Welcome to this week’s unSeminary podcast. We are honored to have Eric Geiger with us. He was recently with LifeWay, but has now transitioned into a new role as senior pastor at Mariners Church in southern California.

There are times as church leaders when we are shocked that the people we’ve looked up to have fallen and seem to have wrecked their lives. It’s so easy to think that it could never happen to us, but the longer he’s been in ministry, the more Eric has realized just how easily it can happen to anyone. Today we’re talking about early warning signs that we are heading down a slippery slope, practical ways we can lead our staffs to guard their hearts, and what to do if we fall.

* Early warning signs. // Looking at King David’s fall, he was a man after God’s heart and the Lord used him to unite the tribes. He was a Godly man, yet he had an affair with Bathsheba and killed her husband. In the story in 2 Samuel 11, there were some early warning signs. The first is David’s isolated and sending people away. A lot of leaders after coming back from a big downfall admit that they also became isolated. Success may have made them feel like no one understood them or they were no longer transparent with people, and they were only surrounded by people who were impressed with them. Senior pastor roles don’t have peers, what they do is so different from everyone else on the staff, and so it is almost isolating in itself. It’s important to be in relationship with people who love you and respect you, but can also rebuke you and aren’t constantly telling you how amazing you are.

* Constant boredom. // Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “Sin is always, in some sense, a life of boredom.” David gets up from his bed and walks along the palace roof, and he’s looking for something. This is the same David who in Psalm 63 said, “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” But in 2 Samuel 11, he’s not thinking of God. If we’re bored, it means we’re not looking at the Lord because He’s never boring. He breathes significance into the mundane.

* A sense of entitlement. // Rich recently read in Let Us Prey: The Plague of Narcissist Pastors and What We Can Do About It by R. Glenn Ball and Darrell Puls that 31.2% of active pastors have a narcissistic personality disorder. Pride is probably the thing that we’ll preach on the most. C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity that pride is the great sin that we see in everybody else, but have trouble seeing in ourselves. An indicator of pride is an ungrateful spirit, a sense of entitlement or ingratitude, and you see that in David when he’s confronted by the prophet Nathan. Nathan tells him that God did all these things for him, and yet it wasn’t enough, he wanted more.

* “Be killing sin or sin will be killing you.” // So how do you stop all of this? To kill isolation as a leader, be sure that the teams you’re leading are in some kind of community where they’re held accountable. Get them around other people often. To kill boredom, remind them of the holy mission they’re part of. The grand story they are called to is never boring, so be sure to stir that affection for the mission up in them. To kill pride, remind them that everything they have is only be His grace. We aren’t owed it and we don’t deserve it, we are only given it by His grace.

* Repent without excuses. // In his book How to Ruin Your Life and Starting Over When You Do, Eric shows us how starting over can work using the story of King David. The great news about David is that his story doesn’t end with his fall. He repents and God’s forgiveness and grace allows him to start over. Saul made excuses when he was confronted about his fall, but David didn’t offer excuses, he only repented.

Welcome to this week’s unSeminary podcast. We are honored to have Eric Geiger with us. He was recently with LifeWay, but has now transitioned into a new role as senior pastor at Mariners Church in southern California.

There are times as church leaders when we are shocked that the people we’ve looked up to have fallen and seem to have wrecked their lives. It’s so easy to think that it could never happen to us, but the longer he’s been in ministry, the more Eric has realized just how easily it can happen to anyone. Today we’re talking about early warning signs that we are heading down a slippery slope, practical ways we can lead our staffs to guard their hearts, and what to do if we fall.

* Early warning signs. // Looking at King David’s fall, he was a man after God’s heart and the Lord used him to unite the tribes. He was a Godly man, yet he had an affair with Bathsheba and killed her husband. In the story in 2 Samuel 11, there were some early warning signs. The first is David’s isolated and sending people away. A lot of leaders after coming back from a big downfall admit that they also became isolated. Success may have made them feel like no one understood them or they were no longer transparent with people, and they were only surrounded by people who were impressed with them. Senior pastor roles don’t have peers, what they do is so different from everyone else on the staff, and so it is almost isolating in itself. It’s important to be in relationship with people who love you and respect you, but can also rebuke you and aren’t constantly telling you how amazing you are.

* Constant boredom. // Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “Sin is always, in some sense, a life of boredom.” David gets up from his bed and walks along the palace roof, and he’s looking for something. This is the same David who in Psalm 63 said, “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” But in 2 Samuel 11, he’s not thinking of God. If we’re bored, it means we’re not looking at the Lord because He’s never boring. He breathes significance into the mundane.

* A sense of entitlement. // Rich recently read in Let Us Prey: The Plague of Narcissist Pastors and What We Can Do About It by R. Glenn Ball and Darrell Puls that 31.2% of active pastors have a narcissistic personality disorder. Pride is probably the thing that we’ll preach on the most. C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity that pride is the great sin that we see in everybody else, but have trouble seeing in ourselves. An indicator of pride is an ungrateful spirit, a sense of entitlement or ingratitude, and you see that in David when he’s confronted by the prophet Nathan. Nathan tells him that God did all these things for him, and yet it wasn’t enough, he wanted more.

* “Be killing sin or sin will be killing you.” // So how do you stop all of this? To kill isolation as a leader, be sure that the teams you’re leading are in some kind of community where they’re held accountable. Get them around other people often. To kill boredom, remind them of the holy mission they’re part of. The grand story they are called to is never boring, so be sure to stir that affection for the mission up in them. To kill pride, remind them that everything they have is only be His grace. We aren’t owed it and we don’t deserve it, we are only given it by His grace.

* Repent without excuses. // In his book How to Ruin Your Life and Starting Over When You Do, Eric shows us how starting over can work using the story of King David. The great news about David is that his story doesn’t end with his fall. He repents and God’s forgiveness and grace allows him to start over. Saul made excuses when he was confronted about his fall, but David didn’t offer excuses, he only repented.

Welcome back to our new podcast all about multisite! 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 seventh episode.

Opening question: If you could switch out your role for any other role in your church, what would it be?

* Natalie – Either a lead pastor role at one of our campuses or (if we had such a role) some kind of guest connections role.

* Greg – I would switch places with our teaching pastor.  

* Ben -I would say something like a junior high or a grief share role—for me, those are the opportunities for some pivotal moments in people’s lives.

Q1: After several years of having a second campus, we really need a model for staff interaction. Is there a good starting point to begin to put a model in place?

Natalie said that a model is more than who reports to whom; it begins with an overarching vision. What is shared, what isn’t? What makes it a multisite other than two churches that share finances or branding? Make a list of essentials that helps guide your church to understand its identity. Get to a place with a shared program, shared structure, and shared resources. Connect on training times and create a common list of everything from setting up a classroom to supplies and toys. Natalie also advised that when you plan, don’t just plan for a few locations—plan for many locations and consider what the sites would look like ten years down the road.

Ben offered insights from a service programming perspective. First, evaluate the following: how do you help teams from a creative point of view? When you go from one to more than one, start planning your preaching calendar further in advance (e.g. plan it out in the fall for the upcoming year, and roll it out to the staff around December). To streamline communications, standardize your announcements and your events, and consider hosting just one event as a whole church instead of several smaller events which vary per site. Ben also suggested that churches move from live to video announcement, have a consistent playlist for the worship teams, and standardize social media.

Greg responded to this question with a series of questions for the executive team to reflect on. Where in the spectrum between a church plant and a campus is that church? If you’re referring to one site as the “main campus,” are the sites the same size or is one significantly larger than the other? Is there any vision for another campus? When it comes to assimilation, make it the same experience for guests at both campuses.

Welcome back to our new podcast all about multisite! 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 seventh episode.

Opening question: If you could switch out your role for any other role in your church, what would it be?

* Natalie – Either a lead pastor role at one of our campuses or (if we had such a role) some kind of guest connections role.

* Greg – I would switch places with our teaching pastor.  

* Ben -I would say something like a junior high or a grief share role—for me, those are the opportunities for some pivotal moments in people’s lives.

Q1: After several years of having a second campus, we really need a model for staff interaction. Is there a good starting point to begin to put a model in place?

Natalie said that a model is more than who reports to whom; it begins with an overarching vision. What is shared, what isn’t? What makes it a multisite other than two churches that share finances or branding? Make a list of essentials that helps guide your church to understand its identity. Get to a place with a shared program, shared structure, and shared resources. Connect on training times and create a common list of everything from setting up a classroom to supplies and toys. Natalie also advised that when you plan, don’t just plan for a few locations—plan for many locations and consider what the sites would look like ten years down the road.

Ben offered insights from a service programming perspective. First, evaluate the following: how do you help teams from a creative point of view? When you go from one to more than one, start planning your preaching calendar further in advance (e.g. plan it out in the fall for the upcoming year, and roll it out to the staff around December). To streamline communications, standardize your announcements and your events, and consider hosting just one event as a whole church instead of several smaller events which vary per site. Ben also suggested that churches move from live to video announcement, have a consistent playlist for the worship teams, and standardize social media.

Greg responded to this question with a series of questions for the executive team to reflect on. Where in the spectrum between a church plant and a campus is that church? If you’re referring to one site as the “main campus,” are the sites the same size or is one significantly larger than the other? Is there any vision for another campus? When it comes to assimilation, make it the same experience for guests at both campuses.

Are you leveraging your first-time guest gifts effectively enough to move people from being guests to fully connected members of your church?

I hope so, because this is an important piece of the connection timeframe; in fact, it’s a critical point in the eight phases of moving anonymous guests towards full community.

Everyone loves getting gifts upon arrival somewhere, whether it’s at a home or when visiting somewhere new. These guest gifts are not solely a gesture of kindness; they also help us collect vital contact information so that we can follow up with those that visit our church for the first time. At the most basic level, we should follow this approach:

We introduce the offer of a gift during our services (maybe we post it on the screens or in the bulletins).

We offer the gift as a way to thank first-time guests for their visit, and we ask them to fill out a contact card when they accept their gift so we can stay connected with them.

When done well, this is a way to both acknowledge and thank the guests who come. Think about it this way: we can all remember a time when we went over to a friend’s house when we thought we were supposed to show up, and while our friend invited us in, it was obvious that they didn’t expect us at all. As a church, we don’t ever want our guests to feel as if they are unexpected. The first-time guest gifts are a way to show people that we both expected them and that we’re thankful they’re with us.

Many churches don’t have a robust enough process to maximize the effectiveness of these gifts; ours certainly used to fall into that category. However, by following these seven best practices, our church went from around 800 first-time guests in one year to 3,500 the following year! While some of that was due to expansion in our overall church, a large portion of that growth stemmed from our doing a better job of collecting information from our guests. Here’s how you can begin achieving similar results:

Call Them “New-Here” Gifts, Not “First-Time” Gifts

For years, we called these gifts “first-time” guest gifts. Even this article uses that same title. However, making the subtle shift in language and referring to the gifts as “new-here” gifts made a profound difference in the way people understand what we’re offering as a church.

If you offer “first-time” guest gifts and your guests don’t take you up on that offer on their first visit, they will wonder if they’re allowed to pick up a gift the next time they visit.

We want to communicate that if guests consider themselves new at the church, then they are free to pick up their gift. They might do so on their first time or maybe during their third time—it might be six months after they’ve started to attend. In all of our language, we want people to know that these gifts are for anybody new here. With that in mind, for the rest of this post, we will use the “new-here” language to articulate that change.

Choose a Gift People Want

Remember when you were a kid and that crazy aunt of yours gave you socks as a gift—and worse, remember when you needed to offer that awkward “thank you”? Or when you were a kid at the mall, and there was an insurance agent handing out calendars that featured their branding all over it? That didn’t feel like a gift at all; it just felt like an advertising piece.

Please don’t do that with your “new-here” gifts.

We need to consider what gifts our guests might actually enjoy receiving. Many churches have found that t-shirts hit the spot because people—for whatever reason—are always willing to pick up a free t-shirt. Now, make sure the t-shirt design is something that someone who doesn’t attend your church on a regular basis...

Are you leveraging your first-time guest gifts effectively enough to move people from being guests to fully connected members of your church?

I hope so, because this is an important piece of the connection timeframe; in fact, it’s a critical point in the eight phases of moving anonymous guests towards full community.

Everyone loves getting gifts upon arrival somewhere, whether it’s at a home or when visiting somewhere new. These guest gifts are not solely a gesture of kindness; they also help us collect vital contact information so that we can follow up with those that visit our church for the first time. At the most basic level, we should follow this approach:

We introduce the offer of a gift during our services (maybe we post it on the screens or in the bulletins).

We offer the gift as a way to thank first-time guests for their visit, and we ask them to fill out a contact card when they accept their gift so we can stay connected with them.

When done well, this is a way to both acknowledge and thank the guests who come. Think about it this way: we can all remember a time when we went over to a friend’s house when we thought we were supposed to show up, and while our friend invited us in, it was obvious that they didn’t expect us at all. As a church, we don’t ever want our guests to feel as if they are unexpected. The first-time guest gifts are a way to show people that we both expected them and that we’re thankful they’re with us.

Many churches don’t have a robust enough process to maximize the effectiveness of these gifts; ours certainly used to fall into that category. However, by following these seven best practices, our church went from around 800 first-time guests in one year to 3,500 the following year! While some of that was due to expansion in our overall church, a large portion of that growth stemmed from our doing a better job of collecting information from our guests. Here’s how you can begin achieving similar results:

Call Them “New-Here” Gifts, Not “First-Time” Gifts

For years, we called these gifts “first-time” guest gifts. Even this article uses that same title. However, making the subtle shift in language and referring to the gifts as “new-here” gifts made a profound difference in the way people understand what we’re offering as a church.

If you offer “first-time” guest gifts and your guests don’t take you up on that offer on their first visit, they will wonder if they’re allowed to pick up a gift the next time they visit.

We want to communicate that if guests consider themselves new at the church, then they are free to pick up their gift. They might do so on their first time or maybe during their third time—it might be six months after they’ve started to attend. In all of our language, we want people to know that these gifts are for anybody new here. With that in mind, for the rest of this post, we will use the “new-here” language to articulate that change.

Choose a Gift People Want

Remember when you were a kid and that crazy aunt of yours gave you socks as a gift—and worse, remember when you needed to offer that awkward “thank you”? Or when you were a kid at the mall, and there was an insurance agent handing out calendars that featured their branding all over it? That didn’t feel like a gift at all; it just felt like an advertising piece.

Please don’t do that with your “new-here” gifts.

We need to consider what gifts our guests might actually enjoy receiving. Many churches have found that t-shirts hit the spot because people—for whatever reason—are always willing to pick up a free t-shirt. Now, make sure the t-shirt design is something that someone who doesn’t attend your church on a regular basis...

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. You’re going to love today’s super practical conversation with Doug Garasic from Rust City Church in Youngstown, Ohio. Doug is here to talk with us today about a decision to make major name and brand changes at his church and how to incorporate these sorts of changes into your own ministry.

* Can you change your church name? // When Doug began his church plant in 2011 in Youngstown, it was originally called The Movement. Back at that time, he was a young pastor and the group he worked with wanted an edgy, unique name. After researching they couldn’t find another church named The Movement, so they moved ahead with that name. But soon afterward the term “movement” became a popular phrase in the church world, and they began to feel that they’d lost some originality. Additionally, other churches in the state of Ohio adopted the name The Movement. In the end, this created confusion because people in other cities assumed these other churches were affiliated with, or campuses of, The Movement in Youngstown. It wasn’t long before Doug and his staff began to question what to do. Do you change your church name? Is it okay to change your church name? The answer is yes: you’re not married to your church name. The vision that God gave you for your community is what you’re married to, not your church’s name.

* Does your name really work? // One of the issues Doug found with their name was that it didn’t communicate what they were. They had intentionally left “church” out of the name and over time they realized “The Movement” sounded like it could have been a gym or a yoga class. The vagueness of the name especially caused confusion with unchurched people. Ask unchurched people what your church name means to them. Ask if they can explain it to you to find out if it really works.

* Slow down and take your time. // Once Doug and his staff decided to go ahead with changing the church’s name, they realized this next step in the process couldn’t be rushed or forced. They weren’t going to just choose a new name right away to get rid of the old one. The goal was to choose a name they could be married to for years to come which would explain who they were and what they were about. It needed to be an inspired name from God that could handle the criticism from people that didn’t like it, or they wouldn’t bother changing the name at all.

* Don’t be afraid to get outside help. // Doug and his team hired an outside agency to help them with the rebranding process. During this time, the agency explored with Doug and the staff who they were as a church and what their big WHY was. What makes them tick? How are they unique from other churches? One of the strengths they discovered is that they love their localness and the community they are in.

* Embrace your ugly. // Youngstown was once a thriving manufacturing area of Ohio, but now is one that young people flee in order to pursue opportunities in larger cities in the area. As a result this depressed area has become known as the “Rust Belt”. Doug wanted that grittiness and salt-of-the-earth feel to be reflected in the identity of the church. So they chose the name Rust City Church. With it’s new name, the church’s mission became: Inviting people in the heart of the rust belt to forget religion and find God and move towards a new possible. Don’t be afraid to “embrace your ugly” and turn it into something beautiful that you can own to reflect what God can do and is doing.

You can learn more about Rust City Church at their website rustcity.church and quitworryingaboutmoney.com. You can also reach Doug on Instagram @doug_garasic.

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. You’re going to love today’s super practical conversation with Doug Garasic from Rust City Church in Youngstown, Ohio. Doug is here to talk with us today about a decision to make major name and brand changes at his church and how to incorporate these sorts of changes into your own ministry.

* Can you change your church name? // When Doug began his church plant in 2011 in Youngstown, it was originally called The Movement. Back at that time, he was a young pastor and the group he worked with wanted an edgy, unique name. After researching they couldn’t find another church named The Movement, so they moved ahead with that name. But soon afterward the term “movement” became a popular phrase in the church world, and they began to feel that they’d lost some originality. Additionally, other churches in the state of Ohio adopted the name The Movement. In the end, this created confusion because people in other cities assumed these other churches were affiliated with, or campuses of, The Movement in Youngstown. It wasn’t long before Doug and his staff began to question what to do. Do you change your church name? Is it okay to change your church name? The answer is yes: you’re not married to your church name. The vision that God gave you for your community is what you’re married to, not your church’s name.

* Does your name really work? // One of the issues Doug found with their name was that it didn’t communicate what they were. They had intentionally left “church” out of the name and over time they realized “The Movement” sounded like it could have been a gym or a yoga class. The vagueness of the name especially caused confusion with unchurched people. Ask unchurched people what your church name means to them. Ask if they can explain it to you to find out if it really works.

* Slow down and take your time. // Once Doug and his staff decided to go ahead with changing the church’s name, they realized this next step in the process couldn’t be rushed or forced. They weren’t going to just choose a new name right away to get rid of the old one. The goal was to choose a name they could be married to for years to come which would explain who they were and what they were about. It needed to be an inspired name from God that could handle the criticism from people that didn’t like it, or they wouldn’t bother changing the name at all.

* Don’t be afraid to get outside help. // Doug and his team hired an outside agency to help them with the rebranding process. During this time, the agency explored with Doug and the staff who they were as a church and what their big WHY was. What makes them tick? How are they unique from other churches? One of the strengths they discovered is that they love their localness and the community they are in.

* Embrace your ugly. // Youngstown was once a thriving manufacturing area of Ohio, but now is one that young people flee in order to pursue opportunities in larger cities in the area. As a result this depressed area has become known as the “Rust Belt”. Doug wanted that grittiness and salt-of-the-earth feel to be reflected in the identity of the church. So they chose the name Rust City Church. With it’s new name, the church’s mission became: Inviting people in the heart of the rust belt to forget religion and find God and move towards a new possible. Don’t be afraid to “embrace your ugly” and turn it into something beautiful that you can own to reflect what God can do and is doing.

You can learn more about Rust City Church at their website rustcity.church and quitworryingaboutmoney.com. You can also reach Doug on Instagram @doug_garasic.

Are you an executive pastor wondering where you should focus your time and energy?

Are you wondering exactly how things are really going at your church?

Are you a bit mystified about how to evaluate what’s really happening under the hood of your church?

Executive pastors are an incredible gift to growing churches. The best executive pastors sit at the intersection of vision and reality. That is to say, they spend their time balancing the bright future of the church on one hand and the facts of where the church is today on the other. In order to move a church from where you are to where you believe God is leading you as a community, you need a series of robust systems. Systems are simply repeatable processes that “Save You Stress, Time, Energy, and Money”.

Executive pastors need to think about how these systems are performing across all areas of the church. In a very real way, the executive pastor is like a farmer cultivating a garden of systems by balancing each of the varying needs and requirements of the church against each other. An executive pastor should spend a considerable amount of time evaluating how well each of these systems performs and adjusting them accordingly when they don’t function the way they should.

This is a perfect time of year, the season of change, to build a plan for evaluation and adjust the systems required to help your church move forward. Here are six systems you should consider when leading as an executive pastor:

Outreach

How does your church attract people through a variety of channels?

Your church needs to have a consistent flow of new guests arriving on a regular basis. Churches that are healthy and growing consistently find ways to reach out to the world around them and invite new guests to join them.

If your church’s ability to reach new people begins to slow, you’ll eventually plateau and might even slip into decline. Evaluate your outreach efforts and how you use marketing and communications to increase your community’s awareness and interest in your church. Keeping a close eye on the outreach efforts of your church needs to be a core function of every executive pastor.

Connection

How does your church move people from their first visit to feeling fully at home?

It’s not enough for churches just to reach people in their community and have them come to church once. We also need to move people towards a deep sense of connection.

The healthiest and fastest growing churches in the country spend a tremendous amount of time and energy thinking through the exact next steps for transforming new visitors into plugged-in advocates of the church.

Deliberately measuring this process to see if your connection systems are performing at a high enough level is an important task of an executive pastor. This could be looking at the numbers for new-here guests, people joining groups, and those getting plugged into volunteer teams. The trick here is to test both the total number of people connected along with the velocity of people moving towards further connection with the community.

Service

How does your church mobilize people for volunteering and service within the church?

Above and beyond getting people connected, we need to find a way to see more people in your church serving others. The core message of the Gospel is that our lives are to be oriented around other people, and therefore the church needs to orient a tremendous amount of its effort and resources around serving.

Does your church have an adequate number of people serving? If not, what adjustments do you need to make as an executive pastor to ensure that more people are serving than ever before? Looking closely at the overall volunteer experience to measure both the number of volunteers as well as the quality of their experience is a system that you should consider.

Giving

Are you an executive pastor wondering where you should focus your time and energy?

Are you wondering exactly how things are really going at your church?

Are you a bit mystified about how to evaluate what’s really happening under the hood of your church?

Executive pastors are an incredible gift to growing churches. The best executive pastors sit at the intersection of vision and reality. That is to say, they spend their time balancing the bright future of the church on one hand and the facts of where the church is today on the other. In order to move a church from where you are to where you believe God is leading you as a community, you need a series of robust systems. Systems are simply repeatable processes that “Save You Stress, Time, Energy, and Money”.

Executive pastors need to think about how these systems are performing across all areas of the church. In a very real way, the executive pastor is like a farmer cultivating a garden of systems by balancing each of the varying needs and requirements of the church against each other. An executive pastor should spend a considerable amount of time evaluating how well each of these systems performs and adjusting them accordingly when they don’t function the way they should.

This is a perfect time of year, the season of change, to build a plan for evaluation and adjust the systems required to help your church move forward. Here are six systems you should consider when leading as an executive pastor:

Outreach

How does your church attract people through a variety of channels?

Your church needs to have a consistent flow of new guests arriving on a regular basis. Churches that are healthy and growing consistently find ways to reach out to the world around them and invite new guests to join them.

If your church’s ability to reach new people begins to slow, you’ll eventually plateau and might even slip into decline. Evaluate your outreach efforts and how you use marketing and communications to increase your community’s awareness and interest in your church. Keeping a close eye on the outreach efforts of your church needs to be a core function of every executive pastor.

Connection

How does your church move people from their first visit to feeling fully at home?

It’s not enough for churches just to reach people in their community and have them come to church once. We also need to move people towards a deep sense of connection.

The healthiest and fastest growing churches in the country spend a tremendous amount of time and energy thinking through the exact next steps for transforming new visitors into plugged-in advocates of the church.

Deliberately measuring this process to see if your connection systems are performing at a high enough level is an important task of an executive pastor. This could be looking at the numbers for new-here guests, people joining groups, and those getting plugged into volunteer teams. The trick here is to test both the total number of people connected along with the velocity of people moving towards further connection with the community.

Service

How does your church mobilize people for volunteering and service within the church?

Above and beyond getting people connected, we need to find a way to see more people in your church serving others. The core message of the Gospel is that our lives are to be oriented around other people, and therefore the church needs to orient a tremendous amount of its effort and resources around serving.

Does your church have an adequate number of people serving? If not, what adjustments do you need to make as an executive pastor to ensure that more people are serving than ever before? Looking closely at the overall volunteer experience to measure both the number of volunteers as well as the quality of their experience is a system that you should consider.

Giving