by Rich Birch: Over the last 20 years, I’ve spent a lot of time helping multi-site churches wrestle through how to launch and lead thriving campuses.

One of the things that often comes up is the “dotted line and solid line” conversation. This is the conversation that attempts to outline how the various aspects of church leadership relate to each other. In particular, this refers to the lines on an organizational chart that define responsibilities and authority.

Solid lines show that the people “down” the org chart have a direct reporting relationship to the people connected to them.

Dotted lines show that the people “down” the org chart have “lesser” reporting relationships than those with the solid lines.

Most church structures resemble a pyramid where everyone in the church reports upwards through someone else to one authority figure or a Board at the top. However, multi-site churches are organized around a matrix comprised of central leaders responsible for functions across all locations and a group of campus leaders responsible for their specific location.

There is a tremendous amount of conversation around where the dotted and solid lines fall for multi-site churches. Some church structures have the solid lines move towards a central leadership team and the dotted lines then flowing outwards to campus leaders. To make this conversation even more interesting, you can also find churches that are structured the exact opposite way. Every multi-site church needs to deliver a common experience across their multiple locations. Dotted and solid lines are a way to structure leadership to achieve that common experience. This type of structure is called a matrix model.

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Source: 5 Reasons “Dotted Lines and Solid Lines” are Overrated in Multi-Site Churches

The post 5 Reasons “Dotted Lines and Solid Lines” are Overrated in Multi-Site Churches appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Today’s post is written by Tony Morgan, Founder of The UnStuck Group. 

Here’s a church growth lid I don’t hear people talking about very often—your org chart.

Yep, the way your church is structured can actually cap your growth. It very commonly does.

A bad structure negatively impacts the health and effectiveness of the team, which ultimately impacts the health of the church.

And you may not even realize it’s the culprit.

I often hear something like this from pastors my team at The Unstuck Group and I are serving:

“I knew we needed to assess our ministry’s health. I knew we needed to clarify our vision for the future. But I didn’t realize just how mismatched our staff structure was for our mission and ministry strategy.”

They’re referring to a key moment in their experience of walking through the Unstuck Process—which is my team’s way of helping a church assess ministry health, build a plan and strategy, align the staff structure to that strategy, and build systems for execution and follow-through.

What they learn in the Structure phase of the process seems to illuminate the rest and make it all come together. You can learn more about how the Unstuck Process works here.

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The post 3 Structure Issues That Get Church Staff Teams Stuck appeared first on CareyNieuwhof.com.

Source: 3 Structure Issues That Get Church Staff Teams Stuck

The post 3 Structure Issues That Get Church Staff Teams Stuck appeared first on Passion for Planting.