Source: The Biggest Challenges in Churches

The post The Biggest Challenges in Churches appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Carey Nieuwhof: Something’s driving your church.  There are a variety of things that drive a church…the challenge for many church leaders is no one is really quite clear on what that is.

What drives your church is critical because it impacts everything you do. Ultimately, it directly impacts both your health and your growth as a congregation.

As I talk to leaders of churches of all sizes, I find different factors at work.

As much as we’d all love to say Jesus runs the church, the reality is that church is a partnership. God seems to delight in human interaction, and while God is in control, leaders have a role.

How we play that role can can create health or dysfunction.

Here are 4 things that shouldn’t drive church growth (and one thing that should)…

The post 4 Things That Shouldn’t Drive Church Growth (And One Thing That Should) appeared first on CareyNieuwhof.com.

Source: 4 Things That Shouldn’t Drive Church Growth (And One Thing That Should)

The post 4 Things That Shouldn’t Drive Church Growth (And One Thing That Should) appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Rich Birch: Welcome to our new podcast all about multisite! I’m chatting with a group of multisite ninjas and answering your questions about the ins and outs of launching new campuses. Our group is as follows:

Natalie Frisk is our family ministry expert. She is a key leader from The Meeting House. This church has 19 (!) locations and is doing all kinds of great stuff, including a killer kids’ & youth curriculum that they give away for free. Natalie’s a lot of fun and will have so many great insights around leading in a thriving multisite church.

Greg Curtis is our guest connections and assimilation expert. He leads at Eastside Christian Church, one of the fastest growing churches in the country, and literally, is the “go to” source for getting people to stick and stay in the church. (Eastside has assimilated something like 1,500 people in the last 18 months!) His coaching practice around assimilation is amazing.

Ben Stapley is our communications and service programming expert. Ben is one of the most helpful leaders I know. His day job is at Liquid Church in NJ, but he does so much to help other leaders with the “big show” part of church world.

And I, Rich, have been involved with 14 different campus launches over the years and enjoy helping churches that are thinking about multisite.

We are here to answer your questions about running a multisite church and are excited to be here today with our second episode.

Opening Question: A surprise you had when you got into leading within a multisite church?

Natalie Frisk – How important developing the right system is. I get a little uncomfortable when people bring up systems and structures, but seeing their value and how they help us do ministry well was my biggest surprise.
Greg Curtis – How franchisable what we do is. I was surprised we could use sites that were a school or where we were taking over their facility. Whether we had a new facility or an old facility, either way it always felt like our own campus. And the other surprise was navigating the dotted and solid line relationships that we talked about in our last podcast.
Ben Stapley – Seeing the change in terms in arts and creativity and what we were able to do in a single site was different in what we did in a multisite. I thought I used to be open handed in passing off leadership pretty easily, but you need to do that much faster at a multisite.

Q1: How do you break through the growth barrier of your church? What is a healthy size for your church and how do you help it grow?

Are you structured for growth to get past the 200, 500, etc. barrier? Leadership development and volunteer structure is one of the biggest hindrances or accelerators to breaking a growth barrier. Not preparing people to take on more ownership and responsibility, especially in a volunteer capacity, can cap growth. Are you structured to grow? The health of the size of a site depends on the health of the culture. We can forget to set a tone for prayer, spiritual health, and really listening to what God wants for our campuses.

Each campus has its own journey. Your strategy generates the growth, but you need the culture to fuel it. Create the strategy with the processes and systems for running the campus before launching the site. Factor in your regional uniqueness when thinking through a healthy size for your campus. It can be easy to look to mega churches in large cities in the bible belt and think if your campus isn’t 1,000 plus then something is wrong, but those numbers aren’t the same everywhere.

From a service and programming perspective, create big days and develop an invite strategy for those. Big days include Christmas and Easter, but look for other days that can be pivotal for inviting unchurched people from your community. For example, create a movie kickoff day in the summer with an all-campus service. The invest and invite strategy has a vision through the year to lovingly invest in the people around you and invite them to church where they can experience a loving God. Do this with a focused message series each year, and provide invitation tools like postcards at the launch of every series.

Q2: What is the difference between multisite and planting a new church? What are the pros and cons between the two?

All churches should have a multiplication mindset and multisite is just one way to that. The gospel makes it clear that we are supposed to be making disciples wherever we go. Church planting takes a new leader and a new model to a new community, and they have a new approach they believe should be different from another church. Multisite uses a new leader in a new community, but they are using an already-existing model. A pro of church planting is it is a lot more organic and authentic to its community. You can tailor it specifically to serve the unique are it’s in. The pro of a multisite church is it is a lot more efficient. It’s like a franchise—you create one model and one experience and then duplicate that to create more of the same thing in different areas. If your context is pretty similar, go multisite.

Cost is another huge benefit to going multisite, versus church planting, both for staff and property. Multisite allows the potential for shared resources and the ability to maximize stewardship dollars in certain areas, whereas church planting must build from scratch from the ground up. Property costs and staffing can be a huge drain to a church plant.

Q3: How is your church doing leadership development?

A strong leadership development program is vital to multiplication within your church. Eastside is currently two thirds of the way through creating a new culture of people development, which has 3 components: preparation, inspiration and ongoing equipping. The prep happens through prep modules that train people in 5 leadership competencies that move someone up a leadership level. The inspiration happens through large leadership events. The ongoing equipping happens through huddles on campus during work hours that all staff and key volunteers are invited to. These reflect areas of need, growth as determined by observation and even performance reviews. These huddles become a key way that people can improve and grow in their capacity as leaders and move up in the organization. If someone has an area where they need improvement, they can provide an ongoing equipping huddle for that person to help them move along in their leadership development. Don’t think of it as just a program, but as a culture. Having a culture-wide way of developing leaders will help your multisite campuses. Ask the question: who am I developing to replace me? Have creativity with leadership development and try new things to find that person who might fill your shoes one day.

Contact us at our websites:

www.themeetinghouse.com

www.curriculum.church

www.gregcurtis-assimilation.com

www.liquidchurch.com

www.benstapley.info

Got a question for us? Record it and send it to rich@unseminary.com

Thank You for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally!

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live! 

Source: All About Multisite: Campus Growth Barriers, Multisite vs. Church Planting & Leadership Development – unSeminary

The post All About Multisite: Campus Growth Barriers, Multisite vs. Church Planting & Leadership Development – unSeminary appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Rich Birch: The only people who like big churches are pastors.

One of the paradoxes that churches face as they grow beyond 1,000 in attendance is that they actually need to act more like a small church in some ways. The “competition” of large and growing churches is actually much smaller churches where people are “known” by others. Your church is going to need to find new ways to ensure people feel connected to your church if you are wanting to grow beyond the 1,000 barrier.

People stick and stay at your church because they find community and care there. They find a sense of “home” and relationship. They may be attracted by the great teaching, fantastic kids programs, and amazing music; but they will only stay if they find relationships with real people to help them stay connected. Ultimately, they need to find friends who they recognize at the church. There are a number of ways your church can work in, in order to ensure people perceive your church as relationally connecting people. You need to be seen as a warm and caring community long before people will find an actual community. (This is true of all churches regardless of their size.)

On the journey of growing your church to this size, you probably went through a phase where you needed to “play bigger” … do things that larger churches do in order to instill confidence in people to invite their friends. Ironically, as you grow, you actually need to dial back some of those things because your size can work against you reaching people. If people perceive that you’re just obsessed with being bigger they will be turned off. Here are 5 ways to ensure your church is staying personal and relational as you grow:

Avoid generic@ Email Addresses

Stop using those generic email inbox accounts. Let people know that there are real live people who answer the emails as your churches and not a faceless organization. When you use those generic email addresses you are subtly communicating to your people that your team is untouchable and unreachable. The sorts of addresses we’re talking about are:

info@
office@
hello@
team@

Managing email is a lot of work, yes. Often leaders are overwhelmed by how many inbound emails they receive. The “generic” email account is an attempt to stem that tide and deal with requests by a group of people. Rather than doing that, have a team manage your leader’s email inboxes. People from your church will understand when they email a team member of your church and that email is passed onto another person who helps solve their problem. When done well, that contact makes your people feel special—not ignored or treated like a number.

Pick up the Phone!

How do you feel when you call a business or organization and you hear the call automatically routed over to voicemail?

What happens inside of you when you need to “push 1 for customer service … push 2 for support …”?

A “simple” way your church can stay relationally connected is to have a real, live person pick up the phone and answer it. It’s not as “efficient” as just making people route their own calls through the menu and such, but the human interaction speaks volumes about the importance of people to your church. As your church grows, there are volunteers who can be trained towards this role. Alternatively, a service like Call Ruby could also handle phone calls for you for a cost lower than a full-time staff member.

I’ve known the pain of people who have a serious pastoral care situation only to be met with a “voice jail” and an inability to navigate the tree to find the right people, largely due to the fact that they are in the midst of a pastoral care crisis. Our voice mail system just added insult and injury to a tough personal situation. Our system reinforced a lingering suspicion that our church was only interested in “being bigger” and “lost touch” with people. We earned the criticism… it was, unfortunately, true in this case.

As I was writing this article, I picked up the phone and called Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL; Life.Church in Oklahoma City, OK; and North Point Church in Alpharetta, GA. The combined attendance of these three churches is over 100,000. If these churches have figured out how to scale this one aspect of staying personal, I’m sure your church can too!

Clear & Obvious Path for People to Get Connected

There seems to be an inverse relationship between the number of programs a church talks about with their people and its size. The larger the church—it seems like—the less “programs” they talk about. They’ve figured out how to narrow the focus and move people to get connected. However, smaller churches seem to list a long menu of lots of programs and ministries that people might want to connect with.

Churches that have been able to jump the 1,000 barrier had made a clear and obvious pathway for people to walk to get connected. There are simple steps that people don’t need to wonder about. It’s overtly stated and simple to follow. Your church would be wise to constantly look at this part of what you do and ask if there is anything else you can do to make it clearer and more obvious as to how people can get connected to your church.

Although it is nuanced across a wide variety of styles and approaches to the church, there are some common elements to this pathway that we’re seeing in prevailing churches:

New Here Gifts // Both to thank guests and to ask them for contact information.
Next Steps “Class” // A simple & regular event to get people to learn more about the church and to make a few new friends.
Teams & Groups // For a clear understanding about the paths for serving on a team and building community in a group.

Name tags … seriously

Where can you insert name tags into your experience? (I know … some people hate name tags!) I’m a convert when it comes to using name tags in churches. I used to think it was a crazy idea, but I’ve been convinced that every church should be looking at adding them to their game. Of course, you won’t be able to get 100% of your people to take a name tag, but it’s worth the effort. I’m talking about trying to get people to wear a name tag sticker that your team fills out their name on, not a predone name tag that people pick up somewhere.

Some of the reasons I’ve become convinced of this first hand are:

Guest Oriented // People want to be known. I know that there is a school of thought that says that people want to be totally anonymous when they arrive at church. The dangerous application of this belief is that we go out of the way to make it hard for people to connect. We want to give people space to control their experience with our church, but we also want to meet them when they are ready to connect. The goal is to move them from anonymity to community. Asking them to fill out a simple name tag is a small step toward being part of the community.
It’s an Invitation to Talk // Our hope is that when people come to church they connect with the community… the goal is to get people talking to each other! People love to hear their own name… it’s the sweetest word they hear all day. By offering name tags, we are multiplying out lots of great conversations in church. What a positive emotion to associate with our church!
Creates Service Opportunities // In order to make name tags for large crowds, you need a lot of people who are ready to make them up. This creates more service opportunities… more service opportunities mean more people are connected to the church!
Helpful for Your Team // Let’s be honest … you can remember maybe 200 people’s names when you see their faces, but you can probably remember stuff about 1,500 people when given their face and name. (Think about Facebook… the fact that you see people’s names and faces boosts your recall about the details of other people’s lives big time!) The name tag helps your team remember a little bit more about your people by just giving them a little bit of information about your guests.
It’s Not About You … // Name tags by definition are about the other people around us, not ourselves. It’s a declaration that I’m not the center of this universe… that I acknowledge that everyone doesn’t know me… that I’m not that big of a deal. When we put on a name tag we are serving other people who might feel uncomfortable coming up to you.

The challenge for your church is to see where in your ministry you could add name tags to make it more relational. Maybe you don’t want to dive headlong and add them to the main adult service but there are lots of other places where you can use them. Put them out on a table when your volunteers show up for training. Encourage your small groups to do them for the first few weeks when they meet. Get them on people at your “new here” receptions. As you see the impact of people having these simple tools in your midst, I’m convinced you’ll want to add them to more environments.

Add Coffee to Your Foyer

The smell of coffee means welcome and community. Our culture has been trained to associate drinking coffee with connecting with people. (Thanks Starbucks!) Many churches remove coffee from what they offer as they grow because of the cost and complexity of doing it at scale. That’s a mistake. Coffee slows your community down as they come and go from your services and encourages people to talk with each other.

Crossroads Church in Cincinnati has been named the fastest growing church in two of the last three years. Nearly 30,000 people attend their services regularly. Coffee is a big part of their front-end guest experience. In fact, for years they had a picture of a coffee cup on the home page of their website. (At the time of writing this, they still had that coffee cup as their icon on their various social media profiles.) If you bump into their leadership and ask them what the deal is with coffee, they will effuse about how it speaks to a larger reality of what they are looking at being as a church. Clearly, they have a lot more going on than just great coffee that is driving their growth, but they are a good example of a church using coffee at scale to help build community and connection.

I’m not even a huge coffee drinker and I’ve seen this dynamic play out in my ministry over the years! The campuses that we had where we offered coffee do have a more relational feel to the foyers, and those that don’t are lacking something. I know it’s a stretch financially as you grow because it becomes increasingly complex to offer a lot of coffee at scale in a short amount of time, but it may help to consider it!

I’d love to hear from you.

Only 2% of churches push beyond 1,000 people in attendance. It’s a complex adventure leading your church into that territory. I’d love to hear from you about what you are learning as you attempt it. Here are some past articles from unSeminary to help you:

5 Reasons Kids’ Ministry is So Important to Churches that Want to Break the 1,000 Barrier
5 Characteristics of Church Staff Teams that Break the 1,000 Barrier
7 Pivots Churches Make to Break the 1,000 Barrier

Source: 5 Ways Churches That Want to Break the 1,000 Barrier Stay Personal & Relational – unSeminary

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