’re at this level, but what their team can do. So if we follow this, let’s just say we had a first impressions coach each weekend who connected with each of those team leaders in the first impression area. That coach is actually just kind of overseeing and helping to recruit people into those ministries. Team leaders are modeling, this is how we do it. And then we have a volunteer army who helps do that work.
And then in some cases, you can even build a volunteer director level. A director is more their leadership level is leader of leaders,. But they are a developer. An example from the church my husband and I were at for over a decade, they would have first impression directors who would lead those coaches, who would lead those team leaders? Who would lead those volunteers. So anyways, something like that. Creating these clear pathways and language for your leadership pipeline, it helps both your ministry leaders and your volunteer leaders understand how to grow and take next steps within their leadership capacity. ’cause this is where we wanna see people moving from volunteer to team leader to coach for those that have the capacity. So getting that just defined is important.
And then next, I would just ensure that there’s a clear expectation for your ministry leaders to be building out their leadership pipeline. So if you have it defined now, every ministry leader should be looking at their ministry. And like you said earlier, how many leaders do you need? Right? We should build this out. How do we move doing off of our staff team into those volunteer ranks? And I am just a firm believer that ministry leaders need to have goals every year around the number of people that are being raised up to volunteer. And volunteer leaders raised up in their ministry. So having goals and expectations in this area communicates that developing volunteers is a core value.
So those would be some of the next steps, which I think all of them are doable, but you will still need to build out how leadership development happens. I’ve been kind of talking about let’s define what the bench looks like and what the responsibilities are, and that was really more about the systems and the framework that need to be built. But in addition to that, eventually you need to define what the development piece looks like, including what the relational and spiritual formation expectations and aspects are within that development framework. But both aspects are important. And I find it easier for churches to start with the system side first and then build it out from there. I think sometimes we just try to bite off the whole thing, Sean, and then we don’t get anything done because we’re just, we’re just creating word docs with all these words that talk about all of these things, but we aren’t getting any traction. So by starting with the framework, I think you will actually get things moving forward.
Sean:
That’s good. That’s a great framework to start with. Amy, you know this, but I learned a lot personally about leadership development in ministry in my time at Community Christian Church in the Chicago area. And actually our pastor there, Dave Ferguson, he wrote a great book about the leadership development process there called Hero Maker. So if you haven’t read the Hero Maker, it’s a great leadership development resource. It’d be a good book to pick up and, and read about this. But I really got to live this out when I served at Dave’s church. And, you know, there’s some things that really stand out to me about that experience that I feel like just really work for churches when it comes to leadership development.
You know, in the book, Dave makes this really simple, but I think it’s a challenging point that the win for a leader isn’t how many people that you actually lead. It’s how many leaders you develop. And that sounds obvious until you actually stop and think about how most churches operate today, right? And hero-led cultures, everything funnels up to one or two people, the pastor, the staff, the kind of go-to volunteers. In hero-making cultures, leaders are constantly asking, who am I developing right now? Not someday, not when things slow down for us as a church. But right now, right?
Another idea from Dave that I love is starting leadership development earlier than it feels comfortable. We tend to wait until people feel ready. But leadership growth almost always happens while you are doing the work.
Amy:
Absolutely.
Sean:
Healthy churches give people small leadership wins early, and then coach them along the way. And this one hits close to home for a lot of leaders, but hero makers have to release control. For me, that’s hard. But that means letting people lead in ways that aren’t exactly how you would do it. And sometimes it means things aren’t as polished. Sometimes it means mistakes happen, but development always costs some control. And churches that won’t pay the price never build depth in their leadership development.
And then the last thing is, you know, I think hero-making churches celebrate leadership development as much as they celebrate attendance. They, you know, they tell stories about people stepping into leadership, not just seats being filled on the weekend. Because attendance, growth is exciting. Right? And it’s been momentum building. A lot of people get energy behind that, but leadership growth is actually what sustains that over time. If your church can’t grow without you as an individual doing more, it’s more likely that you’re the hero and that’s a problem for you.
Amy:
Yeah. It’s been years since I read the book, but that’s a great example of once you have your structure and your systems in place for your bench, taking this to the 201 level to really look at how does development now happen within these systems? You’ve got a lot of great outcomes you talked about there.
Sean:
Well, let’s start to talk about next steps. Amy, where does the church start? If they realize they have this problem, they wanna take some of the steps that we’ve talked about and begin to implement those, where do they begin?
Amy:
Yeah. I think you just have to start by naming it and calling it out. The senior leadership team needs to raise the issue and commit to launching a strategic initiative to build your leadership bench out if this is a key challenge at your church. And step one is identifying who is going to be the champion of this initiative, as I said. And then once we have our champion, I think step two is they just need to assess their starting point. How many volunteers do you have? What’s your percentage? red, green, or yellow? How many volunteers do you have serving in a leadership role where they’re leading other leaders? That volunteer leader ratio, that’s exactly what this church did that I just talked about. Right? They knew their starting point. 35% and 20:1.
The next thing you need to do is set your goals. So what does success look like for your church? You could actually start with the unstuck benchmarks, right? Success would mean we have 50% of our congregation serving once a month, and a leadership ratio would be, we’d have one volunteer leader for every 10. So what’s the end goal? Why are we working on this initiative? What, what do we wanna see if we do this well.
And then I would take that goal and back it up and say, what can we get done in this next year? What’s, what’s the goal for year one? Where do we wanna be this time next year for the church I worked with, their first year targets were increasing their volunteer percentage from 35% to 40%. Again, you can’t hire into this, you can’t wave a wand, you’ve gotta build system. So I thought that was a stretch, but realistic target for them. And they move their volunteer leader ratio from 20 to one, to 13 to one. That’s where they want to be at the end of this year. And if they do that, that means they’re gonna add a hundred people to their serving teams who are gonna be serving at least once a month, and they’re gonna add 55 new volunteer leaders to their team.
Sean:
That’s awesome.
Amy:
So doing this, that’s just brings clarity to the results you wanna see.
Sean:
And Amy, for churches that don’t know their metrics or those benchmarks. They can actually take our Vital Signs assessment.
Amy:
Yes.
Sean:
And find how they compare specifically at their church to those benchmarks. Just go to theunstuckgroup.com/assessments, and you’ll see our vital signs assessment there.
Amy:
Yeah. Take that assessment. Gives you benchmarks not only in those two, but about, I dunno, 15 other areas. Once you’ve done the assessment and you’ve done the goal setting, now you have to develop your strategy. And of course, this will look different for every church based on where you’re starting. But ask yourself, if this is our starting point, right? And this is the goal for this year, what are all the things we need to do that will help us get us there? Just a long list, right? That’s all the things that need to be in place. And then I just encourage you to organize that long list into what needs to happen first, second, third, that’s how you work an initiative.
So just for some examples, for some churches, you need to develop out what your leadership pipeline, what, what that’s going to look like. I talked about that earlier. What are your serving tiers? What do they mean? What’s the level of responsibility? What’s the required level of leadership? What’s gonna be your common language? And this is not rocket science. And again, you mentioned, Hero Maker, but I know Mac Lake. Does a lot of work in this space. There’s a lot of resources out there, how that can look so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
But for other churches, you might already have that. But now your focus might be that you have to cascade goals to ministry levels so that you, they’re actually starting a pipeline, right?. You’re breaking out those volunteer numbers and volunteer leaders and letting ministries know with their input, how many are you gonna be responsible for in that target for this next year?
Others, others of you, you might be ready for the development work, right? You might already have your pipeline kind of defined. You might already have your goal set, but maybe you need to get to the development work now. Like of how do we develop the leaders that are in our care? So I think those are the just easy, not easy, but clear next steps. And it’s just project management. It’s getting the initiative out there and working it. what you need to stop doing though is making excuses. Eliminate the excuses. Church life will never slow down. right. Eliminate the excuses. If you think you don’t have time to do this work, that’s actually a sign. You need more leaders pretty desperately, honestly. And I’ve worked with several of you this year. In fact, someone on your team might need to stop doing something else for a season so that you can find a leader to invest in this.
Sean:
Yeah. What do you, what do we need to stop doing question is really interesting. Amy, what, what else might churches need to stop doing in order to get it working on the leadership bench?
Amy:
Yeah. You gotta stop hiring more staff to meet present needs. Building your bench is such important work. This is a key flywheel that needs to get moving. I keep saying that, but you cannot hire your way into health in this area with a leadership bench. You need a system. And a, and long-term health. Right? A healthy system will likely produce your future staff leaders. Does that make sense? If we get the leadership bench going, then when we go to hire, we should actually be able to look to our leadership bench and go, I think we should hire Sean. I wonder if he wants to quit his job and come into ministry with us.
And, man, stop making this work up to each ministry to create. You have to break down the ministry silos and align your leadership development systems so that time, energy, and resources work together. I see it enough where we’ve got the way that we’ve organized the ministry way, whether it’s gender based or various things. We have all these ministry leaders creating their own bench, kind of cycles or their own ways to do leadership development. This needs to be one process for one church. I dunno, anything that you would add, Sean?
Sean:
You I would just add to that, you know, one of the biggest issues that I see is just a lack of clarity. Like you just mentioned. You know, leaders tend to burn out faster when they don’t know what’s expected of them, what the win is, or who’s supporting them. Ambiguity is exhausting. Right? And exhausted leaders aren’t gonna stick around very long. So clarity is really important. Maybe one of the stops for me is stop giving responsibility without authority. We ask leaders to own outcomes, but then we tend to hold onto all the decision-making power. It’s part of that, you know, not being willing to release some of the maybe quality that we expect from it. And that tension just wears people down over time. Retention of the leaders I think it starts to improve dramatically when leaders feel like they’re trusted to actually lead, not just execute tasks and do things that we’ve assigned to them, but actually lead.
I’ve also seen churches wait too long to start investing in their leaders. You know, to the point where it’s after a lot of the leaders are already fried. Healthy churches, you know, of course do the opposite of that. They schedule regular check-ins with their leaders. They have development conversations, they make sure they’re not overusing or overutilizing leaders so that they don’t burn out. And that sends a powerful message, I think to our team. It says, you are more valuable than what you produce. And I think our leaders need to hear that, the volunteer leaders in our church. One more for me, Amy. I think healthy churches celebrate leaders, too, not just results. And if leaders only hear from you when something’s wrong, they’re gonna check out. They need encouragement, recognition, and just a simple thank you. Those things go a long way in sustaining people over the long haul. So if you want to keep leaders connected, make sure you celebrate and encourage them.
Amy:
Yep.
Sean:
Amy, this has been a good conversation for me. Hopefully it’s been a great conversation for our listeners too, as they’re thinking about this really wide ranging challenge of that leadership bench in churches. So let’s wrap up for today, but any final thoughts from you before we do?
Amy:
Yeah. Just remember that developing leaders, it, it’s just part of our calling. We are meant to equip people for ministry. You know, Sean, I remember reading Design to Lead several years ago, Eric Geiger and Kevin Peck wrote this book, and in it they said something like, the church is uniquely set apart to develop and deploy leaders for the glory of God and the advancement of the gospel. I was trying to think of the word they used. Wayne Cordeiro talked about it, but it’s like, it should be the focus of the church to develop and deploy leaders, you know, with their spiritual gifts for the glory of God and the advancement of the gospel. So yeah, I believe that. I really believe that. And the greatest responsibility of a senior leader is developing the culture of the organization. And that includes this culture of leadership development. So if you don’t have an intentional plan in place to develop leaders, I just encourage you, stop talking about it and take action. And hopefully we’ve given you a few handles today to move that dial forward a little bit.
Sean:
That’s good. Yeah. And it goes back to the Ephesians four principle, right? I mean, truly, for those of us who have the privilege of being on staff in a church, it really is our job. Well, if you’re recognizing these challenges in your church and you’re just ready to do something about it, of course we’d love to help. Our team has a proven process for helping pastors lead unstuck churches that are moving towards health. You can start a conversation with us and our team today theunstuckgroup.com/start. And also make sure you subscribe to catch the next episode in our series where we’re gonna unpack the final two core issues that we commonly see in churches. You can subscribe at theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. Next week, we’re gonna talk about the common challenges of engagement and capacity. So until then, we hope you have a great week.
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