By NewChurches.com: In Episode 597 of the NewChurches Q&A Podcast, Daniel and Ed explore new, creative, and imaginative ways to handle issues surrounding church planting.

“What are some new, creative, and imaginative ways denominations and networks are planting churches?”

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

Different ways church planters are creating churches in 2021
If a stronger focus on disciple making and micro church approaches will be the new norm

 Shareable Quotes (#NewChurches):

“Many networks tend to have a looser ecclesiology, they are get it done people.” – @edstetzer
“We are making a list of the ways churches are combining facilities.” – @edstetzer
“Our number one big opportunity was online.” – @edstetzer
“The idea of packing a bunch of people in an exciting room for a worship service didn’t resonate with a lot of people in 2020 and early 2021, so I think that helped push people toward more missional approaches.” – @edstetzer
“Launch large, up until COVID, had been increasing. And then when COVID hit, all these churches had to pivot.” – @danielsangi
“Many churches during the pandemic launched online.” – @danielsangi
“People revert to the norm. The most likely predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” – @edstetzer
“Other cultural issues would have in my view longer term, bigger impacts on missiological strategy assuming the pandemic is a two year experience.” – @edstetzer

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This Episode’s Sponsor:

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So BELAY, the innovative staffing solution with over 10 years of experience serving churches with virtual assistants, bookkeepers and social media strategists, is offering a free download of their resource, ‘Church Leaders: Essential Strategies to Unleash Productivity.’

Let BELAY help your church live its mission in your community by helping you juggle less and accomplish more. Visit belaysolutions.com/lifeway for your free download.

The post Episode 597: New, Creative, and Imaginative Ways to Plant Churches, part 1 appeared first on NewChurches.com – Church Planting, Multisite, and Multiplication.

Source: Episode 597: New, Creative, and Imaginative Ways to Plant Churches, part 1

The post Episode 597: New, Creative, and Imaginative Ways to Plant Churches, part 1 appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Source: 5 Ways Churches Can Bless Moms on Mother’s Day

The post 5 Ways Churches Can Bless Moms on Mother’s Day appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by unSeminary: Welcome to the unSeminary podcast. I’m excited to be talking with Michael Volbeda, Executive Pastor of Ministries at Brentwood Baptist Church in the Nashville, Tennessee area. Brentwood went from two to four campuses in 2014 and has since grown to eight locations. As time went on, the church realized it was operating as if it still had only two locations to manage.

Michael is with us today to talk about how Brentwood’s sudden growth forced it to restructure and develop a new way to align its campuses while allowing for customization.

Find the right model for your church. // Many multisite churches have a video venue for their campuses, but that model didn’t fit what Brentwood was trying to accomplish. After researching what other churches were doing, they decided a live preaching model resonated with them best. Rather than having a franchise/cookie cutter structure for sites, their goal was to allow each campus to have a different name and feel, which were chosen to reflect the communities they were in. In this case, Brentwood Baptist is the “parent organization” but at each campus they offer as close to a customizable experience as they can.Maintaining alignment. // There are certain aspects that all campuses hold in common, such as the alignment of the weekend messages. The preaching team meets for a retreat and the sermon calendar is planned in advance. Theological research and background info is provided for sermons, but then campus pastors can take it in whatever direction they want to based on what fits their congregation. Each Monday, all eight campus pastors meet to talk about the upcoming service and share how they are moving forward with the message as well as hone their craft together. Balancing alignment with customization. // Brentwood has maintained a strong alignment across its campuses, but they also allow a fair amount of creativity at each site. Working toward alignment among the different locations while remaining open-handed to allow customization is a tension to be managed. This is what ultimately led to some restructuring as Brentwood realized they were still operating like they only had two campuses instead of eight. After clarifying their mission, vision and values, they created a new approach to strategic planning and ministry alignment that they call OKRs, which comes from the book Measure What Matters by John Doerr. OKRs stands for objectives and key results. What are the most critical things to focus on? // Of all the things a church could be doing, the way to start is to ask what items are the most mission-critical and important. These things begin to help you understand what is an objective. Set some very clear objectives of what you want to accomplish. Then lay out specific key results that you can measure along the way. Drive all activity and focus toward those things. Brentwood has a 5 year vision to have: 500,000 gospel conversations, 10,000 disciples making disciples, and 100 healthy congregations (not campuses). Break down each of these huge objectives bit by bit as an overall organization, and allow campuses to break them down further based on their specific community challenges and needs. Brentwood, for example, realized they needed a better training process for gospel conversations; people needed to understand and see themselves as missionaries where they live, work and play. So that helped them to take their next step and put some dates on that key result.Helping the church change direction. // Setting up OKRs and applying dates to the key results helped Brentwood to hold themselves accountable. Each campus came up with their own version of unique ways to engage their congregation to get involved. Churchwide OKRs, campus OKRs and then individual OKRs developed by the staff helped everyone to row together, and the whole organization was able to pivot as a result. OKRs also were integrated into the Brentwood staff’s performance reviews and were a regular part of staff meetings. They helped people prioritize work for the week or month. Brentwood uses a review system three times a year as a big part of the conversations on what is being achieved in each location.Rethink and adjust paths. // If you’re behind on your key results, or something unexpected happens (like a pandemic), the benefit of the OKR approach is that you are able to reshuffle, tweak, and adjust the key results. The objectives of the church stay the same, but key results can be changed to take current conditions into account.

You can learn more about Brentwood Baptist Church at www.brentwoodbaptist.com. To see a sample of Brentwood’s OKRs, download this document.

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!

Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Carey Nieuwhof

Surrounding yourself with other high capacity leaders is so important right now. When you’re well connected, you can put meaning to content and make well-informed decisions.

Carey Nieuwhof created The Leader’s Circle in March 2020, an inner circle of high capacity leaders who have direct access to him and to one another. If you want to stop leading alone and start leading together, apply now to join The Leader’s Circle.

Source: Multisite Alignment by Leveraging Objectives & Key Results with Michael Volbeda

The post Multisite Alignment by Leveraging Objectives & Key Results with Michael Volbeda appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Source: What I Learned as Multisite Campus Pastor

The post What I Learned as Multisite Campus Pastor appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by unSeminary: Thank you for listening in to this week’s unSeminary podcast. We’re focusing on the multisite movement this month and today we have Greg Ligon, the chief operating officer at Leadership Network joining us.

Leadership Network provides tools and resources to help churches reach and impact more people for Christ. They gather innovative church leaders together to learn from each other and then communicate those learnings to the broader church community.

Greg is with us today to talk about where multisite is headed in the future.

Rethink the models. // Some of the churches who were early adopters and innovators at the beginning of the multisite movement are now at a place where they are looking to grow in new ways. Leadership Network gathered some of the leaders from these churches and took them to corporate environments, such as Chick-fil-A, Google and Marriott to name a few, to gather new input and begin rethinking what the multisite models are. For example, early on churches thought the focus was only on video, even though historically that wasn’t really the case. Now an emerging focus is on digital space.Consider the digital world. // What does it mean for a church to be “digital”? Crossroads Church in Cincinnati is beginning to measure not only the people in their physical campuses, but also who shows up to their online campuses. They customize online feeds based on zip codes so that people logged in will see a customized stream of the campus service located in their area. Mobile pop-up campus. // Christ Fellowship in Palm Beach Gardens is experimenting with what they call pop-up church. In this model, once or twice a month Christ Fellowship takes the equipment from a portable campus to another location in their region where they might consider a future campus. By experimenting with a pop-up church once a month in a new area, they see what kind of a response they might get to a possible campus there.Innovations in the digital space. // There continue to be refinements in what it means to have an online campus. Churches are doing more and more beyond simply broadcasting the weekend experience. Some are using podcasts in a targeted way to reach a particular audience or demographic in their community that might not otherwise be attracted to the church. In this way, podcasts serve as an introduction to the church. Another example from Crossroads Church is the app they’ve created called Crossroads Connect. Through geo-targeting capabilities, the app identifies where its users are located and helps build community across the country by connecting people with other users in their area. It also opens the door for ministry opportunities and allows Crossroads to see where their are concentrations of people in cities. Down the road, this could lead to a member of the Crossroads team moving to the area, building community and eventually starting a campus there.Creative partnerships. // There isn’t any slowing down in the multisite world. Churches are looking for opportunities to develop creative partnerships with other organizations in their communities. Crossroads Community Church, for example, has partnered with Aspen Group to co-build a community sports facility which they use as a campus venue, but Aspen manages and operates to serve the community. Crossroads Community also has a partnership with Alpha and as they go into prisons, they have asked Crossroads to consider establishing campuses within the prisons. Greg anticipates we will see more creative applications of multisite as we move into the next decade.Examine a change in support structure. // When churches decide to go multisite, they need to revisit the support structure they’ve put in place as the church grows. The current model may work well with a second campus and even a third. But once the number of campuses grows beyond that, the leadership needs to examine a change in the staff support structure and commitment to multisite.

You can learn more about Leadership Network at their website leadnet.org and reach Greg at greg.ligon@leadnet.org.

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: The Future of Multisite with Greg Ligon

The post The Future of Multisite with Greg Ligon appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by unSeminary: Thanks for joining this week’s unSeminary podcast. This is multisite month and I’m excited to have Paul Martel with us today. He is the CEO and cofounder of Living As One.

Paul began his work doing broadcasts at Hewlett-Packard and managing their transmissions. In the meantime, he was also helping his church with A/V needs. When his church wanted to do video streaming at their campuses, Paul brought in the same technology from HP to make it happen. Whereas HP was using a private internet connection for their transmissions, however, the church had to use public internet connections. As a result, data transfer for the church was incredibly slow and the campus viewing experience was poor because video would cut out. Paul started Living As One in response to this problem churches have with streaming content to their locations.

Paul is with us today to talk about the technology that Living As One has created and how it can help with streaming video to church campuses.

The challenges of video delivery. // If you’re a church doing video teaching at your campuses, chances are you’re handling the transmission of that video in one of two ways. One method is to record your content to solid state hard drives and physically drive them to other campuses. However, this method can create a delay if the delivery isn’t on time, a file can get corrupted, or there can be on-the-spot errors that are difficult to solve in the moment. Another method churches use is to create a satellite connection in order to stream their content to campuses. But satellite is expensive at a $300,000 initial investment, plus additional costs for the satellite time as it’s used. Satellite also doesn’t work well for portable campuses because you have to set up a satellite receiver, and this can be tough for volunteers that don’t have the technical expertise.Another solution. // Paul and his team knew that they couldn’t fix the slow transfer rates of public internet connections and it would cost churches thousands and thousands of dollars for a private connection. So Living As One engineered another option for churches. They built their own hardware and software to capture the video and store everything at every step in the transmission process. This method put all of that data on local hard drives to make sure the broadcast was transmitted appropriately. Even if the internet at one location went out, everything was still stored and started back up where it left off when the connection returned.Simple and scaleable. // Because the system that Living As One developed is built through a cloud network, it’s incredibly scaleable. Plus it’s simple to use on both the broadcast sending and receiving end. The simplicity of the design eliminates the need for volunteers to have special expertise when it comes to using this system. The methods that Living As One uses make it easy to keep these broadcasts streaming on both ends and they teach users how to solve issues that may come up. Additionally, the system is set up to broadcast automatically during scheduled service times. If there are any problems, the system will send alerts directly to you.Easy setup for portable and small campuses. // Portable campuses are using this plan of streaming too since their internet is not always reliable. They can simply roll in their equipment on its rack during set-up and use wireless hot spots to broadcast the service. These systems have even been used in house churches where a group can gather to watch a message from another church. Some house churches in Australia that used this method grew so large that they became church campuses.

You can find out more about Living As One and how they can help your church at www.livingasone.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!

Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Red Letter Challenge

Red Letter Challenge is not only a plug-and-play campaign to help your church gain a better insight into the teaching of Jesus, but it will also help your church grow because of deeper engagement!

Visit redletterchallenge.com/unseminary to explore turnkey packages and see what this resource can do for your church.

Source: Under the Hood of the Technology Driving So Many Multisite Churches with Paul Martel

The post Under the Hood of the Technology Driving So Many Multisite Churches with Paul Martel appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by unSeminary: Has your campus growth stalled out?

Have you launched a few locations but they aren’t reaching the community in the way that you’d like?

Are you wondering why your campuses aren’t growing as large as your initial location?

In a recent study of the multisite church movement, Leadership Network found that the normative multisite church experience is that one campus accounts for the majority of church attendance. In fact, the data shows that, on average, one campus draws the largest crowds and accounts for 63% of the overall church attendance. While this is an important fact to keep in mind when benchmarking your church against the broader movement, there are some tactics you can employ to encourage your campuses to grow and reach more people.

In my book and video course, Church Growth Flywheel, I explore the fact that the key factor for fast-growing churches is that growing churches create a vibrant invite culture where people are regularly encouraged to invite their friends.

Growing churches are filled with people who frequently reach out to others and ask them to come to church. If your campus is going to grow, you need to get your people involved in the mission! Here are three ways you could increase the invite culture at your church:

Leverage Regular Launch Cycles

Hopefully, your church is regularly launching new campuses. This provides an incredible opportunity to also see growth at your existing campuses.

Often when a new campus is opened, there is increased communication in the church about the new launch. The church will celebrate milestones towards the launch, rally new volunteers to join the launch team, distribute promotional material in the community, and plan programming to help the new campus be as highly “inviteable” as possible. Take advantage of all those opportunities!

Increase Your Volunteer Core // Healthy campuses are filled with lots of volunteers. Leverage the launch of the new location to raise up new leaders at your campus. Encourage your people to either go and help launch the new location or stay where they are and make that campus healthier. Don’t miss this opportunity to engage new groups of people in service.Double Up on Promotional Material // Chances are you are investing in some sort of marketing for the launch of the new campus. The expensive part of that process is the strategy and planning piece. Use that same strategy to reintroduce your community to your existing campuses. You could even do a “grand re-opening” celebration around a milestone anniversary like five years! Series Promotion // No doubt your church will host a “homerun series” with content that is guaranteed to get your people inviting others. Don’t miss the opportunity to go above and beyond with invite tools for this series at every campus. Develop invite cards and shareable social media content for your people to distribute and share. Countdown to the launch of the series so people know exactly when to invite their friends. Ask them who they are inviting in the weeks leading up to the series launch. Spend time publicly praying that God would draw people to the church for this special series.

Big Days Make a Big Deal 

There are three or four days every year where you will see a spike in attendance at your campuses. It’s on these “big days” that two things happen: Your people are more likely to invite their friends, and these friends are more likely to attend.

Make sure that you encourage your people to invite their friends on these big days. These few weekends during the year represent a disproportionate opportunity to increase the invite culture at your campus. Understanding this opportunity and deploying a simple strategy to encourage your people to invite others will result in a huge bump in attendance over time.

In most churches, the two biggest days are Christmas and Easter. However, understanding what the third and fourth biggest days are for your church is important for you as a campus leader. Often times Mother’s Day is one of those days. Sometimes it’s the Sunday after the time change in the fall. The first thing you need to do is identify what those big days are.

Once you’ve identified the big days, you should rally your campus leadership team around these days to encourage your people to invite their friends. Find something to add to your services on these weekends that will draw interest. Add a photo booth to your Christmas Eve services and encourage your people to bring the entire family to take a picture at the service. Do an Easter egg hunt during your Easter weekend services and open up a special area for kids who bring friends to collect even more eggs from! Let people know that you’ll be drawing for a special “Ultimate Mom’s Getaway Weekend” at your Mother’s Day service. Throw a fun “pajama sleep-in party” for your kid’s ministry that encourages your church’s families to invite their kids’ friends to sleepover at their place and then meet the parents at church the next morning.

Community Service Gets People Talking

The church is best understood as a local gathering of people making a difference in its community. People love being a part of a church that positively impacts the town or region in which they live.

When you look at most of the fastest-growing multisite churches in the country, they regularly get people out of their seats and onto the streets to make a difference. These churches deeply believe in putting faith into action and mobilizing their people to make a difference in the community.

Community service days are great tools for growth because loving the people around us in a tangible manner is not only what we are called to do, but it builds connection. People love telling others about these kinds of opportunities and movements happening in their church, and campuses grow when your people talk to their friends about what the church is up to.

Here are some examples of community service opportunities you could engage with at your campus:

Park Clean Ups // Next spring you could mobilize a group of people from the church to get out and get the local parks ready for spring. Extreme Makeovers // Remember that old reality TV show that would makeover a house in a few days? You could do the same thing with a non-profit partner in town. 5K for …? // What cause captures the imagination of the people in your community? Mobilize your church to run and raise some funds for it! Free Market // Flea markets are about selling junk for a high price. Free markets are about giving away your best stuff to people in need in your community.

Get the FREE three-part video series designed to help your church launch more multisite campuses.

Is your church thinking about launching new multisite campuses? Have you already launched a campus or two but are stuck getting the next locations launched? Are you ready to take the next steps in your multisite expansion but aren’t sure where to start?

I’m releasing a FREE three-part video series designed to help your church reach more people through multisite church expansion. The lessons in this series come from my practical experience of being in the driver’s seat for 13 launches and from helping other churches like yours! Here is what we’ll be covering in the free video series:

Video #1: The Biggest Mistake Churches Make When Launching Campuses. Build an approach to launching locations that avoids this mistake, and your church will scale up to reach more people! Video #2: Keys to Picking a Great Location for Your Next Campus. Apply the lessons in this video and you’ll find effective locations that will aid your church’s growth for years to come! Video #3: 5 Dirty Secrets of the Multisite Church Movement. Finally, get an insider’s look at the underbelly of this movement to better inform your leadership as you move forward!

[Click here to sign up for the free three-part video series today.]

Download PDF Article

Source: 3 Campus Growth Tactics for Your Multisite Church

The post 3 Campus Growth Tactics for Your Multisite Church appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by unSeminary: Welcome to the unSeminary podcast. This week we are joined by Daniel Im, an author and teaching pastor at the Fellowship Church in Nashville.

Daniel is from Canada, and he has traveled across the world to help plant churches. He has been in Nashville for the last four years and also works with LifeWay to help provide resources for church planters and multisite churches.

Daniel is with us today to talk about church planting, multisite creation, and what strategies work in different contexts.

Know your current context and what “normal” is. // Depending on where and whether or not you went to seminary or bible college, and which church circles or conferences you go to, you are going to be influenced (often on an unconscious level) either toward multisite or toward church planting. Both of these strategies are great. Some can work better in certain contexts than others. Consider who the people are that you look up to ministry-wise and what they advocate.  A lot of times this dictates what that “normal” is for you. Church Plant vs Multisite. // We can think of church planters as entrepreneurial leaders who want to test a new approach or a new model that’s different than their sending church. By contrast, on the multisite side, leaders want to take the same model or a very similar model and transplant that into a new community. Multisite models can have a reputation of being primarily video-driven. But many multisite churches do live teaching or have some sort of hybrid model as well. If you are interested church planting, consider first learning in a campus pastor role at a multisite church. It is a good opportunity which allows you to gain experience, and you may discover that working in multisite is where you are called rather than planting a new church.Be competent in communication. // Campus pastors need to be extremely competent in communication. Part of this is public communication and can be via live preaching or as the primary communicator/host of the campus. When a church considers multisite vs church planting or a combination of the two, if you don’t have someone who can think like a supply chain manager and is passionate enough about communicating that they never get bored of saying the same thing over and over in different ways, then church planting might be a better option for you. Over-communication is necessary in a multisite context and as a result is not the best option for every church.Campus vs Original Site. // You can run in the same circles and speak the same words as someone else, but when it comes down to values and culture there can be a lot of disagreement. When values and culture differ from site to site within a multisite church, it will interfere with growth. Examine the communications, expectations and how the systems are working for the smaller campus vs the original site. Ask the lead pastor what was done to grow the church when it was the size of the smaller campuses. This will help the campus pastors have ideas on how to grow their campuses without trying to use strategies that only work for a much larger location.Resource for campus pastors. // LifeWay has a resource to help develop campus pastors. You can learn more and access it at newchurches.com/campuspastor.

You can learn more about Daniel and his work at danielim.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!

Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Remodel Health

The benefits platform designed for faith-based organizations.

Download their Health Insurance Buyer’s Guide for churches.

Source: Church Multiplication, Church Planting & Multisite with Daniel Im

The post Church Multiplication, Church Planting & Multisite with Daniel Im appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Source: 5 Ways Churches Can Bless Moms on Mother’s Day

The post 5 Ways Churches Can Bless Moms on Mother’s Day appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by unSeminary: Alright, you talked me into it.

I’ve received hundreds (maybe thousands) of questions over the years about my experiences in launching campuses. I’ve had the privilege of being in the driver’s seat for 13 multisite church campus launches and that means I’ve learned a lot about what not to do! We released somewhere around 1,500 volunteers into the launch teams of these campuses, and today these locations serve somewhere over 9,000 people every weekend. The multisite church movement continues to gain momentum, and I want to help equip churches to launch more locations. What questions do you have about launching? Some past questions I have received include:

How do you find enough great volunteers for a strong launch?What does a healthy launch timeline look like?Who is or should be part of the launch team?How do you market and promote the opening of the new campus so that people actually show up?

And the list goes on. And I love it because I’m ridiculously passionate about launching multisite campuses, and I want to see your church do more and succeed. Whether your church is currently just one location and you’re thinking about launching a new location or if you already have a few campuses and want to launch more, I want to help you! I’d love to hear your questions in order to integrate them into new helpful resources that we’ll be launching in the coming months.

I would love to hear YOUR burning questions! To make this as helpful as possible, submit your questions via the form below so I can make sure they are answered.

[Click here to leave your questions.]

Thanks again for all that you are doing to reach the people in your community! I’m excited to see what happens in your church as you look towards launching more locations in the future.

Source: What Do You Want To Know About Multisite Church Launches?

The post What Do You Want To Know About Multisite Church Launches? appeared first on Passion for Planting.