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What I Learned as Multisite Campus Pastor

By Bryan Rose

10 Learnings of a Multi-Site Mega-Church Campus Pastor.. In Twitter form.

1.    Everyone going finds a place to serve, or stays. Mission is contagious – so is consumption.

2.    Develop an identity within the core team. Walk the divisiveness line carefully, but call pioneers to bigger and better things.

3.    Check your ego at the door. You don’t preach, be okay with that or find a small church to pastor.

4.    It’s the Environment stupid. Environmental transformation is a conduit for life transformation – just like in High School, looks matter.

5.    Bring your staff. Doesn’t matter if you pay them, identify leaders in key ministry areas and empower them to own the vision and lead the team.

6.    You get what you pay for. Consultants and outfitters are worth keeping you focused on casting vision and building the core team.

7.    Stay in the loop. Information is influence and your greatest source of power: keep your friends close; keep your senior pastor closer.

8.    Parking, parking, parking. Venue evaluation begins and ends at the parking lot – access and availability drive the plan and the budget.

9.    Settle the chain of command. Figure out vision and implementation: peer relationships inter-campus, direct reporting intra-campus.

10.    Do your homework. Struggle with a business plan, evaluate demographics, and count the cost, God is big enough to speak in spreadsheets.

by Rich Birch: Is your church considering going multisite? It would seem like every church leader I talk with is wrestling with this approach on reaching new communities. Studies have shown that basically every growing church is either already multisite or actively looking into it.

I’ve been a practitioner of this approach to church since the early 2000s. I can still remember having conversations with Greg Ligon from the Leadership Network many years ago and him telling me about nearly a dozen other churches that were doing something like what we were doing at The Meeting House – launching this dispersed approach to church. At that time, it seemed crazy to me that there were that many other churches trying out this approach; little did I know that in just over a decade, the multisite revolution would jump to 1,000 churches and impact the lives of millions of people.

As an unabashed fan of this approach to reaching more people, I do have a confession to make. There are aspects of being a multisite church that aren’t as great on the inside as they look on the outside. There are some dirty secrets within this movement that I want you to be fully aware of if you are considering launching a new campus. Or maybe you already have a few campuses and something just doesn’t feel right.

85% of Multisite Churches Aren’t Launching More Than 2 Locations.

Leadership Network has been at the heart of fueling this movement. They’ve done a number of great studies and books that have been cornerstone to this movement’s development. In fact, in a lot of ways, they deserve the credit for helping codify how this movement understands and talks about itself … a critical aspect of disseminating ideas. They’ve done a number of landmark studies into the dynamics of this movement that you should check out. In their most recent study, it was found that 85% of multisite churches don’t get 2 locations beyond their original location. The vast majority of multisite churches simply aren’t moving beyond 3 locations in totality.

Why?

It could be that the movement is still too young and this number is likely to rise over time. It could be that there is something built into the complexity of 4+ locations that is slowing down the churches’ abilities to go there.

Having talked with dozens and dozens of multisite church leaders over the years, I’m convinced about the problem: most multisite churches launch campuses as opposed to launching a system for launching campuses. They think about how they extend themselves into a location or two, but don’t put enough creative thought into building a culture and approach that gets the church into the rhythm of launching regularly.

I had the honor of being a part of The Meeting House as this fantastic church launched its first 6 locations. After launching out the first location we set the audacious goal of launching one campus every year for 5 years! We had no idea what we were doing when we set that target, but it did impel us to think about building a system for sustainable launches rather than a single location. All these years later, this church has 19 locations and is actively looking to launch more in the future.

Finding Campus Pastors is really (really!) hard.

Over the years, I’ve had a number of whispered conversations with multisite church leaders at many conferences about this secret. Every once and while I talk with a senior leader on the phone who admits they are really struggling with this fact.

Finding, training, releasing, rewarding and ultimately, retaining campus pastors is an incredibly difficult task.

We’ve suffered over the years with cute sayings about this role in an attempt to define it. Among the things we led ourselves to believe about what these leaders need to be includes …

• Face with the place …
• A big dawg leader!
• Bleed the vision out one arm and the community with another …

When I think back about the most personally painful aspects of leading within the multisite movement, a lot of it has to do with managing campus pastor relationships. Sometimes we didn’t clearly articulate what we were looking for because we didn’t know what we needed. Sometimes, the campus pastors convinced themselves about fitting into the scheme of things even as they realized deep down that they really wanted to do something else. The eclectic mix of expectations, ambitions, vision and communication seems to conspire against us to make it really difficult.

Churches often find themselves with the location, the people and the financial resources to make new campuses work, but they can’t find the right leader to lead it!

87% of campus pastors come from within the church. [ref]

I wish I had let this fact sink in deeply years ago. All the time, effort, energy and money that we spent on attempting to attract campus pastors from outside should have been spent on identifying, training and releasing people from within our church to lead campuses. Your next campus pastor is already attending your church. The question is: What is the system you’re employing to identify them and raise them up to do justice to that role?

I’ve seen it first hand; campus pastors who are from “within” have a better “stick” rate than those from elsewhere. It makes sense because they have already bought into the vision of the church. Their notions of what it means to lead within the church have been shaped by the church.

Older Location’s Ability to Reach People Slows Over Time

Nothing reaches new people like new campuses. The other side of that coin is that older campuses aren’t as effective at reaching people as newer ones. This isn’t just my personal opinion; it was backed up by Warren Bird in his study on the dynamics at play within new multisite campuses. [ref]

We often like to celebrate the fact that new campuses reach more people, but until you’ve lived within the dynamics of an “old” campus and understand its subtle contours incisively, the conversation takes on a slightly different tenor. (Studies show that “old” campuses are anything over 5 years.)

Some of the impacts of this on a church culture can be:

• “Shiny New Car” Syndrome // Where the church leadership gets fixated on launching new locations, much to the detriment of the older locations.
• Deflated Leaders // People leading in “older” campuses can easily get down on themselves because they aren’t seeing the same results over time.
• It’s a push // Older campuses have to push more to reach people. Stop using the same “yardstick” to measure the effectiveness of all campuses.

Leaders who are effective during the early days of the launch of a campus are different than those who are effective after a few years.

Churches need to find a way to build growth strategies that take into account the needs of an older campus.

Leaders in older campuses shouldn’t shy away from reaching new people. Instead, they should see the natural “slow down” as a challenge to meet and overcome.

The most effective days of new campuses are when they first launch, so your strategy needs to push hard in those early days, months and years to reach as many people as possible. The growth trajectory of the campus is set early on!

The Size and Health of Your Launch Team is THE Key Success Factor

I’ve been in the middle of the launch of 14 campuses directly and seen a bunch more from the fence as coach. I’ve seen all kinds of factors that impact the effectiveness of a campus. (Campus pastor, location, time of year, etc.) By far, the most important factor in the launch of a new campus is the size and health of the core volunteer launch team. Across all the launches I’ve seen, this one factor is the best predictor of how the campus will fare over time.

The benefits of a large and healthy team are pervasive …

• More people to invite friends to the church.
• More people to share the volunteer load, which in turn increases the appeal to serve.
• More financial resources to help sustain the campus.

When you are thinking about the target size of the community of volunteers that are needed to launch a new location, try going beyond your comfort zone. What factors would have to be in place to send 10% of your church to go launch the new location? What would it take to get 150+ volunteers to make the new location their home?

This dirty secret pushes towards you taking longer in your launch cycle. You need to take longer to work with “late adopters” who aren’t initially interested to be involved in the launch. You can convince a small team of “innovators” to jump to the new location quickly, but you need to slow down to woo less innovative people to be a part of the launch. The advantage of this approach is that “late adopters” are more likely to stick with the campus in the long haul than “early adopters” any ways.

You don’t just need people to attend the new location. You need people who are willing to serve at the new campus. Your launch process needs to revolve around building up a strong and healthy volunteer core team, and not finding people who will sit on the seats at the new campus. Build a big enough volunteer team and you won’t need to worry about what your attendance will be, because all those volunteers will invite their communities to be a part of your church!

Multisite Will Scale Up Your Problems

Multiplication is at the core of the multisite church movement. It’s a way for your church to spread the good things that are happening at your church to new locations. It’s a path to see your church implement the lessons you’ve learned in a new community.

The downside is that your problems will scale up as well.

If your kid’s ministry is struggling in one location, it will struggle even more in three locations. Taking a music ministry that is having a hard time developing artists in one location and spreading that problem to multiple locations may not be a great idea. If you have problems aligning your vision with your leaders in one location, the discord will just grow wider as you add new locations. Your financial predicaments in one location won’t be solved just by adding new locations.

As the multisite movement enters this next phase, its pervasiveness means that lots of churches that might not be ready to multiply are now beginning to consider it. Even worse, some leaders are seeing this approach as a tool to help kickstart a stuck church. Please don’t.

Nail it before you scale it.

Your church needs a modicum of excellence within its ranks before you look to replicate the model. There needs to be signs of health weaving through the ministry across multiple levels. With humility, can your church say that you are doing aspects of your ministry differently from what other churches are doing in the communities you are looking at moving into?

Conditions Will Never Be “Perfect” For Launch

Talk with any of those rare churches that have launched more than 8 locations and they will tell you they never really felt ready to launch new locations. It was always an internal drive to reaching people, something that the church isn’t able to do today. It was choosing the future while living with a real reality that the present still needs a lot of work.

Over the years, as we’d come up to the launch of a new campus, leaders within our church would start to hold back our plans on the launch. These caring and intelligent leaders would list internal factors that simply weren’t in the spot that they should have been. People could find reasons why this was the year we did not need to launch. They were right but we launched anyway. In fact, the resistance to launch ended up becoming the first step in our launch process. It was like that moment when you stand on the end of the diving board and think twice about jumping. You have to go through the second thought as a human before you can jump.

The fact remains that if your church is growing, you need to launch a new campus. 94% of churches are losing ground against the population growth within their communities. [ref] If your church is growing faster than the community you’re currently in, we need your church to multiply what is happening there. The kingdom needs your church to launch its next campus.

You’ll end up facing the fact that things won’t be perfect, but you’ll need to launch anyway. There will be things that you’ll need to work on even as you multiply. It will feel like building the plane while trying to fly it. It will require a lot from you and your leaders … but it’s worth it. Seeing new people connect with the eternal message of Christ in a new campus is exciting and invigorating in equal measure.

Let’s talk about your next campus (or two!)

Yes, I’m biased. Even with all of these “dirty secrets,” I think that the multisite church approach is the most effective way to reach more people in today’s generation. Is it perfect? Definitely not, but the results are breathtaking to see and be a part of. From just a handful of churches all those years ago to millions of people attending a multisite campus today, it has been an honor to be a part of this amazing transformational journey.

By Sam Yoon: One of the most common questions I am asked as a campus pastor is, “What’s the difference between the role of the campus pastor and the associate pastor?” That’s definitely a question I asked and wondered when I served as an associate pastor. And now having been on both sides, I’ve learned three things that make being the #1 guy different from being the #2 guy.

1) Spiritual Weight

A spiritual burden and weight comes with being a campus pastor. It’s a very different spiritual weight than being an associate pastor because people typically see the campus pastor as the pastor. People generally want to meet with the pastor in charge first and will come with their hurts, habits, and hang-ups.

There is also a spiritual weight and expectation to pastor, to counsel, and to encourage your church as a campus pastor. As the associate pastor, the campus pastor is your buffer. The campus pastor may ask you to carry some of this weight. But the main responsibility falls on the campus pastor.

2) Leadership Weight

I believe the saying, “As the leader goes, so goes the organization.” This also applies in the church world, “As the pastor goes, so goes the church.” The ability to lead, cast vision, strategize, organize, and execute vision falls on the shoulders of the campus pastor. Staff, volunteers, and church look to the campus pastor to guide them, inspire them, and move them.

This doesn’t mean that campus pastors don’t delegate and lead wisely of course. However, it’s an understanding that it’s the campus pastor’s role to set the tone, establish the pace, and hold people accountable. No one is looking at the associate pastor for this type of leadership. If they are, then there is an issue of leadership at your church. The associate pastor plays a critical role, but the leadership engine starts and ends with the campus pastor.

3) Family Weight

Church and ministry jobs can be one of the most stressful careers that exist. When you are the lead guy, there are more decisions, expectations, and responsibilities that need your attention. You are juggling many different elements and that can spill over into your time with your family. Healthy boundaries need to be set so that you maintain a healthy balance with your family.

But your family will also feel the weight of your role as a campus pastor, whether you want them to or not. You can invite them into that journey and share the load with them, or you can separate your family and church life. Either decisions has its pros and cons, so it’s important to understand and be in communication with your family. As an associate pastor, your family isn’t looked on with as much scrutiny as the campus pastor. You are given more leeway and so the expectations for your family are different. Your family may feel the pressure of being a pastor’s family, but they will bear the weight differently.

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Do you have what it takes to be a campus pastor? How does this role differ from a church planter? Or from a senior pastor? Learn from our research-based and practitioner-tested scope and sequence to develop campus pastors in our course, Essential Campus Pastoring.

By Sam Yoon: As a campus pastor, I want to hit it out of the park. I want to reach more people for Jesus and have the church grow. To accomplish this, I feel the need to control every situation and manage every part of the church. Who else is better equipped to do this than me, right?

But after attempting to control a church with over 20 ministries and a staff of 7, I started to stress out and burn out. I essentially failed. The more I controlled, the less impactful I was. My failure opened my eyes to one big truth. I thought I had to do 20 different ministries effectively to meet my goals. But what I learned was that I just needed to do only three things well.

When I focused on just these three things, I was less stressed and more influential. I was able to empower and coach leaders to manage those 20 ministries. The church actually started to grow. These three leadership principles are my game plan for being an effective campus pastor. It is what I do on a regular basis. They are simple principles that any and all pastors can implement. I believe it will help you in your church.

1. Communicate Vision

Your biggest role as the leader is to communicate the vision. No one will be more passionate or care about the vision than you, the leader. The best way to do communicate your vision is through stories. Stories are the best way for your people to remember your vision and values. Stories inspire and motivate you to continue to live and fulfill that vision. Number and statistics are great, but stories of life change move people to action.

Use all forms of communication to share these stories. I will always share our vision at our weekly staff meeting, our volunteer Facebook group, email newsletters, and whenever we have volunteer meetings. My goal is to over-communicate the vision. How do you know if you are over-communicating? You know that you are on the right track when you hear your leaders or volunteers tell others the vision to others.

Do you have a clear and simple vision statement, and do you share stories on a regular basis to inspire?

2. Connect to Build Relationships

John Maxwell says, “People won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Ministry isn’t a job; it’s a relationship. It’s a relationship with God, with your family, and with your church family. It’s your primary role to model and train others to build relationships with your staff, volunteers, members, and guests.

There are so many different ways to achieve relationships, and it requires intentionality and time. It’s my first instinct to finish a task rather than to build a relationship. Therefore, I have to set intentional time to focus on relationships. I make it a goal to hang out with our staff on a regular basis outside of work. I also make it a point to send birthday and thank you cards on a regular basis. I set goals on how many people I want to meet with on a weekly basis.

Do you have an intentional relationship plan? What are ways that you can build and model relationships with your staff, leaders, volunteers, and members?

3. Coach to Train and Develop

The last leadership principle for every campus pastor is to help your people grow. Leadership development and coaching is your primary role and responsibility. This doesn’t happen automatically. It requires careful planning and creating a space to either get developed by an outside organization or through your own leadership development training.

It’s important to always be coaching, teaching, or helping develop your staff and leaders. And this shouldn’t just happen once a year at a conference. It should be happening on a regular basis. With your staff, it needs to be a weekly basis. Our staff goes through different leadership books, and I ask them to apply it during the week. With your volunteer leaders, it needs to be monthly at least. I’ll be taking our leadership team through different assessments like the Myers Brigg and Strength Finder so that we better understand each other. This will help build our team dynamic.

There needs to be a regular system and flow to grow your leaders. This goes without saying, but you as the leader need to be growing and poured into as well. You can’t lead or coach if you yourself are not growing and developing.

What’s your coaching plan for your staff and leaders?

 

 

By Stephen Smith:

In any and all organizations, the leadership quotient can never be understated. Mountains of books exist on the subject. Whole industries are built around sharpening leaders. If you’ve been in leadership for any period of time, you know how important that sharpening time is.

Let’s talk then about the leadership role of the Campus Pastor. Multisite church multiplication requires an answer to three overriding questions:

• Where to plant? Location
• Who to plant? Leadership
• How to plant? Logistics

Answering these questions is a continual process. Usually, the questions are asked in this order. Once the church decides to multiply and plant a campus, everyone is eager to go right to the locality piece. Locality and context is a key issue in church planting, but I would advocate for a different scheme:

• Train up the leader(s). (Leadership)
• Decide how to plant that best expresses the heart of your church. (Logistics)
• Plant carefully. (Location)

Can they be asked and answered simultaneously? Yes, but just go with me here for a moment.

Your Leadership Quotient

Leadership quotient at a multisite campus will directly affect the “success” of the planting effort. Without leaders who understand core DNA of the church and how it relates to campus realities, the church will find itself in an even more complex situation than the multisite church model already is to begin with. Solving leadership issues on the front side is of premiere importance. One right decision here can lead to 10,000 right decisions in the future.

Here are a few ways to make sure the leadership piece is anchored.

Team

The best place to find Campus Pastors is on your existing team. The benefit is that they are known by the congregation, in existing partnership with the staff, and believe and have been living in the existing church culture. As you look out across your staff team, allow the Lord to lead you to the right person. You would be surprised at how the next planter might be waiting for that nudge to next level leadership. When God calls, He equips!

If you are unable to “hire from within,” it is critical that the next campus pastor have a minimum of 6 months to a year on the team before he is sent out. Inculturation takes time. Trust takes time. Friendships take time to grow. Allow for this.

Training

Leaders need lessons, but they also need “at bats.” Reading key leadership books and articles that resonate with your church culture is step one. NewChurches.com is committed to the training process and is packed full of smart people talking about higher-level things. It is quickly becoming a hub for all things church planting.

Conducting deep, open-ended conversations about expectations, spiritual gifts, work strategies, and people skills is step two. The Campus Pastor should actively “interview” people across the team to better acquaint themselves with the perspectives of others. This will pay huge dividends down the road.

Step three is getting the Campus Pastor into the game as much as possible. Let them see and feel the weight during some critical decisions. Require them to teach, speak, and preach on multiple occasions in the planting process. The more comfortable they are with running your offense, the more time they have been observed, the more time they have been empowered to make the important calls while still “at home” or with the “sending church,” the more comfortable they will be in the field.

Talk

Not only does deep conversation happen during the training process, it is also a key factor in continued relationship. Time and space can play tricks on the planter’s heart and mind. The physical distance away from the sending church can sometimes play with the emotions. Here are some helpful things to keep in mind.

No matter how many sites you have, get a text group together as soon as you get finish reading this blog and begin the process of talking about random things. We get so caught in the doing of ministry that we neglect the very small things of life that can bring people together. Slack or GroupMe are two helpful tools to get this process started. Cat videos and random memes required! (Okay, maybe not the cat part.)

Breathe the same air. Nothing can replace face-to-face time with your group of Campus Pastors. Do this either weekly or monthly. We find that a monthly lunch with just the campus pastors in the room is a key component to foster healthy talk.

Finally, go deeper than the meeting agenda. Take time to go off topic and talk through campus issues. When someone from one campus context realizes that somebody else around the table is dealing with the same things they are, there is a certain unity that it built.

Team, Training, and Talk are just three ways to create a real sense of team, common purpose, and community among your campus pastor team. Whether you have 2 sites or 15, these same principals can apply.

*NOTE: At Houston’s First, our Campus Pastors were hired both from within and without. Their meeting schedule looks something like this:

Weekly: Campus Pastors meet with their campus staff. We also have a standing Skype to coordinate for the upcoming Sunday.

Frequently: We can frequently be found blowing up our GroupMe channel.

Monthly: Each Campus Pastor meets monthly with Pastor Gregg for a one-on-one lunch. Also, Campus Pastor Lunch happens each month in a private room. Finally, each of the Campus Pastors sit on a 16 person “Planning Team” that serves as a central meeting for all Gather, Grow, Give, and Operations functions.

So, it can be said that each Campus Pastor has some variety of a standing weekly meeting either with counterparts, central, or Pastor Gregg. This rhythm seems to be working for us now. As with everything in multisite world, it is always subject to change.