“Be genuine. Be remarkable. Be worth connecting with.” – Seth Godin

Your church grows when people tell their friends about it. It really is that simple. In my recent book, Church Growth Flywheel, we explored how to add regular prompts to remind your people to talk with their friends about your church. At its core, the book is all about how to make your church more remarkable — literally a church that people remark more about.

As I’ve studied and observed churches over the years, I’ve noticed that growing churches are the kind of churches that people talk about. There is something happening to them that is different enough that people are talking about them. Here are five tell-tale signs that I see repeatedly in churches that people are remarking about.

Remarkable Churches Have Messages that Connect with Real Life

¾ of church attendees, studied by Gallup, say that messages based on scripture and are relevant to life are a major factor in choosing the church they attend. [ref]

Churches continue to be teaching driven communities. It might seem blindingly obvious, but it can be an easily overlooked part of what our churches “do”. Remarkable churches have messages that people talk about. They connect the timeless truths of scripture to people’s everyday lives. They devote time, energy and resources to ensuring that the message portion of what happens every weekend is of as high quality as possible.

5 Ways Most Churches Could Improve Their Messages

Delegate More // Most pastors are doing too many other things that aren’t core to generating a great message this weekend. Narrow the focus of how to spend your time to ensure a large portion of the week is given to this task.

Seek (Honest) Feedback // Building a community of people who will give honest feedback on messages is a vitally important part of improvement. Push beyond the “Great sermon, pastor!” backslapping that happens on Sundays.

Get More Visual // Jesus was constantly using what he saw around him as an object lesson to drive home a deep truth. Your people are visual learners and using a well-placed “prop” in a message will make your messages more sticky.

Practice // Please don’t have the first service be the place where you first run through the message. Professionals practice while amateurs wing it.

Drive to Application // When we encounter transcendent truth it should move us to live differently. Work hard to move beyond vague platitudes and push towards practical applications to real life.

Remarkable Churches Serve Their Community

Volunteerism is at a 30-year high. Every age group is volunteering more today than in the past. [ref]

Getting people out of their seats and into the streets continues to be something that many churches are doing to impact their communities. Remarkable churches know that people want to make a difference in their cities and so create platforms for these opportunities. People want to be a part of churches that model a selfless lifestyle, and community service is one important way that the church displays this.

3 Reasons Community Service Drives a Church’s Remarkability

Good Thing vs. God Thing // We think that caring for the last, least and lost in our communities is a “God thing”, while the people we’re attempting to reach see it as a “good thing”. Community service allows our churches to express what we’re “for” rather than against and many in cities we serve can find an align with that.

People Aged 34–44 Volunteer the Most [

Welcome back for another episode of the unSeminary podcast. I’m excited to have Mark Jobe from New Life Chicago with us today. New Life is an amazing church with 25 locations and 43 worship services. It is not only multisite, but also multicultural.

Mark is talking with us today about how to keep so many different locations on the same page while reaching different communities and also about rebirthing churches.

* Pursue a clear vision. // What you’ll find when you visit one of New Life’s sites depends on which location you visit. The campuses range in size from 100 to 1500 people, and also vary in the style of services each location has, from loud music and dancing to quiet services, depending on the community and culture that is being served. New Life brings that diverse multicultural and multilingual element together by finding a common clear vision that all locations pursue together. Define the reality and God given mission that all of your locations are called to do and pursue it as one.

* Building a strong community. // In order to keep the New Life staff like a family, each of the pastors from the twenty-five locations meet every Monday. Twice a month they all come together in the same place and twice a month they break up into coaching groups of about 5 each led by a seasoned pastor. During these meetings you hear a lot of laughter and prayer. Building that fellowship and community is the strong foundation in creating a diverse multisite church that knows each other and works together.

* Allow for customization. // New Life uses live teaching in all of their services that are both woven together so that there is a common focus, and yet customized to each location. At first, Mark prepared all of the outlines for the live teaching, but over time began to tap into the giftedness of the other pastors, and so messages were prepped as a group. When the group grew larger, sermon prep began to take up too much of the meeting time, so now message outlines are prepared in subgroups by pastors that have giftedness with sermon development. To keep the campuses aligned, the pastors plan out the entire year’s sermon series together. Then each series is assigned to a different subgroup and each group works on their series, creating the outlines and working with the communications director to plan the graphics and videos. All the pastors will then give input on sermon prep. There are no manuscripts to follow word-for-word and you don’t have to deliver your sermon the same way someone else delivers theirs. The emphasis and flow of the sermon is the same, but the delivery and style is contextualized to the community that each campus is trying to reach.

* Church restarts begin with trust. // Out of the 25 locations at New Life, 14 of them are restarts. Church restarts are hard for both groups involved. When you first sit down with the group from the church, keep mind that it’s not really about strategy but about trust. It’s easy to get into the mechanics and what it all will look like, but that first meeting needs to be about showing this, usually elderly, congregation who you are and what you believe and where your heart is. Don’t come in with an attitude of “You failed, you blew it.” Honor their past and their legacy, and build from that. Show them that they can trust you to celebrate their history.

* Don’t look at it as a land grab. // If you think of a restart opportunity as a way to save yourself $3 million and that you are getting free land, it makes it tempting to manipulate and force the merger to happen. Make the process a kingdom win for all of those involved. It will be difficult, but the most important thing is that the congregation knows they can trust you and that they invite you in rather than you forcing their hands. Ask yourself, “How would I want my grandmother to be treated if she was a part of this congregation?”

You can learn more about New Life Chicago at th...

Welcome back for another episode of the unSeminary podcast. I’m excited to have Mark Jobe from New Life Chicago with us today. New Life is an amazing church with 25 locations and 43 worship services. It is not only multisite, but also multicultural.

Mark is talking with us today about how to keep so many different locations on the same page while reaching different communities and also about rebirthing churches.

* Pursue a clear vision. // What you’ll find when you visit one of New Life’s sites depends on which location you visit. The campuses range in size from 100 to 1500 people, and also vary in the style of services each location has, from loud music and dancing to quiet services, depending on the community and culture that is being served. New Life brings that diverse multicultural and multilingual element together by finding a common clear vision that all locations pursue together. Define the reality and God given mission that all of your locations are called to do and pursue it as one.

* Building a strong community. // In order to keep the New Life staff like a family, each of the pastors from the twenty-five locations meet every Monday. Twice a month they all come together in the same place and twice a month they break up into coaching groups of about 5 each led by a seasoned pastor. During these meetings you hear a lot of laughter and prayer. Building that fellowship and community is the strong foundation in creating a diverse multisite church that knows each other and works together.

* Allow for customization. // New Life uses live teaching in all of their services that are both woven together so that there is a common focus, and yet customized to each location. At first, Mark prepared all of the outlines for the live teaching, but over time began to tap into the giftedness of the other pastors, and so messages were prepped as a group. When the group grew larger, sermon prep began to take up too much of the meeting time, so now message outlines are prepared in subgroups by pastors that have giftedness with sermon development. To keep the campuses aligned, the pastors plan out the entire year’s sermon series together. Then each series is assigned to a different subgroup and each group works on their series, creating the outlines and working with the communications director to plan the graphics and videos. All the pastors will then give input on sermon prep. There are no manuscripts to follow word-for-word and you don’t have to deliver your sermon the same way someone else delivers theirs. The emphasis and flow of the sermon is the same, but the delivery and style is contextualized to the community that each campus is trying to reach.

* Church restarts begin with trust. // Out of the 25 locations at New Life, 14 of them are restarts. Church restarts are hard for both groups involved. When you first sit down with the group from the church, keep mind that it’s not really about strategy but about trust. It’s easy to get into the mechanics and what it all will look like, but that first meeting needs to be about showing this, usually elderly, congregation who you are and what you believe and where your heart is. Don’t come in with an attitude of “You failed, you blew it.” Honor their past and their legacy, and build from that. Show them that they can trust you to celebrate their history.

* Don’t look at it as a land grab. // If you think of a restart opportunity as a way to save yourself $3 million and that you are getting free land, it makes it tempting to manipulate and force the merger to happen. Make the process a kingdom win for all of those involved. It will be difficult, but the most important thing is that the congregation knows they can trust you and that they invite you in rather than you forcing their hands. Ask yourself, “How would I want my grandmother to be treated if she was a part of this congregation?”

You can learn more about New Life Chicago at th...

Thanks so much for joining us for another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Ben Gowell, an Executive Pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley. Christ’s Church is a fast growing church in the Phoenix Valley area with 8 campuses that serve about 35,000 people each Sunday.

Ben is with us today about how to develop a healthy culture at your church.

* What makes a healthy culture? // What are the things that stick out to make a healthy culture? You have to develop what you want the culture to be in your church, but it’s not enough to just cast that vision one time and hope it sticks. Vision leaks so it requires reinforcement from an unified staff that is aligned to catch that vision. You must rearticulate that vision time and again so that it doesn’t leak and disappear from view.

* Lean in to practicing awkward conversations. // We need to lean in to practicing awkward conversations. Practicing face-to-face conversations and confrontations when necessary (as opposed to avoidance) help reinforce these healthy aspects of the culture we are developing. Over time the culture becomes infused with healthy communication practices and helps prevent things like gossip or suspicion building up behind the scenes. Without healthy and open communication, these sins build up like a cancer and before you know it, trust has been eroded within your staff.

* Work on your tone and your response. // Don’t be over reactive. Go to each other with the intent of helping to make the team better rather than focusing on your own anger or hurt. Let an offense sit for a bit before going to someone in anger or writing that email. Go with a clear head. Face-to-face is much more productive than email or text because it’s easier to read someone’s tone. Have enough respect for someone to sit and talk with them.

* Spend more time in interviews. // At Christ’s Church of the Valley, they’ve formalized their hiring process to a day long event once a month. During this time, the HR team and entire leadership team to sit with prospective hires and go through a table by table interview process with them, This allows for more discernment as the team gets to know potential hires. Ben sits down with each person for 15-30 minutes to talk with them and get a gauge on where their heart is. As Christ’s Church spends more time on pre-interviews, they are seeing more hires sticking because the leadership knows prospective team members better before hiring them. Ministry should be a place where you put your whole heart into serving and not just get a paycheck.

* Know exactly who your target audience is. // At Christ’s Church of the Valley, they are very intentional about targeting the man so that they can reach the whole family. Hearing this statement may make it sound like they only care about the men, but that’s not the case. The gospel is for everyone, however, statistically speaking women are much more active in churches on their own. By contrast, more often men are lagging behind in spiritual leadership in their homes. Christ’s Church has clearly seen that when they engage the man of the family, it makes a big difference as to whether the children will attend church. Get the men engaged, equip them to lead in their homes spiritually, and it will have a huge impact on the rest of the family.

You can learn more about Christ’s Church of the Valley at their website www.ccv.church.

Thank You for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to le...

Thanks so much for joining us for another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re talking with Ben Gowell, an Executive Pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley. Christ’s Church is a fast growing church in the Phoenix Valley area with 8 campuses that serve about 35,000 people each Sunday.

Ben is with us today about how to develop a healthy culture at your church.

* What makes a healthy culture? // What are the things that stick out to make a healthy culture? You have to develop what you want the culture to be in your church, but it’s not enough to just cast that vision one time and hope it sticks. Vision leaks so it requires reinforcement from an unified staff that is aligned to catch that vision. You must rearticulate that vision time and again so that it doesn’t leak and disappear from view.

* Lean in to practicing awkward conversations. // We need to lean in to practicing awkward conversations. Practicing face-to-face conversations and confrontations when necessary (as opposed to avoidance) help reinforce these healthy aspects of the culture we are developing. Over time the culture becomes infused with healthy communication practices and helps prevent things like gossip or suspicion building up behind the scenes. Without healthy and open communication, these sins build up like a cancer and before you know it, trust has been eroded within your staff.

* Work on your tone and your response. // Don’t be over reactive. Go to each other with the intent of helping to make the team better rather than focusing on your own anger or hurt. Let an offense sit for a bit before going to someone in anger or writing that email. Go with a clear head. Face-to-face is much more productive than email or text because it’s easier to read someone’s tone. Have enough respect for someone to sit and talk with them.

* Spend more time in interviews. // At Christ’s Church of the Valley, they’ve formalized their hiring process to a day long event once a month. During this time, the HR team and entire leadership team to sit with prospective hires and go through a table by table interview process with them, This allows for more discernment as the team gets to know potential hires. Ben sits down with each person for 15-30 minutes to talk with them and get a gauge on where their heart is. As Christ’s Church spends more time on pre-interviews, they are seeing more hires sticking because the leadership knows prospective team members better before hiring them. Ministry should be a place where you put your whole heart into serving and not just get a paycheck.

* Know exactly who your target audience is. // At Christ’s Church of the Valley, they are very intentional about targeting the man so that they can reach the whole family. Hearing this statement may make it sound like they only care about the men, but that’s not the case. The gospel is for everyone, however, statistically speaking women are much more active in churches on their own. By contrast, more often men are lagging behind in spiritual leadership in their homes. Christ’s Church has clearly seen that when they engage the man of the family, it makes a big difference as to whether the children will attend church. Get the men engaged, equip them to lead in their homes spiritually, and it will have a huge impact on the rest of the family.

You can learn more about Christ’s Church of the Valley at their website www.ccv.church.

Thank You for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to le...

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. This week we’re joined by Danny Franks, the Pastor of Guest Services at The Summit Church in the triangle region of North Carolina. The Summit Church has a goal to plant 1000 churches in this generation, and part of that success depends on how they welcome people who visit the church.

Today Danny is with us to talk about the importance of getting into the heads of your guests so you can receive and serve them well.

* Keep your guest in mind. // As church leaders, we might not think about the discomfort we’re asking people to submit themselves to when they show up to a strange place for the very first time. At the Summit Church, Danny really works to get into the minds of their guests. Think about what your guests need to know when they come to your church. What questions might they be asking? What are things that would make them feel comfortable versus very, very uncomfortable? Watch carefully for things that could be confusing and need to be interpreted for your guests. For example, how can you help them understand what communion is and what it means to eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus? How can you explain baptisms, the offering, or theological terms? Keeping your guest in mind isn’t about glossing over the Gospel, it’s about breaking down barriers and helping your guest to understand things that are completely foreign to them.

* More than just coffee. // If you don’t think about how guest services is connecting to the mission and vision of your church, it can feel like what you do is just fluff. But as Danny explains, “We’re not trying to simply park cars and pour coffee.” The Summit Church works hard to give their guests an excellent guest service experience, not to impress them with their systems, but to point beyond the process to Jesus. Guest services is ultimately about taking the biblical command of hospitality and putting that together on an institutional level. Ultimately what our guests need is Jesus, but when they first show up at church, they don’t know that all that they need is Jesus. You need to be able to build a relationship with them first, and oftentimes that happens before you introduce them to a relationship with Jesus. However if their visit isn’t stewarded well, you may not ever get that chance.

* Serve your city. // If there’s one bit of advice Danny could give to any church out there who wants to improve their guest services experience, it’s to define where you are now and where you want to go. Begin by asking yourself how you can serve your city better. What would make people feel welcome at your church? Start here and make changes little by little.

Danny has written a book called People Are the Mission to answer the questions like the ones asked during today’s podcast. You can get a study guide to go along with Danny’s book at peoplearethemission.com, or learn more from Danny at his website www.dfranks.com.

Thank You for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally!

Lastly, don’t forget to 

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. This week we’re joined by Danny Franks, the Pastor of Guest Services at The Summit Church in the triangle region of North Carolina. The Summit Church has a goal to plant 1000 churches in this generation, and part of that success depends on how they welcome people who visit the church.

Today Danny is with us to talk about the importance of getting into the heads of your guests so you can receive and serve them well.

* Keep your guest in mind. // As church leaders, we might not think about the discomfort we’re asking people to submit themselves to when they show up to a strange place for the very first time. At the Summit Church, Danny really works to get into the minds of their guests. Think about what your guests need to know when they come to your church. What questions might they be asking? What are things that would make them feel comfortable versus very, very uncomfortable? Watch carefully for things that could be confusing and need to be interpreted for your guests. For example, how can you help them understand what communion is and what it means to eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus? How can you explain baptisms, the offering, or theological terms? Keeping your guest in mind isn’t about glossing over the Gospel, it’s about breaking down barriers and helping your guest to understand things that are completely foreign to them.

* More than just coffee. // If you don’t think about how guest services is connecting to the mission and vision of your church, it can feel like what you do is just fluff. But as Danny explains, “We’re not trying to simply park cars and pour coffee.” The Summit Church works hard to give their guests an excellent guest service experience, not to impress them with their systems, but to point beyond the process to Jesus. Guest services is ultimately about taking the biblical command of hospitality and putting that together on an institutional level. Ultimately what our guests need is Jesus, but when they first show up at church, they don’t know that all that they need is Jesus. You need to be able to build a relationship with them first, and oftentimes that happens before you introduce them to a relationship with Jesus. However if their visit isn’t stewarded well, you may not ever get that chance.

* Serve your city. // If there’s one bit of advice Danny could give to any church out there who wants to improve their guest services experience, it’s to define where you are now and where you want to go. Begin by asking yourself how you can serve your city better. What would make people feel welcome at your church? Start here and make changes little by little.

Danny has written a book called People Are the Mission to answer the questions like the ones asked during today’s podcast. You can get a study guide to go along with Danny’s book at peoplearethemission.com, or learn more from Danny at his website www.dfranks.com.

Thank You for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I’m grateful for that. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally!

Lastly, don’t forget to 

Welcome 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 at Liquid Church in NJ, 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 second episode.

Opening Question: A surprise you had when you got into leading within a multisite church?

* Natalie Frisk – How important developing the right system is. I get a little uncomfortable when people bring up systems and structures, but seeing their value and how they help us do ministry well was my biggest surprise.

* Greg Curtis – How franchisable what we do is. I was surprised we could use sites that were a school or where we were taking over their facility. Whether we had a new facility or an old facility, either way it always felt like our own campus. And the other surprise was navigating the dotted and solid line relationships that we talked about in our last podcast.

* Ben Stapley – Seeing the change in terms in arts and creativity and what we were able to do in a single site was different in what we did in a multisite. I thought I used to be open handed in passing off leadership pretty easily, but you need to do that much faster at a multisite.

Q1: How do you break through the growth barrier of your church? What is a healthy size for your church and how do you help it grow?

Are you structured for growth to get past the 200, 500, etc. barrier? Leadership development and volunteer structure is one of the biggest hindrances or accelerators to breaking a growth barrier. Not preparing people to take on more ownership and responsibility, especially in a volunteer capacity, can cap growth. Are you structured to grow? The health of the size of a site depends on the health of the culture. We can forget to set a tone for prayer, spiritual health, and really listening to what God wants for our campuses.

Each campus has its own journey. Your strategy generates the growth, but you need the culture to fuel it. Create the strategy with the processes and systems for running the campus before launching the site. Factor in your regional uniqueness when thinking through a healthy size for your campus. It can be easy to look to mega churches in large cities in the bible belt and think if your campus isn’t 1,000 plus then something is wrong, but those numbers aren’t the same everywhere.

From a service and programming perspective, create big days and develop an invite strategy for those. Big days include Christmas and Easter,

Welcome 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 at Liquid Church in NJ, 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 second episode.

Opening Question: A surprise you had when you got into leading within a multisite church?

* Natalie Frisk – How important developing the right system is. I get a little uncomfortable when people bring up systems and structures, but seeing their value and how they help us do ministry well was my biggest surprise.

* Greg Curtis – How franchisable what we do is. I was surprised we could use sites that were a school or where we were taking over their facility. Whether we had a new facility or an old facility, either way it always felt like our own campus. And the other surprise was navigating the dotted and solid line relationships that we talked about in our last podcast.

* Ben Stapley – Seeing the change in terms in arts and creativity and what we were able to do in a single site was different in what we did in a multisite. I thought I used to be open handed in passing off leadership pretty easily, but you need to do that much faster at a multisite.

Q1: How do you break through the growth barrier of your church? What is a healthy size for your church and how do you help it grow?

Are you structured for growth to get past the 200, 500, etc. barrier? Leadership development and volunteer structure is one of the biggest hindrances or accelerators to breaking a growth barrier. Not preparing people to take on more ownership and responsibility, especially in a volunteer capacity, can cap growth. Are you structured to grow? The health of the size of a site depends on the health of the culture. We can forget to set a tone for prayer, spiritual health, and really listening to what God wants for our campuses.

Each campus has its own journey. Your strategy generates the growth, but you need the culture to fuel it. Create the strategy with the processes and systems for running the campus before launching the site. Factor in your regional uniqueness when thinking through a healthy size for your campus. It can be easy to look to mega churches in large cities in the bible belt and think if your campus isn’t 1,000 plus then something is wrong, but those numbers aren’t the same everywhere.

From a service and programming perspective, create big days and develop an invite strategy for those. Big days include Christmas and Easter,

There is no doubt that the multisite church movement has blossomed, and has a massive impact on the church today. In fact, today in North America one in six people attend a multisite church campus. That fact astonishes me! Each one of those campuses has had a group of volunteers at the core of the opening process that we’re calling a launch team. This is a group of people who have committed to be a part of starting up the new location and ensuring that it’s healthy and ready to impact its community.

Since the early 2000s, I’ve had the honor of being at the forefront of fourteen campus launches. We’ve seen around 1,500 volunteers join our launch teams. Today, over 9,000 people attend the campuses that sprung from the combined efforts of all those people. It has been a privilege to have a front row seat to this amazing approach to reaching new people with the message of Jesus. Seeing the multisite revolution from the inside has given me a perspective that is second to no other! As I reflect on what I’ve seen in all those teams, I’ve attempted to boil down some common lessons about these critically important teams, which I have discussed below.

Stop trying to find people like you.

At the core of the challenge of recruiting healthy launch teams is a sociological fact that we tend to attract people like ourselves. We need to consciously push against this reality. You don’t want to find people like you because most people leading these endeavors are innovators and early adopters, which is a minority number among people in the world. While being an innovator is great for leading the launch of campuses, they don’t make great volunteers long term because those “early adopters” tend to get bored after the initial launch phase and just want to move onto something new.

5 Categories of the Adoption Curve:

Innovators // Eager to try new ideas, products, and services, almost as an obsession.

Early Adopters // Rely more on group norms and values, as opposed to Innovators who rely on their own values.

Early Majority // Collect more information about products and services to weigh the pros and cons before they make a decision.

Late Majority // Adopt the new mainly because their friends have all adopted it and they feel the need to conform.

Laggards // Do not rely on group norms and values, just like Innovators. Their past heavily influences their current decision process.

Your approach to finding volunteers needs to tread slowly with people and ideally be built around finding “early majority” people who will take some time convincing them to get plugged in. However, when these people make a decision to be a part of the campus they will be more likely to stick and stay. It’s only when this group starts to pile in en masse that the late majority will decide to be a part of the team!

You need more. A lot more.

Stop trying to find the minimum number of volunteers needed. There is evidence across the movement that campuses with larger launch teams have better initial campus launch sizes but then also tend to reach more people over time. Figure out how many people you “need” to make the launch happen and then stretch. Push to get more people lined up on the team than you need to make things better long term.

5 Benefits of Larger Multisite Launch Teams:

* Trajectory Setting // Studies show that the first five years of a campus is when the majority of its growth happens. [ref] A larger launch team means the campus is set up to maximize its potential of reaching people because there are more social connections to people outside the campus.

* Healthier Teams // One of the paradoxes of volunteer recruitment is that the more volunteers you have the easier it is to...