The Multisite Mistake Nearly Every Church Makes
I love being a part of the multisite church movement. And it’s certainly a movement!
According to the most recent research I’ve seen, this movement in the church has grown from 100 to 8,000 since the year 2000. That’s explosive growth. All the cool kids are doing it, right?
Of course, with any rapidly growing phenomenon, there will be issues and problems to navigate. The multisite movement certainly isn’t immune to issues. We should probably come back to this topic a few more times, but for now, let’s take a moment and address one specific tension between existing locations and newer campuses.
For background, I am a Campus Pastor. We call it Lead Pastor, but that distinction deserves its own post. I’ve been leading at Woodstock City Church, a campus of North Point Ministries in Atlanta, for nearly seven years. In this time, we’ve experienced a great deal of change in attendance, meeting locations, and staff just to name a few. All along the way, one of the greatest tensions we’ve navigated was learning to act our age.
Here’s what I mean specifically.
6 Questions That Will Help Your Next Sermon Reach Everyone
This is about removing assumptions in our preaching and sermon content, so ironically, we need to begin with a few assumptions.
When you preach, I assume your hope is to reach every person in your audience, connect them all to a new way of thinking, and lead them all to apply a new way of living. That’s the basic idea preaching, right? Provide true information that compels helpful application.
If we hope to lead everyone in the room to the truth of our message, we must start by connecting everyone in the room to us and our message. That’s not a simple task.
For instance, if you only had an audience of one, developing a message that will accomplish your connecting goal would be relatively simple. To grasp where one person is in their faith, understanding of God, and engagement in a Christian worldview is likely. Not necessarily easy, but certainly possible.
With an audience of 10, the task gets more complicated — potentially 10 times more complicated in fact. A larger audience brings a larger diversity of backgrounds, understandings, willingness to believe, and willingness to apply ideas or new truths.
Grow the audience to 100, or 1,000, or 10,000, and the task gets exponentially more complex.
In the face of this complexity, there is one preaching mistake I see more than any other:
Too many sermons are crafted around unshared faith assumptions.
The One Church Leadership Mistake You Cannot Make
I bet you and your team have annual goals or focus points. It’s always healthy to have a few things in focus as the year begins. It’s like an organizational resolution, but much easier to keep. I recently saw Chick-fil-A’s organizational focus for 2018. One item on their list stood out — food safety. When […]
4 Steps to Not Overreact to the Disgruntled Attendee
As a leader you are forced to make decisions, and if your church or company is bigger than you, these decisions will inevitably be upsetting to someone. Decisions have a way of upsetting the status quo. In many cases, the lack of success or progress with the status quo is why decisions are necessary.
Not to oversimplify it, but when decisions are made, the response seems to come from two separate categories of people:
1. The vocal disgruntled
2. The quiet supporters
The first category causes us to question our decision. The response (at leas the vocal response) seems disproportionately in one direction. And this disproportionate response can be unnerving.
The second category really does bring balance to the conversation, but their quiet support doesn’t ring as loudly as the disgruntled.
Facing this seemingly unbalanced response, leaders begin to either question their decisions, or worse, seek to make decisions that are more “vocally” supported.
But vocal support can feel like an organizational oxymoron. You’ve never called your local pizza delivery chain to thank them for your delivery, but you might have called to complain when your pie is late. People never call our church to tell us we’re doing a great job, but they do call (or post on FaceBook, which is so much worse and socially unaware) to complain about a decision that creates an inconvenience.
So what should we do when the vocal disgruntled feels like the vast majority?
50 Shades of Theological Gray
How comfortable are you with theological unknowns? My church upbringing formed a belief system that did not allow for any theological variance. There was black and white and not much in between, and a “lukewarm” verse taken out of context was always used to substantiate the point. If you ever hinted at a middle ground […]
Could Your Growing Ministry be Responsible for Your Shrinking Passion?
What do you do when your pastoring passion is declining?
It happens to us all, so we better have some answers.
Unfortunately, too many of our answers involve walking away from ministry, from our current churches, and from even our families, friends, and ourself.
A loss of passion can happen for many, many reasons. I’d like for us to consider one of the most common and equally hidden of them all. I stumbled upon this truth a year or more ago. I was in a funk. I was partially questioning my role, my responsibilities, and even ministry as a profession. I considered reentering the marketplace. As I began contemplating how I arrived in the funk, I realized over time our church (and everything around it) had grown somewhat substantially. Initially, this realization didn’t connect any dots. But, it did begin to launch a discovery process.
To go back in time a bit… A few years ago we would have our staff meeting in my car on the way to lunch. We were a much smaller church with way fewer resources. The entire staff served as the president and the janitor. We were all needed for basically every element of ministry that happened in and through our church. As we grew, we added staff. We added complexity. We added complications. We added a building. Throughout the change, our roles and responsibilities also changed. As the Lead Pastor, I continued to function as the president, but the janitorial elements the I often did in the past faded away. We had other staff to handle some of the things I used to do.
Why We Should Stop Comparing Our Average to Everyone Else’s Awesome
Every week, pastors and leaders are recorded all across the country. But more often than not, there is a good deal of editing, re-communicating, and “let’s try that again” happening before it ever goes public. We watch these other preachers and teachers and feel both inspired by their message and intimidated by their abilities. But we’re only seeing their highlight reels.
Why Are People Less Interested in Attending Your Church?
I recently listed 10 areas in our church where we are not satisfied. Nothing is necessarily broken, but there is room for evaluation and improvement. The law of diminishing astonishment is partially to blame for a few items on the list, like decreasing attendance patterns from regular attendees and lack of enthusiasm within the upper […]
Always Content, Never Satisfied
I love this sentiment: “Be content, not satisfied.”
I can’t remember when I first heard it. It sounds like something John Maxwell would say, but I’m not sure. It’s certainly not a new idea. But for many leaders, mastering the power of this statement is novel and can provide new innovations and invigorate change.
At Woodstock City Church where I lead, we are constantly fighting to remain content, but not satisfied. Content because we are partnering with God and his church. Unsatisfied because the mission of God’s church is too big to every feel like it is complete. We take this so seriously around our church that we even labeled it “Make it Better,” one of our six core staff behaviors. “Make it Better” means never fall prey to believing we have arrived.
You know that in an ever-evolving culture, we can never stop evolving our approach, our model, or our strategies. As my friend and boss (Andy Stanley) likes to say, “We must be married to our mission, not our model.”
How to Make Great Decision without any Clarity
As a leader, have you ever struggled with a decision?
If you lead or have ever led anything, the answer is unequivocally “yes.” Making decisions is crucial to leading. Making decisions is an inseparable part of leadership. Leaders who cease to made decisions abdicate their leadership.
Of course, some decisions are obvious, some are more challenging, and some are absolutely daunting. The decisions leaders face during times of transitions, whether personal or organizational, are often the most difficult. The reason is simple:
Transitions bring cloudy conditions.
Great decisions are only possible when we have clarity — clarity of the situation, problem, possible solutions, and ramifications. Clarity is essential, but as every leader knows, when seasons give way to what’s next, the transition creates conditions that work directly against clear decisions.
Transitions are cloudy because they happen between what is known and what is next. What is known is often clear, but what’s next is typically new. New always has an element of unknown, and unknown is often unclear. It’s like driving our car into a dense fog. When you can barely see, it makes driving nearly impossible. If the fog grows dense enough, moving forward ceases to be a viable option.
In our car, we can always pull over and wait out the fog. But as a leader, waiting out the transition isn’t an option. And hence our decision dilemma:
How do we make great decisions in cloudy conditions?
Before we answer that question, we should acknowledge that these transition decisions are often the most important decisions we as leaders make. Both an unfortunate, yet true reality. When there is change and transition, the organization and the people therein look to leadership for stability and direction. The decisions we make during these transitions set the pace, tone, and direction for the next season. These decisions are critical. And they are uncomfortable. Because they are so cloudy.
