Welcome back to our monthly All About Multisite podcast! 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 the Weekend Experience Director at Christ Fellowship in Miami, 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 twelfth episode.

Opening Question: What’s something surprising that you’ve learned about leadership in the year?

* Natalie – You’re not as important as you think you are. It’s true. It’s God’s Kingdom and He’s going to continue to push through the things that need to happen and I get to be part of this cool thing. * Greg – Two things: One is that loving relationship makes leadership almost effortless. The other one is that people actually want to grow as leaders. They want to become leaders and grow as leaders.* Ben – The first is that I’m not as good of a leader as I thought or fancied myself to be. The second is that you can manage people you don’t love, but you can’t lead people you don’t love. If I want to draw out the best in them and help them be who they were designed to be by God, I really need to love them. * Rich – I’ve been wrestling with the idea that as a leader, particularly in an organization where you have some staff that report to you and you have some people that work full-time, 50-60% of my job is just acquiring great staff. What can we do to ensure that onboarding experience is the best it can be? What can we do to ensure we’re finding the right people?

Question 1: When

it’s a larger venue, do you start with multiple services so the volunteers can

attend one and serve one, or start with one service for a while and then work

up to adding the second service?

When you launch a new campus, Natalie explains from experience that volunteers and staff will develop some bad habits that need to be addressed. There will be great things that happen, but also issues that need to be corrected. One service will lead to one set of bad habits, but two services doubles that all at once. Nail the site experience before you replicate it. Refine how you run the service and then begin the second service.

Ask yourself the important questions before starting the second service: What is the capacity of the location? Natalie says that one of the worst things you could do is turn away people with kids. If your location doesn’t have capacity for kids’ classes,