REVEAL's Church Leadership Podcast

Launching multiple sites has been a top “go to” strategy for church expansion for three decades. Of the 70 multi-site churches that have fielded the REVEAL for Church survey, a large percentage fall into the more spiritually vibrant archetypes. But while many multi-site strategies have been great successes, there have been failures along the way. In this episode, we examine what REVEAL data show about the spiritual vibrancy of multi-site churches and talk with Jim Tomberlin about strategies for successful expansion into multiple campuses. Jim has launched many multi-site congregations and is the founder of a consulting organization called Multisite Solutions.

About 7% of the churches in the REVEAL database are multicultural churches, with at least 20% of congregants being of diverse ethnicities. These churches are among the most spiritually vibrant of the churches who have taken the survey. In this episode, we share the impressive statistics that show the vibrancy of multicultural churches and speak with Albert Tate, founding pastor of Fellowship Monrovia Church in California, which is a thriving multi-ethnic, multi-generational congregation.

In this episode, we open the REVEAL database to share some surprising information about what “average” looks like. Having surveyed more than 2,000 churches, REVEAL’s database provides a statistical profile of averages for many aspects of church life, including congregant behaviors (how often do they really read the Bible every week?) and congregant attitudes (how strongly do they believe in salvation by grace or the authority of the Bible?).

In this episode we focus on how churches that take the REVEAL survey can benefit from engaging with a coach to help them plan and implement changes based on their results.

In this episode we interviewed Keith Doornbus, one of our first REVEAL clients when he was pastor of Providence Church in Holland, Michigan. Providence took the REVEAL survey three times, improving from Troubled to Average. Keith shares his perspective on using REVEAL to turnaround Troubled and Introverted churches, both as a pastor who used REVEAL to understand his own congregation and as the coach for many pastors in the Christian Reformed Church who have taken the survey.

This episode introduces you to the Troubled Church, an archetype that accounts for 14 percent of the churches in the REVEAL database. The Troubled Church is one in which congregants are both spiritually immature and unhappy with their church. This dual challenge makes turning around a Troubled Church difficult, but not impossible. In fact, 80 percent of the Troubled Churches that have taken the REVEAL survey more than once have changed archetypes.

This episode introduces you to the Complacent Church, which is the one of the largest of the eight archetypes we described in Episode 10. Complacent Churches account for 17 percent of the churches in our database. The Complacent Church is filled with people who are happy with their church, their pastor, and their busy, active lives. But they’re going through the motions—unaware of the danger that they are missing out on the central purpose of being a Christian, which is to grow into a disciple of Jesus Christ

In this episode, we talked with Robert Kelly, lead pastor of Beacon Church in Long Island, New York. Beacon Church took the REVEAL survey in 2012 and fell into the Extroverted Church archetype. Robert shares what his church has done to create a discipleship pathway to grow newcomers into missional disciplemakers.

In this episode, we talk about the factors that set the Extroverted Church apart and then use the stories of a few Extroverted Churches to give you some practical insights. The Extroverted Church is just what the name implies—it’s a church that is “turned outward.” It’s friendly; it likes to meet new people. It is also highly engaged in serving its community. However, Extroverted church congregants are weak in their core Christian beliefs and don’t engage very frequently in personal spiritual practices. Just nine percent of the churches in the REVEAL database are in the Extroverted archetype.