Stuck or Unstuck? (Part 2)
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People are often surprised when they read our reports for the first time.
Our data shows contradictory trends to much of what we read in general research.
For example, in our most recent edition of The Unstuck Church Report, the average year-over-year attendance increase was 17%. There’s clearly something different about the churches engaging with our surveys. Despite the headlines, we know hundreds of churches that are NOT in decline.
So, are U.S. churches stuck or unstuck?
WHAT MAKES AN UNSTUCK CHURCH
Over the next two episodes, we’re going to try to explain what’s so different about unstuck churches—based on real-life examples—and give you some practical ways to make sense of the things contributing to church growth or decline.
- Why our data is different
- Characteristics of outliers
- Next steps for church leaders
This episode is brought to you by The Six Types of Working Genius:
Working Genius is the fastest way to increase productivity, improve morale, and decrease turnover on your team. It takes ten minutes to discover the work that gives you joy and energy, and the work that is leading to staff burnout.
- Take the assessment.
- Discuss your results.
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Get started today: Use code UNSTUCKWG for 20% off at workinggenius.com.
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More Episodes in This Series
- The State of Religious Participation in American Life with Alan Cooperman of Pew Research Center – Episode 360
- More Things Unstuck Churches Have in Common – Episode 362
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We use #unstuckchurch on X (formerly Twitter), and we start a real-time conversation each Wednesday morning when the episode drops. You can follow me @tonymorganlive and The Unstuck Group @unstuckgroup. If Facebook is where you spend your time, I’m there, too.
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Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast, where each week we are exploring what it means to be an unstuck church. While the broader data shows that the church overall is in decline in North America, there are indications in our research that many churches are seeing a significant increase in health and growth. On this week’s podcast, Tony and Amy continue our series on the differences between stuck and unstuck churches with a conversation on why some churches are not in decline. Before we get into today’s episode, I want to tell you about an upcoming opportunity we have, specifically for senior and lead pastors. Our newest senior pastor cohort kicks off October 15th through 17th, and registration for it closes on August 15th. During the year long cohort, you’ll connect with senior pastors from eight to 12, like-minded churches to explore the critical responsibilities that senior pastors own in larger growing churches, and actively participate and learn from each other. To learn more and register, just go to theunstuckgroup.com/seniorpastor. Now, before we get into this week’s episode, here’s Tony with this week’s podcast sponsor.
Tony:
The Six Types of Working Genius is the fastest way to increase productivity and morale on your team. This 10-minute assessment gives you a custom report about why certain work frustrates you while other work energizes you. When you do it with your team, you’ll immediately understand how to better leverage each other’s geniuses. You’ll see better decisions, higher retention and productivity without burnout. So get started@workinggenius.com and use code unstuckwg, that’s U-N-S-T-U-C-K-W-G, for 20% off.
Amy:
Welcome back to all of our listeners. We’re in week two of a great series called Stuck or Unstuck? And we’re talking about why churches, why some of them are actually not in decline like we always hear in all the reports and things that we read. But before we dive in, Tony, hey, it’s great to see you. I know we’ve both been on the ground week after week. Usually summer slows down, but that is not my case right now. How about you?
Tony:
I have been traveling, I wanna say for the last four or five weeks now, some of that consecutively, some of that, there was a bit of a family vacation in there. But otherwise I’ve been on the ground serving churches, and I know you have too, is Amy, where’d you say you just came back from Pennsylvania, is that right?
Amy:
Well, I was in Pennsylvania. We just actually had our follow up call today and just such a great church, Believers Church out there. I actually just got back from Boise, Idaho, and let me think, St. Charles, Missouri, and let me just tell you
Tony:
By St. Louis. Yeah.
Amy:
It’s really hot in America. I’m glad to be a Minnesotan. It was 55 degrees when I woke up this this morning. I was so glad to be home.
Tony:
Well, Amy, you’re right. We’re in a great series, and it’s really, the focus is primarily on why is it that some churches are not stuck.
Amy:
Right.
Tony:
And the reason why, I mean, it just seems like the surveys and the data reported in the media always repeat the same refrain. Church attendance is in decline. Religious participation is phasing out of American life. And I trust the research. I don’t doubt that that is happening when you look broadly at churches and society as a whole. And because of that, although I wanted to have some confirmation of what the experts are seeing in the research, and last week in the first episode, I had a fascinating conversation with Alan Cooperman of Pew Research Center, and we did a deep dive into the status of religious life in America. And that really was fascinating. I loved that conversation, but that kind of sets the conversation for where we’re gonna be going in these next two episodes.
Amy:
Yeah. I’m excited for this now. That was such a great backdrop. Loved hearing what Alan had to say. But over the next two episodes, we’re gonna try to explain what’s so different about unstuck churches based on real life examples, and give you some practical ways to make sense of the things contributing to church growth or to church decline. So let’s kick this off today, Tony. Let’s just start. What do you think is the core tension that we’re exploring in this episode?
Tony:
Yeah, so Amy, as we look at the data we’re collecting at the Unstuck Group, it’s, I mean, it’s just, it’s, the trends are different than much of what we read about in the general research, which again, says something different about the churches that are engaging with our content and participating and our surveys. And I think because of that, people are surprised when they read our reports.
Amy:
Yeah.
Tony:
For the very first time. As an example, in our most recent edition of the Unstuck Church Report, the average year-over-year attendance increase was 17% across churches of all different sizes. And that is, it’s just contradictory to what you would see and maybe assume is the case for all churches. And I trust that’s the case. There’s clearly something different about the churches engaging with our surveys. And despite the headlines, we do know that there are hundreds of churches that they’re not in, in decline. In fact, I would say they’re actually thriving in this current season.
Amy:
That’s right.
Tony:
And just to give some more specifics to this, we also know from that most recent research that in the church, not only were the churches experiencing attendance growth, but they were seeing more people cross the line of faith as well.
Amy:
Yeah.
Tony:
In fact, again, this is the average of churches of less than a hundred to churches well over 10,000. And what all of those churches experienced on average was 14% of their average attendance. These were people that actually said yes to following Jesus by indicating either a decision, a salvation decision, or actually going public with their faith through baptism. So again, 14 out of every hundred people in these churches are meeting and following beginning to follow Jesus. And I love that. And it’s, Amy, I mean, we were just mentioning it. I mean, just about every week, you and I, and then the rest of our team are in different churches across North America. And just this past week I was at a great church and, and I always like to brag on the churches that are experiencing health and they’re thriving right now. So I wanna brag on Victory Church. It’s in the Philadelphia area specifically. Audubon, Pennsylvania are a, Amy, are you familiar with Audubon?
Amy:
No. I just shifted over to Germany.
Tony:
Oh, yeah. No, no. This is in the U.S. in Pennsylvania at Victory Church. This is, it’s just a fun church because I’ve had a chance to work with Pastor Ed and the team there for, gosh, it’s probably more than 10 years now. But they are seeing the highest level of attendance that they have ever seen. but they, in the last 12 months, Amy had close to 600 people that said yes to following Jesus.
Amy:
Wow.
Tony:
And It’s a good size church, but it’s not a mega church. But they’re just seeing all kinds of people take steps towards Jesus. And again, it just points to the uniqueness of the churches that are listening to this podcast for you, church leaders that are listening and those churches that are engaging with the surveys that we put out on a quarterly basis. So there’s something distinctive about churches that are unstuck. They’re not really stuck.
Amy:
Right. Well, harvester Church, where I was at in St. Charles, Missouri, they had 23% of their average attendance is kids, and 14% of it is students. And those, those are high numbers.
Tony:
They’re reaching young families.
Amy:
They’re reaching young families. Yep. Well, we, I think we can say with confidence, because we know firsthand it’s not all bad news out there. In fact, I know that we have to kind of trust some of the data that’s out there, but I always have this skepticism because the view from my seat looks so different with the churches we’re working with. So let’s actually get down to why that is, Tony, why are some churches outliers to the data?
Tony:
Well, that’s what we’re going to explore in this episode. And also in, in next week’s episodes. So I’ll share a few of the characteristics I’ve seen. The churches that we personally know from our work are definitely not stuck. Beginning with this: They have a clear vision and direction. In other words, we’ve talked about this in the past. There is a clear, bold move that they’re pursuing as a ministry, in other words, because they have clarity about this future direction, and they’ve identified their bold move. They have reason to lean on God. So they’re not just doing the same thing that they’ve always done. They’re leaning into what God has for their ministry in the future. Because of that, they’re not holding onto traditions. And what I’ve seen, Amy, is, when I talk about traditions, especially religious traditions, we probably have in mind this church that’s been around for a century, and they’re still doing church the way they did church a century ago.
But what I know about churches is we get very religious about how we do religion, and it doesn’t take very long for us to begin almost worshiping the way we do church. And so we’ve seen churches hold on to specific ministry strategies, even though those strategies are no longer producing the mission results that they’re trying to pursue. So, Amy, lemme give you a specific example of what this looks like. And I’m not gonna name names of churches. In fact, I’m not even sure it was this specific program, but let’s call it a basketball program for kids in the community. We’ve seen churches and actually multiple churches. So if this is your church frankly, we could be talking about dozens of different churches. And it might be basketball could be something different. But because so many people are participating in the ministry program, in this case basketball program, we think that’s a win.
But in reality, then when we start to look at specifically because of that basketball program, our people taking steps towards church and faith, then you see the result, the win is the participation in the program, but it’s not helping people become more like Jesus and take a steps toward, take steps towards faith. The bigger challenge with ministry strategies like this, is it still, when you do a program like that, it still takes resources. It still takes people’s time. Volunteers, leadership, communications and promotions focus. Space in our facilities. And not to mention financial resources for programming like that. And so anytime we have a strategy that’s not producing results, not only is that a drain on limited resources that churches have. But what it’s doing too is pulling from where we could be making investments in our ministry that’s actually producing results. So it’s taking, it’s not allowing us to really invest in the things that God’s using to help people take their next steps towards Jesus. Amy, I anything you would add here?
Amy:
Yeah. To, to what you were talking about. It just opened up a window for me that when we talk about the characteristics of these outliers, the churches that are not stuck and growing, what you’re just talking about is a mindset I see them embrace when we bring it up, which is they are not doing things just to draw a crowd anymore. They are evaluating, they’re naming what the win is for whatever event it is, whatever program it is. They’re naming the win before they invent it, then they hold it and they debrief against that because it’s really about next steps. It’s not about attendance anymore when it comes to programs. Tony, do you remember the book The, that came out by Charles Duhigg a few years ago called The Power of Habit?
Tony:
Yeah. Yeah, I do.
Amy:
Yeah. In that book, he writes about these keystone habits. And keystone habits are habits that trigger a series of related behaviors. In other words, one keystone thing that you do changes a series of behaviors that happen. And I think a keystone characteristic of the unstuck churches we serve is that they’re just mission minded. In fact, as you wrote in your book, The Unstuck Church, they hold tightly to their mission why they exist, and they hold loosely to their methods, how they’re accomplishing it. In fact, Chad Hunt on our team, when I’ve watched him facilitate, when he’s walking church leaders through our church lifecycle, which is also from your book, The Unstuck Church, he talks about churches that are on the left side, that ascending side. He talks about them being people who are focused on loving people, and in churches that are starting to lose momentum, head down the right side of that life cycle, you know, in maintenance. He said, those churches are really focused on loving God. Loving God isn’t a bad thing, but we’ve moved from loving people to loving God. And lastly, the churches that are dying are on life support, are really focused on loving me. And I love that.
Tony:
The individual. Yeah. Yeah.
Amy:
I love me. Don’t change, I don’t change my church. And I love it because I think the keystone characteristic is this mission mindedness of unstuck churches, churches who are committed to both reaching and discipling people the most effective ways they can, they change their methods when, when they’re not working. So anyways, that, that is the thing that permeates these unstuck churches, is that they are more tied to mission, more tied to loving people, reaching people, and discipling them than they are their programs or themselves. So yeah,
Tony:
So yeah, Amy, that’s so good. And as I’ve expressed in the past, what you’re highlighting here is that stuck churches have let the way they do church get, get in the way of why they do church. And healthy, thriving churches. They just, they hold loosely to their min ministry strategies. And they’re only going to leverage the strategies that are really helping point people to taking a step towards Jesus and getting on mission with the body of Christ. So I love that. Well, I launched us off with one of the distinctives, or these outlier churches. What else comes to mind for you, Amy?
Amy:
Yeah, I think this is an important one. Outliers, I believe they have clarity about their spiritual formation or their next steps. In other words, they don’t just have a bunch of programs, but rather they’ve developed these clear next steps that they want all believers to take. And outliers have a leader that’s over those next steps so that they all, they all work together instead of competing with one another. And because of this, their church calendars are not cluttered, they’re not trying to do too much. You know, I work with a, a church right now that’s trying to get unstuck. And it’s funny, they showed me how they track all of their events and it’s really, really cluttered right now. And the pastor’s becoming more and more aware of that and is just, he’s laser focused now on, we’ve gotta have a better process for what’s gonna hit the calendar, because if we do too much, we’re really not gonna accomplish enough.
Tony:
Yeah. And Amy, what I’ve noticed with churches in their calendaring strategies is commonly they let fairness be the driver of what gets on the calendar. That’s right. And the people that are most efficient in their calendaring get, in other words, they ask for a spot on the calendar or in the facility and in the promotion strategy first.
Amy:
Yep.
Tony:
And because of that, they get, they get space. But fairness is not the win here. Helping people meet and follow Jesus is the win. And because of that, we can’t just cater to everybody’s desire for space on the calendar. We have to figure out what are, what are the opportunities that are going to encourage people to encounter a living God. And making sure that whatever’s gonna point people to Jesus gets highest priority then on our church calendars. Not just who happened to be first or not just making sure every ministry gets their fair share of the calendar in the coming year.
Amy:
Okay. So I’m gonna build off of that one Outliers talk for, they actually stop working on the ministry for, in the ministry for a while. They pull back and they start by going, what do we think God wants to do through our church this year? What results do we wanna see? And then they ask how we’re gonna accomplish it. The other side, the stuck churches go, all right, everybody send us all the events you wanna have everybody send us all the money that you wanna have. And then we, we work on it for a few months, and then we just dive right back into the ministry. We don’t strategically think about those. Well, and just one last thought on that, I think, and because these outliers are being very strategic about not cluttering their calendar, they aren’t creating so much busyness in the church.
And so because of that, there’s some margin and their people are able to prioritize relationships, prioritize their core next steps, and, you know, the things that they need to be doing and taking the action for in their spiritual life. And Tony, I’ll just mention this. You know, we launched a multi-site cohort in April, and last week, you weren’t able to be on the call with us. In fact, I wanted to share these results with you. But we had our first follow up check-in call. And of course, these are outliers. These are multi-site church leaders who came together because they wanted to lead a more effective multi-site church, again, holding tight to mission, not methods. And at the top of the call, we asked each team just to share the progress that they made since our time together and what results they were seeing.
And one church reported, okay, so they’re in the midst of rewriting their bylaws. They’re moving their multi-site model to a more identical model. They’re clarifying decision rights and all of that we know is a lot of work. But you know, the results they’re seeing, they launched a campus, Tony in January, that campus has experienced 80% growth since its opening. And I have to believe it’s because of how they’re approaching it. Another church, Christ Chapel, I think they’re down in the land of Texas. They’re in the midst of launching a 5:00 PM Sunday night service to accommodate all their growth. They’re calling, I love this. They call it Sunday morning on Sunday night. And they’re envisioning their church to make the change, attend the evening service in order to open up seats on Sunday morning. That is such a love people move.
Not love me. It’s a love people move. And then just a shout out, of course, to a Minnesota Church. Riverside Church, again, they’re in the midst of working on decision rights, getting clarity around a few of their multi-site leadership roles. But on August 4th, they open a third location of their church. And here you go, a core of 400 people. I know where their church is placed, a core of 400 people who are owning the mission with them, and they’re taking that church to a new community. So just going back to Chad’s words again, they are loving, they’re in loving people mode, reaching new people with the gospel and helping them look like Jesus. And, you know, each of the churches on that call, they are defying the overall trends of the church being in decline and losing engagement with people. And I’m getting all wound up, Tony. So maybe, did I get off track? Is there anything else you wanna add?
Tony:
That’s all, that’s all so good. Yeah. I love celebrating the stories that fills my heart too, to hear about the churches that we’re being that we have the opportunity to engage with and just seeing them thrive in this season. I absolutely love that. And I noticed you always tend to throw in an example from Minnesota too, so that’s great as well. Let me share one more today. So this is one more reason why we find churches that are not stuck. They’re the outliers, if you will. And I think it’s because churches that are not in decline empower pastors, and they empower staff leaders. It’s almost as if these churches recognize that God has placed a call on these people. They are uniquely gifted by God in areas to actually help the church thrive. And they’re empowering these pastors and staff leaders to accomplish the mission for the church based on the call God has placed on each of these pastor’s lives.
And there’s no doubt about it. I go into some churches, Amy, and it’s very evident. The pastor is healthy, the team is healthy. And when you start to unwind it just a little bit, you find out the reason, one of the reasons why the team is healthy and the pastor is healthy is because the board, the lay leadership understands, their top priority isn’t to provide checks and balances, is it’s not about accountability, though. In reality, that is a piece of their responsibility. They see as their number one job to make sure that they’re continually encouraging the pastor. The staff, that they’re helping them thrive in their ministry responsibilities, and they’re working as hard as they can to keep the church unified and on purpose, focused on the priority of accomplishing the mission of the church.
On the other hand, we run into stuck churches, and it’s fascinating, and we’ve shared the data. Stuck churches have larger boards, they have twice as many committees as healthy, thriving churches. There’s just a lot more governance. There’s a lot more boards and committees trying to make decisions about ministry rather than seeing people engaging in ministry and in those churches, it’s not unusual for the board as an example to see their job is to hold the pastor and the staff accountable. Their job is to decide how ministry is going to get done. And it’s one of the reasons why these churches are stuck. It’s because they’re not actually empowering people that God’s called into ministry, into leadership, into spiritual leadership. That’s to actually lead the church.
Amy:
I have a great example of that, Tony. I worked with the church, and again, they’re doing great work. Pleasant Hills Church in the Pittsburgh area. I’m gonna guess it was three or four years ago. I was on site, so I can’t remember if it was pre or post Covid, probably post, but they came to a joint decision board and lead pastor, like what we’re doing isn’t working. And they’re a mainline denomination in the Presbyterian church. And so they have polity rules that they have to live by, but they recognized, how do we take the spirit of the way that we were suggesting they set up governance and work it within our mainline denomination. And it was such a partnership between the staff leaders and the lay leaders. And we’ve been working, they’ve been working this now for I think three years.
We just finished up kind of tying a bow on their work, but they’re in the right direction now. I think they had a session that was like 27 people, and then they have to have certain committees in the area of grounds and finance, but they have restructured to the concept of a singular board. And they have empowered those leaders now, and they gladly did it. Because I remember when we started, one of the things that the staff said was, I don’t know if I report to the pastor. I don’t know if I report to this board member. And those, by the way, the people in the, those lay leadership, they were, they had a lot to offer, but they were just stuck in meetings all the time. The work at that church, and it doesn’t happen overnight. We often say the unstuck process might happen in three months, but it’s not three months of work. And some of this stuff, it’s years of work to get it right. But they are now, I would start to call them one of the outliers. And this was the issue that really released them to get back to a place of growing and thriving as a church.
Tony:
Yeah. And Amy, I mean, just step back, who would prefer to be engaging in life and life ministry actually helping point somebody else to Jesus loving on them? Who would rather just say, no, I’m not gonna do that. I would rather sit in a boardroom making decisions about stuff that many times lay leaders, because they have, they have lives, they have jobs, they have families. They’re making oftentimes I should say, making decisions about stuff that they just, they’re not aware of all the implications Of the decisions that they’re making. Amy, maybe that’s the reason why at my church, I don’t want. I’ve, I don’t wanna be on a board. I don’t wanna do that. Yeah. I wanna, I wanna be serving in the ministry just helping point people to Jesus.
Amy:
Yeah. It’s so good. Alright, well that’s probably a longer episode than we usually have, but Tony, what are some next steps? Let’s end with that. What are some next steps we can leave church leaders with today related to this topic?
Tony:
Yeah. It’s as if you and I are very passionate about helping churches get unstuck. Well, here’s the first, next step to consider. First, I do think you need to just get honest with yourself about whether or not your church is in decline. And here, I mean, you’re not just looking at attendance and giving, but really I want you to be thinking about how are you engaging people in the mission? And then specifically, are you seeing people say yes to following Jesus? Are you seeing people making those big faith decisions and going public with their faith through baptism? Are you seeing that happen? And if so, that’s an indication that you may be one of these outlier churches. But I really think you need to get honest with yourself.
And let me just say this, if you are a pastor or a leader, leaders see things before normal people see things. In other words, you may be, you may be aware of some questions about what’s happening in your church right now, that you would think, maybe may indicate that your church is in decline, not experiencing the health it should. And you may feel like you’re the only one that sees that. If so, that’s probably a confirmation that you actually have the spiritual gift of leadership. Because leaders see these things before normal people see them.
Secondly, then you need to ask yourself how you’re doing in these critical areas we cover today? Do we have a bold move that our church is pursuing that causes us to really rely on God and challenges us to rally the church to be a part of, of that bold move? Are you mission minded or, and are you willing to change? Are you willing to stop doing some things in order to do other things better that will help you accomplish your mission? Thirdly, do you have clarity about how you’re making disciples? Are people actually taking their next steps towards Christ? And is that really working? And then lastly, is your team empowered to lead the church to accomplish its mission going forward? Is that happening? So four critical questions are, do we have a bold move? Are we willing to make a change because we’re mission minded? Do we have clarity about how we’re helping people experience spiritual formation? And then is our team very empowered?
Amy:
All right. What a great conversation today. Tony, before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts for our listeners?
Tony:
So pastors often engage our team when they realize their church is beginning to decline, and often when growth is flat or slower than in previous years. At the Unstuck Group, we bring a proven process that helps pastors assess ministry health, clarify the vision God’s given them for the future, and then create the team structure and action plans to see that vision through. Simply put, we help pastors identify where God’s calling the church to go, and then how you’re going to get there. And we help the team get moving faster. We do, we have a proven track record of helping churches of all shapes and sizes create healthy growth for more than 15 years. And you can learn how the unstuck process works at theunstuckgroup.com.
If you haven’t already, take your staff team through the Six Types of Working Genius. You’ll better understand how to use each other’s gifts to get more done. We actually have some people on the Unstuck team who have been certified in Working Genius, and they can help you maximize it on your team. You can get started with the assessment at workinggenius.com and use code unstuckwg, that’s U-N-S-T-U-C-K-W-G, for 20% off.
Sean:
Well, thanks for joining us on this week’s podcast. At The Unstuck Group, our goal is to help pastors grow healthy churches by guiding them to align vision, strategy, team and action. In everything we do, our priority is to help churches, help people meet and follow Jesus. If there’s any way we can serve you and your church today, reach out to us at theunstuckgroup.com. Next week, we’re back with a brand new episode. So until then, have a great week.
