This Isn’t Working Anymore (Part 3)
For many years, one of the main reasons for stuckness in the Church was that churches lacked discipleship steps. Instead, they just had a lot of programs for church people to engage in.
Now, most churches have done the work of designing next steps for people. They’ve created a pathway instead of a program calendar.
So, why is it still not working?
In this episode, Tiffany and I break down the most quietly misunderstood thing in church ministry: the Spiritual Engagement Journey.
- Common gaps in the Spiritual Engagement Journey
- Why outcomes matter more than participation
- How to accurately measure spiritual catalysts
Churches are still too focused on participation over outcomes. [episode 449] #unstuckchurch Share on X When we only measure activity and attendance, we unintentionally reinforce whatever draws the biggest crowd—not necessarily what produces the most transformation. [episode 449] #unstuckchurch Share on X As you’re starting, try not to over-engineer the journey; keep it simple enough that teams will actually see it, use it and implement it. [episode 449] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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Transcript
Sean:
Before we start this week’s episode, I wanna stop and say thanks to our podcast sponsor Planning Center. If you’re still organizing things at your church through a bunch of spreadsheets, maybe group texts, sometimes you just say, well, just email Tom, Planning Center was actually built just for you. It’s an all-in-one church management platform that handles volunteer scheduling, guest tracking, check-ins, event signups, and online giving. So instead of chasing down information across six different platforms, it’s just there in one place so you have less administrative chaos, more time for actual work in the ministry. Check it out and get started for free at planningcenter.com.
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, your host, joined by my teammate Tiffany Deluccia. Today is the last episode of our series. This Isn’t Working Anymore. And just as a quick recap, back in episode 447, we talked about one of the first upgrades leaders have to make right now, recognizing that what people really need is not an aspirational vision, but rather clear direction. And that looks different for different churches, but what’s the same is the need for clarifying direction in a way that really activates your team. We talked about the ways that the Unstuck Process has evolved to help churches do that better. And then in episode 448, we dug into some outdated ways of thinking about multi-site strategy and leadership and the ways that we’ve adjusted how we’re coaching churches over the last few years.
Tiffany:
Okay. So we’ve spent two episodes talking about direction over vision and rethinking multisite. Now we’re gonna land the plan on what might be the most quietly misunderstood thing in church ministry. The spiritual engagement journey, specifically how to stop mistaking activity for actual engagement. Which, honestly is a trap that’s a lot easier to fall into than most leaders wanna admit.
Sean:
Absolutely.
Tiffany:
A lot of churches feel like they’ve already done the hard work here. They’ve streamlined, they’ve got the discipleship pathway, and then they ditched the program model. They went simple. You know, the whole simple church model, I think really took off. But something still not clicking. And that’s what we wanna talk about today.
Sean:
Before we go there, let me talk a little bit about our journey when talking with churches about their discipleship pathway. When our founder, Tony Morgan, began the Unstuck Group, you know, one of the big reasons, for stuckness in the church, the big C Church, was that churches didn’t have discipleship steps. Instead, they just had a lot of activities for church people to engage in. And his passion back then really was helping churches move from programs to a discipleship pathway from activity to specific next steps that people needed to take. Well, most churches have done that work of designing next steps for people. They’ve created a pathway, and those steps are commonly what we refer to as, spiritual catalysts.
You know, it’s coming to the weekend service. We still think attending on the weekend, being there on Sunday or for some churches Saturday is an important part of our discipleship journey. Right? The gathering of the believers, getting connected with others around the Bible in smaller groups, and then also using their gifts to be a part of a serving team, or volunteering, serving in their church. And then I would add to that, taking a step to become more generous in their life. With their finances and how they contribute to ministry. So when people take those next steps, it’s a pathway. Those are the activities that help us grow as followers of Jesus. Once those got defined, you know, churches put slogans on them.
Tiffany:
Churches love slogans.
Sean:
That’s right. At one church, I remember, they called it kind of the big three. Attend, get in a group and serve, you know, assuming generosity would actually just be happening if they did those steps. a church that I was at, we call it, we called it, celebrate, connect, contribute. That was clarity around what are the activities that if I’m participating in those, they help me better follow Jesus and they grow my, grow me in my spiritual formation. And, you know, these phrases can be clarifying. They make good sermon series titles. They’re memorable, they’re portable.
Tiffany:
They’re simple.
Sean:
That’s right. But back to your question of like, what’s still not clicking? a few thoughts there and here’s what we’ve seen. First of all, those are all pretty big steps, right? Especially for new people at the church, you know, and we’ve talked about that quite a bit on the podcast in the past year. So most churches are missing a few steps in their discipleship pathway. Second, I think we can mistake, we have a path for we are actually seeing transformation. So there’s a bit of a measurement problem there.
You know, now again, many churches do measure their success in areas of weekend attendance, group serving, generosity, at least churches in our tribe, our Unstuck tribe. That’s, those are many of the things that we track in our Vital Signs assessment with churches. But it still surprises me how many churches don’t track these areas. Small churches, big churches and everything in between. They track attendance and financials, but almost nothing else. Tiffany, the church that I grew up in, we had a board that, was at the back of our sanctuary and there were two numbers on it, every single week, last week’s attendance and last week’s giving.
Tiffany:
That’s amazing.
Sean:
It was in the sanctuary. That was our scoreboard. Now we didn’t have anything to compare that to, so whatever numbers we looked at were just reality, but we didn’t know if those were healthy or not. But that was there, you know. But even when churches do track these metrics, is it enough when we’re trying to assess, are people really being discipled? Are they looking more like Jesus? So we’ve updated our discipleship conversations from creating a path to actually talking about those spiritual catalysts, the ministry strategies tied to those catalysts, and then using measurements to assess if those strategies are producing the outcomes that we’re looking for. You know, we’re trying to get the focus on outcomes rather than just defining steps.
Tiffany:
And Sean, when we say spiritual engagement journey, what does that actually mean? Where are churches typically dropping the ball along that journey?
Sean:
Yeah, so the spiritual engagement journey for us is actually the journey from what we would call being not connected to the church or faith, you know, outside of the church and faith, to, on the other end of the spectrum, being a fully devoted follower of Jesus. And we’ve kind of categorized this into five specific areas. First of all, the not interested, these are people who are outside the church and faith right now. Spiritual conversations are not on their radar. Then we have the spiritually curious, something piques their curiosity, and they’re interested in conversations about faith. For those people, and I know there could seem like there’s a big gap here, but of course, hopefully many of those people connect with our churches and they take a step and eventually they become a new believer. So they cross that line of faith, and after they cross that line of faith, we want to continue to grow.
And then we would, they would move into a category, a broad category that we’d call being discipled. And this is where many people who are taking steps on that discipleship journey are at within our churches. And then the other end of the spectrum, we call a disciple maker, but essentially, you know, we’re thinking somebody who’s continuing to grow as a disciple of Jesus, and then they’re bringing others along with them. So it begins with people who are not interested in faith. Some of them become spiritually curious about the church in Jesus. Some of them put their faith in Jesus and become a new believer, and then they begin the process of being discipled and becoming a disciple maker. Every person is somewhere on that journey. So we use it as a backdrop for our conversations of reaching people and talking about their process of spiritual formation.
As far as gaps that we see, a lot of churches are very focused on big steps, you know, like I mentioned earlier. And they’re missing the smaller steps. And honestly, we, here at Unstuck, we missed talking with churches about those smaller steps until we updated our process. This need was really revealed, I think over the past five or six years as kind of we came through the pandemic and culture shifted. Time is by far the biggest commodity for people. You know, post-pandemic, people are much more guarded with their time. Big long commitments are not what people are drawn to right now. So that’s one headline gap for us. The second is that churches are still too focused on participation over outcomes. They’ve defined the big steps they want people to take, but they lack the discipline to design strategies to compel people to take those steps. So just because a pathway is named doesn’t mean a church isn’t still over programmed with lots of other events. And that those events often lack clear purpose.
Tiffany:
Yeah. When I think about, reducing it down to just three big buckets like gather, go, grow as the example you gave earlier. You can plug a lot of programs and say they fit in fit into one of those three categories.
Sean:
And all ministry is good ministry, right? So it doesn’t help us really prioritize; it’s hard to say no to something that we could say, well, that’s going to create a good outcome for someone, right? In order to say yes to the things that are going to create great outcomes for most or all people. Does that make sense?
Tiffany:
Yeah, for sure. So generally speaking, you’re saying churches are measuring attendance at the thing, and they may have simplified the categories of things. But they’re still just measuring attendance at the thing, not the outcomes.
Sean:
Right. Yeah.
Tiffany:
And if we’re being honest, that’s a pretty easy way to feel like you’re winning without actually knowing if anything is changing.
Sean:
Exactly. Exactly. They celebrate that hundreds of people came to an event instead of tying it to outcomes, like the steps that we want people to be taking. And everything that’s on the church calendar outside of the 52 weekend events we run every year should have a stated purpose. And I would go so far as to say that sometimes these events or ministry strategies actually work against what we’re trying to accomplish. For example, and it’s an older example, but just listen for the intent behind this, ’cause I think this is actually maybe a little exaggerated, which will help us.
But let me use the strategy of Sunday School. There’s still a number of churches that do Sunday school, and I’ve seen churches that have Sunday school between their two Sunday services. I worked with one towards the end of 2025 that had this. And because of this, most participants in Sunday school never actually serve on Sunday morning. They come to a weekend service, and then they go on Sunday to Sunday school, and then after those two and a half hours at church, of course they had home, right? They miss the pathway step of serving and using their spiritual gifts, for the biggest reach strategy a church has for reaching new people. That’s the weekend service.
I worked with one church in the past year that they had challenges around parking, significant parking challenges and making room for people at optimal hours. Well, they have this model of Sunday school between their two Sunday services, and it’s stalling their opportunity to reach new people because it’s a hard shift to make and lead through that; they are in a maintenance phase of the church life cycle. And in that phase, those churches are just trying to keep people happy right now. So, last thing I’d say is, another gap, which is getting less common is an unbalanced focus on discipling people. They’re heavily invested in programs and events that disciple people, to the neglect of some of the strategies that actually reach new people who are right now in that not interested or spiritually curious category.
Tiffany:
So what’s the actual upgrade here? What do you think a healthier way of thinking about this and measuring it looks like for the leaders who are listening right now, can you tell ’em a little bit about how we actually changed how we’re coaching churches in this?
Sean:
Well, I think it all starts with clarity. So if you haven’t done the work of defining what your spiritual catalysts are, start there. And again, spiritual catalysts are the steps that people take that help them to grow and deepen in their faith at unstuck. There are kind of a core four that we look at that, you know, we’ve worked with thousands of ministry leaders, hundreds of churches through this. And I can confidently say that these are the ones that rise to the top. It starts with worship and teaching. That’s a spiritual catalyst for people. Connecting with others. Those relationships that we have. Serving others, you know, it’s hard to be a disciple of Jesus and not serve, and becoming generous, becoming generous with our time, our resources, and how we give to the mission of the big C Church. The mission of why we’re here.
Now, you might have more than that at your church. There might be some others that you think through, but I would say start there, and after that you need to add in other engagement steps specifically. And this is the key difference that we found, kind of post-pandemic. What’s the first step of engagement in, I would say becoming known that you want people to take or do after attending a weekend service. So if they’re, if they’re brand new to your church or they’ve been attending a couple of Sundays checking you out, what is that first small step? Very few people will go from sitting in a service to joining a small group with a bunch of people they don’t know.
Tiffany:
Or to giving money.
Sean:
Yeah, exactly.
Tiffany:
Or to signing up to serve.
Sean:
Exactly. Once you’ve clarified what those steps are now, name your primary ministry strategy that you are using to help people experience those catalysts. For example, most churches, under the catalyst of worship and teaching their weekend service is the primary strategy to introduce people to biblical teaching and worship. For the catalyst of serving others, it’s joining a ministry serve team. It’s one of the easiest first steps in serving for the first step of engagement. You know, it’s a short experience after a weekend service to help them meet others and ask a few questions and get those questions answered. So what are your primary strategies tied to each step of this journey? This will help you work to define what engagement means in the context of your local church.
The next thing I’d suggest is just to decide how you will track engagement in each of these steps. The work that you did before was answering the question, what are the steps we want people to take? Now we have to answer, how will we know they took them. And I think this part is really key because once you’ve named your spiritual catalyst and the primary strategy behind each one, you’ve basically built yourself a dashboard now. You can actually see what’s working, and then also what’s just maybe happening. You know, most churches, like we talked about, they track weekend attendance and budget, and that’s it, which is kind of like a football coach only checking the scoreboard at the end of the season, you know, and skipping the game film entirely.
Tiffany:
Right.
Sean:
That’s not gonna work. So we push churches to set goals around every step of the engagement pathway. And when they do, you know, things start to get real really fast. I think about our interview that we did with Pastor Donny Wadley a few weeks back. And he thought, at the time when we came in to work with them, that they were crushing it at baptisms. And turns out, when we actually pulled the data, they were below the 5% benchmark from our Vital Signs assessment. But here’s the thing. Once he knew that they could do something about it, and from what he shared on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, their baptisms have grown since that time by over 140% in their church.
Tiffany:
Wow.
Sean:
Just because they had eyes on this metric, they had awareness of it, and they said, you know what? We’re falling short of our goal. What do we need to change to get there? That’s what visibility does.
Tiffany:
Exactly. Yeah. Setting goals and then tracking engagement to those goals. You gotta know if your ministry strategies are working or not. That’s really the important thing.
Sean:
You’re taking all of that time, financial resources, your people, you’re aligning them to those strategies hopefully. So wouldn’t we wanna know, if all of that energy and time and resources working, is actually leading to the right results?
Tiffany:
For sure.
Sean:
And if it’s not, now we have an awareness of what we need to do to make adjustments. That’s why those metrics are so important.
Tiffany:
Okay. So let’s get practical. If a leader is listening right now and thinking we need to make some changes like this. Where do they actually start this week?
Sean:
I love this conversation because this is really what we want leaders to walk away with, right? What do we do? How do we take all of this and apply it to our church? So first of all, if you haven’t done the work of mapping your current engagement journey, just start there, confirm it with your team. What are the actual steps that people take today? Not, not what’s on paper, but what are people actually doing? There might be a difference between what you’ve documented in the past and what’s really happening in your church.
Tiffany:
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Sean:
From there, I would say identify three or four key next steps that you wanna prioritize. You know, what are the steps on your spiritual engagement journey that if they are working, if they’re healthy and if they’re thriving, they would produce the most spiritual fruit in that journey for people. And then just choose one or two indicators, those metrics or ways that you measure per step that show progress. For instance, if being a part of a serving team is one of those big steps, I would measure the percentage of adults and students who are serving. And I would also measure the volunteer-to-leader ratio. So this is one of the key metrics that we track. Looking at the number of volunteer leaders that you have compared to your overall attendance. Those are key metrics in helping us know is the serving part of our engagement journey actually helping people take steps.
And that would help me see how we’re doing and engaging, serving overall. And if we’re really being that Ephesians for church, that’s equipping the church to lead, not just attend. So getting traction on those three action steps is a great place to start. I would say as you’re starting out here, try not to over-engineer it either, you know, keep it simple enough as you’re beginning that teams will actually see it, use it, implement it. Or hire us to come in and help you. I mean, we do this with churches every single week. And so we have a process that can really expedite some of these steps for you and expedite some of those measurements. And so if time is a key factor, we can come alongside you and help you get there more quickly.
Tiffany:
I love that last point you shared too, Sean, keeping it simple enough that teams will actually use it. I’ve seen so many over-engineered strategy documents and data dashboards, and they just don’t get used. I’m a big proponent of tracking data that you can use to make decisions.
Sean:
Absolutely.
Tiffany:
And not tracking data just for the sake of tracking data. You’re not gonna do something with it. And the pace of ministry really comes into play here. If your playbook isn’t simple enough to implement quickly, you’re gonna struggle to find the time to use it.
Sean:
Right? Yep.
Tiffany:
Well, this has been an honest, challenging series for us to look at ourselves and say, we need to change our approach to better help churches. Do you have any final thoughts that you wanna wrap up the conversation with or the series as a whole?
Sean:
If you move from a long list of programs to a clear, simple path, but don’t build in a way to evaluate whether your people are actually taking steps along the path. You haven’t really changed your ministry outcomes. You haven’t really changed anything at the end of the day. When we measure only activity and attendance, we unintentionally reinforce whatever draws the biggest crowd—not necessarily what produces the most transformation. But when you take time to define your discipleship strategy, connect that to meaningful goals, and then create visibility around the results, we see this in churches. Everything starts to align. You know, your strategy, your staffing, and even your calendar start to reflect what matters most to you. And I think that’s what most leaders want. So as we wrap up the conversation, that’s the point. These upgrades that we’ve talked about aren’t about just chasing the latest trends. They are leadership decisions that build healthier, more intentional ministry systems within our churches over time.
Tiffany:
Yeah, that’s a great note to end on. And honestly, it’s a great way to close out the whole series. I think the common thread across every episode has been the same. The upgrade isn’t a new program or a trendy framework. It’s the willingness to stop and ask, is what we’re doing, actually producing what we’re hoping for? And that’s what we did in making these changes to our process. We know it’s a harder question than it sounds, but it’s always the right one. So if you’re ready to get serious about that, clarifying your discipleship outcomes, connecting your strategies to real goals, building the kind of visibility that tells you if it’s actually working, that’s exactly what we help churches do through the Unstuck Process. You can start a conversation with our team at theunstuckgroup.com. Lastly, if you’re enjoying this podcast and it’s been helpful to you, make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a future episode. You can do that at theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. And if you’re willing, leave us a review on your Apple Podcast or wherever you’re listening, so other leaders can find us.
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