Predictable Challenges of Leading a Growing Church (Part 3)
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In this series, we’ve covered the things that can start to feel like crises related to the people side of growth, and we’ve covered the challenges you can expect related to the emotional side of growth. But there’s one more area that contains a lot of practical, preventable challenges in a growing church: the systems and structure side of growth.
To wrap up this series, we’re talking all about the logistics. The practical obstacles you start to run into as more and more people show up. The really obvious issues that have less obvious solutions.
PREVENTING BURNOUT
- Consistent tensions that emerge during sustained growth
- How to recognize and respond to growing pains
- Encouragement & next steps to consider
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome back to the Unstuck Church Podcast. My name is Sean. I’m your host. Today I am here with my friend Amy Anderson. Amy, we’re officially one week out from Christmas as this episode releases, so I’d like to play a Christmas game today to start us off. Are you okay with that?
Amy:
I am. I don’t know what you’re doing, but sure.
Sean:
No, you have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into. It’s a Christmas would you rather, so this is kind of a get to know Amy Anderson Would You Rather? But Christmas-themed. Okay. So, Amy, would you rather receive money or gifts for Christmas?
Amy:
Gifts.
Sean:
Okay. Would you rather have a hot Christmas with no snow or a snowy Christmas in Minnesota?
Amy:
Hot Christmas, no snow.
Sean:
Would you rather spend all day watching movies or sledding?
Amy:
Oh, watching movies for sure.
Sean:
Oh, right. Would you rather decorate a Christmas tree or a Christmas cookie.
Amy:
Oh, a tree. Hands down.
Sean:
Okay. Alright. Here’s a good Minnesota, would you rather for you, would you rather go ice fishing or ice skating all day?
Amy:
Oh, ish. All day?
Sean:
All day. Why not?
Amy:
Ice skating.
Sean:
Would you rather stay indoors or have an ice bath?
Amy:
Oh my gosh. I’d rather, can I stay indoors?
Sean:
Yeah, absolutely.
Amy:
Okay. You said indoors or would ice bath indoors? Yes indoors. Okay.
Sean:
Alright. And then my final question for you, would you rather have a cookie for each day of the 12 days of Christmas? Or have 12 cookies all in one day?
Amy:
Probably one cookie for 12 days.
Sean:
That is the right answer. Can you imagine 12 in all one day? I would just be sick.
Amy:
Yeah. It’s funny. I’m a Minnesotan the way I answered that because I do love living here, but I really don’t like being cold.
Sean:
Yeah. Well, that doesn’t have anything necessarily to do with being an unstuck church, but I just thought people would be interested in an Amy Anderson Would You Rather? And we’re one week from Christmas, so why not. Right? Well, we’re back this week with part three, the final episode of our series on the predictable challenges of leading a growing church. And we’ve covered the things that can start to feel like crisis related to the people side of growth. And we’ve covered the challenges that you can expect related to the emotional side of growth. So, where are we wrapping things up today, Amy?
Amy:
Yeah, I thought today we could talk about like the systems and structure side of growth, more on the logistics side of things. Those practical obstacles that teams start to run into as more and more people show up. And again, that’s really fun, but the really obvious issues don’t have obvious solutions as we get bigger and bigger as a church.
Sean:
Well, in the churches that have been participating in our leadership cohorts and with the churches that were, a lot of the churches we’re consulting with right now, we are seeing so many churches growing. It’s really been a fun season.
Amy:
So fun.
Sean:
And because of that, it’s easy for us to sit and brainstorm a list of the systems and structures challenges that they’re facing right now. So, Amy, I wonder, what was the top of your list?
Amy:
Oh, the top of my list. Super easy under this umbrella of how do we make room for more people? It always starts with questions around service times. In fact, I can tell when a church is growing because I get that email that asks like, Hey, what are the best service times, you know, for three services or four services? And this is where I go. It becomes an obvious challenge. But the solution to this is not always so obvious. Or they’ll start to think about, can we add a venue on our campus, or can we maybe take over that building that’s across the street to kind of relieve the pressure valve? So just trying to figure out how many services they need to have, when they need to have them, and dialoguing about that.
And tied in with that. Again, making room for more people. It always leaks into other like space, location and parking issues. Like you know, the church I’m thinking of right now, we have room in our auditorium for more people, but we don’t have enough parking spaces. Or we don’t have enough room, like in our kids space, meaning they’re having to cap rooms because they’re just getting too full. They’re using extra overflow, which is getting into fire code issues. So that’s kind of the top, obvious, but no obvious solution challenge. That was at the top of my list. How about you? What’s the top of your list?
Sean:
Yeah, I’ve heard that one about kids space as well, and even churches that are having to say no to families when kids are coming in on Sunday morning because their rooms are just too full.
Amy:
The worst.
Sean:
It’s a terrible feeling. One of the things that came to mind for me that I’ve heard quite a bit about is just the finances, keeping up with the vision of the church. When we’re growing, when we’re experiencing momentum, there’s a lot of vision and a lot of ideas and thoughts about what we could do in the future to further our reach and expand our ministry. But finances tend to lag behind that. And so, it’s always good, I think, to have more vision than we have a resource for. But developing a plan so that we can fully fund our strategic ministry plan is pretty important.
I’d also say kind of the systems and technology side. I love technology, and we see a lot of the churches as they grow, they start to outgrow their database a little bit, especially as churches get larger, they find some kind of gaps in those systems. And they discover there’s kind of this need to begin to track discipleship, especially as the church grows bigger. We wanna find ways to leverage technology to make a big church feel smaller. And we can do that, but we have to be able to track people and how they’re engaging with our church. So they’re questions around that, that have come to the surface.
Amy:
Yeah. I was just talking with an executive pastor, and he was saying, I know this sounds weird, but he’s like, our app is full. The website’s full. It just means like they are now kind of ceilings or caps on what they’re trying to do from a discipleship side of things and frustrated. And those aren’t always quick, easy solutions. You gotta think deeply, and you gotta work through it. So I’m hearing that too. Here’s another one. Is this whole process of engagement when you’re growing church, you know, all these new people are showing up. But the pastors I’m talking to, they’re concerned that the church just isn’t connecting with all those new people. Meaning they’re not engaging them beyond Sunday attendance. And they know long term that’s not a good thing.
And if the pastor is honest, I think they’re also concerned that the system that they have to engage people is outdated and it’s not a draw. What worked in 2005 doesn’t work anymore. I’ll give you example of one of these calls. So a church out in the Denver area, pastor Doug Damon’s church out there, I worked with them probably five or six years ago. Doug was actually a part of our team for a season, but he dropped me an email about this whole engagement topic. He was so excited. I hope this math is right. You can check me in a minute. They had like a 330% growth in people taking their engagement steps. Last year, 148 people took those steps. This year, 852 did. And that’s a huge increase. And I’ll share a little later what they did, but I know he’s not the only pastor who’s frustrated with that engagement level of new attenders in high seasons of growth.
And maybe just one more with growth, I think many pastors are feeling the pressure that ministry complexity is creating, meaning all the programming is crowding out the essential ministry of reaching and discipling people. A great example in real time, since you said we’re a week out from Christmas, are all those churches right now who are doing Christmas concerts and programs. And six months ago it probably sounded like a great idea. But now that Christmas is at our doorstep, the complexity with extra Christmas programming is zapping all the energy that needs to go into what I call the essential ministry, which is the Christmas Eve services. So if you find yourself in that season, our listeners write down your thoughts and frustrations now, so that in three to four months when someone wants to drop those programs back onto your church calendar again in mid-December, you’ll remember the toil that it took on your team. And I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times on this podcast. Nothing your teams are doing right now are bad; they’re good. All ministries good. But in a heavy growth season over programming starts to reveal the limitations of what your team can pull off. And you have to be like the parable of the shrewd manager. You have to determine what the time and resources you have, and then what’s the most important that you should engage those resources. Yep.
Sean:
That is a great reminder for pastors in this season. So those are some of the top tensions that churches are managing as they grow. And this stuff isn’t necessarily fun. It can be easy to start making decisions too quickly and just move on. So how are you coaching churches, Amy, right now, these growing churches as they solve these structure and systems problems?
Amy:
Yeah. You know, I’ll just say, but we always say you’ve got to do an assessment first. Don’t do anything knee jerk to find the solutions. We do this in all of our consulting processes. Before we plan, we always do and dive into these initiatives. We need to get our team around the table and understand our starting point. It was several years ago, Andy Stanley and his leadership podcast that he took a tour of his various locations, North Point Church in the Atlanta area, and everything was going so well. He asked the question like, do we actually know what’s in our secret sauce? Do we know why these things are happening? And so I think, part of the assessment is confirm why you’re growing, why are people showing up? Get some of your team around the table to share their perspectives. The wisdom comes from many advisors. And then confirm the true pressure points. And again, it sounds really obvious, but these discussions help planning. You get more information than just responding to we had to close our kids’ room again. It never ceases to amaze me what God reveals through just a healthy cross-functional discussion about what’s working and why it’s working, and then what’s stuck. So that’s always the first step. Pause, take a few minutes to get with a group and think together.
And then you can move into planning, once you’ve had the assessment conversation, and by the way, I would encourage you to allow a little processing time for your team. Meaning don’t assess for 30 minutes and then jump into your solution planning. Have one meeting on one day, give your team an overnight and then do planning. You know, how are we gonna solve these problems the next day? And the reason I say that is, Sean, you and I are both wired this way. We’re on the faster side of the DISC assessment. You’re a D, I’m an I, I think that’s how it lays out. I always say driver expressive. So we can bring our best thoughts like in real time, but for everybody who’s wired on that more take a step back side, they need time to process because they are not going to really contribute to the conversation until they’ve had some time to think it through. So put a little break in there, but once you’ve done the assessment conversation, you’ve allowed that processing time, now it’s time to talk solutions.
Especially in high growth, here’s the first thing I would challenge you to do. Start by playing the movie forward. So in other words, if you keep growing, like you’re growing, when are you going to hit your lids? This is a predictable exercise. Even if you’re not growing right now, you should actually do this exercise to say, man, if God starts to trust us with 10%, 5%, 20% growth year over year, when is our auditorium lid gonna hit? When is our parking lid gonna hit? When are our kids space lids going to hit? And then keep that long view in mind because while you do have some short term problems that you need to solve, you need to understand long term where you’re going and when these lids are going to be hit so that you can actually plan in advance for the next time this heavy growth season comes at you.
I’ll give you an example. So I probably talked about them too much, but I just love this church I’m working with in Acworth, Georgia, Cedar Crest Church. They brought us in because their pain point in growth was actually understaffing. So they didn’t have enough people on their team and they wanted to hire wisely, build out their structure wisely. So that’s the initial reason they brought us in, and that’s what we did. But what we uncovered was they actually need an expansion or a multiplication plan. They are heading, if they are not already there, they’re heading towards that sustained health part of the lifecycle where you get into that replication. And if we hadn’t uncovered that and had that conversation, what would’ve happened is he would’ve hired the right people, got the right leaders around the table, and they would’ve just hit this lid of, we don’t have room for people again and again. So now what we’re talking about is actually trying to solve the future lid plans that are coming up. If God keeps growing them, their church, the way he’s growing.
Sean:
That’s good.
Amy:
So again, ultimately he needed to solve the urgent challenge, but not without making future plans kind of simultaneously at the same time.
Sean:
Yeah, that’s right.
Amy:
The last thing I’ll just say is under this umbrella of how do we coach them? We also have to look at structure at this point as well, because when you are growing quickly and you’re adding staff to your team, which are, it’s a good thing, but structure isn’t addressed, we can end up with some staffing complexity that down the road is going to get us into a tangle as well.
Some of the issues here is span of care can get out of whack, especially if we have a leadership deficit on our team. Like maybe we’re adding a few new leaders, but they haven’t been on our team very long. It’s very easy with each new hire to just keep giving it to the same one or two people and all of a sudden they have way too much span of care. Or, it’s similar, but all of a sudden, roles and responsibilities get weird. So now suddenly I’m leading operations and next generation, that’s a weird combo. Or I am overseeing discipleship, and now I’m also overseeing the weekend. And for large churches, that kind of gets weird. So we start to build our structure around the people we have instead of having a destination structure that we’re building to as we’re adding these new members.
So if that’s you, by the way, let me give you just a next step. First, you need to identify your ministry lanes, what are our core ministry lanes? And understand who the leader is over each one of them. You might even have to pause some initiatives. You might have to do some pruning until you can actually get the right people in the right structure in the right place going forward. So just don’t miss out on that structure side of things.
Sean:
That’s good. And this makes me think, Amy, of the conversation around leadership development, that’s really been a hot topic in the last few years. And I think for churches that are growing, it’s been more of a hot topic because finding people to hire outside of the organization is hard right now. ]
Amy:
It is.
Sean:
And so developing people internally, even, even before all the changes that we’ve experienced through the pandemic and the great kind of people moving from location to location or state to state. We experienced, you know, people hiring from within was always a better way to approach our staff, right?
Amy:
Yep.
Sean:
Or staffing our church. But I think so many churches now have run into some issues around leadership development because of confusion around what leadership development actually is. It’s far more culture than system. And sometimes we’re looking for the silver bullet of the plug and play system for leadership development. Right?
Amy:
Right.
Sean:
But it is just, like you’ve said, it’s really, really difficult, maybe impossible to do if we don’t have the right span of care. If someone is trying to care for 12 people, they can’t really develop them as leaders as if they were caring for four people. And the other piece of this too, I think is just being able to identify leadership capacity. You know, all of us have a bit different leadership capacity that’s God given to us. And sometimes we’ve tried to place lead people in leadership roles that really don’t have the right leadership gifting for that role. So getting the right leaders in the right places so that they can develop others because they’re wired, God’s wired them to be able to get ministry done through others to develop other people is pretty, pretty critical as well. So leadership development just came to mind as you were talking through some of those things structurally.
Amy:
Yeah. And if you’re unsure about a team member’s leadership capacity, I would just test it first before you actually give them a big role. Give them a project, give them something to lead and just confirm the potential that you see in them before you actually put them over something that’s too large.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good.
Amy:
Let me go back a little bit. Again, in these high times of growth, talking about some of the assessment, I think it’s really important in those seasons to assess some of your systems. So in that assessment time, when you’re talking about what’s working and what’s stuck for the ones that feel stuck, take time to evaluate why you think that’s happening. Because what you don’t wanna do is in growth, just kind of get on this general wheel of pushing broken systems, right? So, here’s how you can do that. Benchmarks are important. It’s why we created the vital signs more than a decade ago. In our learning hub, if you haven’t taken it, I encourage you to get in there and take the vital signs assessment. Vital signs will just give you a good high level view of where you have health and where you don’t.
But let me go back to Doug’s church that I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. So he just knew that that low number in the hundreds was not for how they were growing. They had just launched their first multi-site location. He knew that was not a healthy target. And so they put that process under the microscope to try to figure out what do we need to do so that we can, they probably said double, triple that number. I bet they never suspected they’d be up in the eight hundreds. But he knew that, you know, bad engagement processes leads to a revolving door for the church. And one of the changes that they made was instead of having a one-hour starting point, we’ll just call it starting point, this introduction to the church, instead of having a one hour starting point class once a month after the first service. So between the two services they ran, they just came to recognize people really don’t go to classes anymore. Again, that’s 2005 people went to classes. If you could see me talking, you’d see me holding up my phone. People use their phones for a lot of their learning today. And so that’s what they gave a try. Instead of a one hour class between two services once a month, they started to do their engagement process after every service every weekend, and they made it 15 minutes. And in that 15 minutes they got to shake a hand, get to know a name, and their biggest desire was to get their email or their phone number so that they could enroll them in a workflow that what they used to have in the class, they would now get in the form of a weekly email and they could do it on their own time when they wanna learn it’s right there.
Sean:
Yeah. I love that.
Amy:
And all of a sudden this big barrier of time, class, I don’t even know who’s teaching it. Oh, you just want me to stop by over here for a few minutes after service over 800 people to do that.
Sean:
That’s great.
Amy:
And what Shelly said, she’s the pastor over discipleship there, is that this is how Gen Z learns that they want to come to them, they want to do it on their own time. And then where they get to spend their time as pastors is addressing deeper issues or questions that they have because kind of the plug and play content is now created in a very engaging way. So that’s an example of they could have kept pushing their broken system and they would’ve kept seeing the poor results that they were seeing before.
But they took a few minutes to get their eyes above the waterline to do that. And maybe that’s my last point on this is. Guys, I know when you’re in a high season of growth, it is so hard to get out of the whirlwind of ministry. That final exam, that big event every Sunday. But that is my challenge to you. The concept of the whirlwind basically says it will eat up whatever energy you throw towards it. And so ministry will eat up as much time as you throw at it. The authors of the book Four Disciplines of Execution would say, we need to spend 20% of our time working on our ministry, not in our ministry.
So in a growing season here would be my challenge to the leaders around the table: Start with 10% mark down, block out, don’t give up this time. Spend 10% of your time, which is four hours to work on these systems, these broken systems once a week. It’s amazing what you can get done when you have focused time, but 10% would be four hours to block out and to get ahead and to work on some of the broken systems you have. And by the way, if you struggle to do that, we can help you, it’s part of what we do. We help churches get out of that whirlwind. Again, if you don’t do it, you’re not gonna get much return on any other investment because it’s just the nature of the busyness of church. You don’t see a lot of change if you give up that time, but you’ll see a lot of change if you actually set that time aside.
Sean:
Yeah. Yep. That’s really good. By the way, Amy, speaking of the changes that Orchard Church made there in their system, I actually did check your math and there was a 475% increase.
Amy:
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Sean:
And so, you know, it does, it just speaks to that importance of those systems changes as you experience the growth are so key. And here’s the good thing. I think there are best practices for most of these things. You don’t have to just start from scratch and invent solutions. And I think Orchard did lean into some of those best practices, leveraging the phone that people have in their hands almost 24 hours a day. Taking short sprints of introducing themself to people after every single service rather than between services. I mean, those are great kind of best practices that exist. So I would just encourage leaders take the time to identify what those best practices are. And of course, we help churches with that. We have a unique vantage point I think as an organization, as a ministry, we get to see the broader sort of big C church trends and we see a lot of those best practices.
So let’s just take service times. For example, you mentioned this earlier in the conversation, Amy, what we’ve learned about service times, there have been a lot of churches asking questions about best service times on Sunday morning. We are considering adding three services. Your times can’t start before eight and they can’t start after noon.
Amy:
Right. Right. Generally speaking, that is very true.
Sean:
We have not seen many churches experience success. And so the best practices would be somewhere between eight and noon. We’ve seen a number of churches that have moved away from Saturday Night Services. Now there are some who still do that, and it’s a viable option, but a number of that have moved away from it, for some staffing health reasons. They found other ways to kind of leverage and engage people. Thursday night has been an interesting emerging trend. I’m not sure that we can call that a best practice yet, but I know a number of pastors who’ve been really encouraged by what they’re doing on Thursday night and the services that they’re having there. So, I just encouraged pastors go in eyes wide open. There’s always gonna be trade-offs. You can’t squeeze another service in without giving up anything about the way that you’re currently doing it now. Right?
Amy, before we move on to next steps, I just wanna take a moment and thank our podcast sponsor Planning Center. It takes us a lot of time and resource to actually put these podcasts together. And so Planning Center has been a huge help to us. Planning Center is an all-in-one software that helps you organize your ministries and care for your church. It has a very easy to use, efficient platform of products where you can do things like organize event details, create signup forms, schedule volunteers automatically and much more. And you can actually get started for free at planningcenter.com. That’s planning center.com.
Amy, I wonder if you could just share some kind of final thoughts around next steps churches could take as they deal with some of these systems and structure challenges related to growth?
Amy:
I’d start by just scheduling some time now to do what we recommended earlier, and maybe not right now because I know y’all have Christmas here in a week. But start the new year with a great conversation and assess where your church is healthy, where your church feels stuck. And then also take the time, not just looking at the present time, but play the movie forward. If you’re a growing church, play those numbers forward and see when your lids are gonna hit so that you’ll have some time to prepare for future growth as well. And then through that assessment time. Now, you might just have a few things you need to solve, a few problems. You might uncover many more. So you’re gonna have a longer punch list. That is the truth for many churches that we work with. In fact, we’re always kind of holding them back saying, I know you think you need to do nine things right now, but we’re gonna do two so that we can actually get it done.
And by the way, after that assessment visit, if it just feels overwhelming, we would love to help you. We often say, we’ll put an Unstucker on your lead team for a little while through the process just to help you deal with understanding what needs the most attention right now, and how do we organize future initiatives moving forward. Same thing with some of that structure piece. If you don’t feel like you have the comptence, that’s another area that we would love to help you with to address that structure, kind of span of care things. But start with the assessment. Play that movie forward. Get a long list of the things that need to be worked on, prioritize them. Give your team a little bit of time to think and then start to put together a plan. Because while you’re in a high time of growth right now, we know this church rhythms, they spike and they dip, and you’ve got some predictable dips that’ll come up. And what a better time to have that assessment done and get your plans in place so that you can leverage that slower time in the church to actually resolve and push through some of today’s challenges.
Sean:
Well, it is so important to lead your church forward from seasons of momentum growth into that strategic growth season so you don’t get stuck and stall out. And churches can get stuck really in any phase of the lifecycle if they ignore the warning signs for too long. And of course, that’s where we come in. We help pastors lead unstuck churches. We’d love to help your church as well. You can start a conversation today with us at theunstuckgroup.com/start.
Amy, this Christmas season is almost here. We’re one week away. We’re actually gonna take the week off next week and not release a podcast on Christmas Day. But we’ll be back the week after that with a brand new podcast series. Until then, we hope you all have a very Merry Christmas.
Amy:
Have a Merry Christmas. We’ll see you all next year.
