August 6, 2025 • 29 mins
Building a Healthy Multi-Site Leadership Culture
Many churches dream of going multi-site, but few consider what it takes to cultivate a unified, thriving leadership culture across campuses. In this episode, we outline the five essential elements your church needs to lead well in a multi-site model.
Your hosts Scott Ball and A.J. Mathieu from The Malphurs Group bring decades of church consulting experience. They share insights from working with churches of all sizes to build healthy systems and sustainable leadership models.
In this episode, we cover:
→ [00:05:36] Why your church needs clearly defined leadership teams across campuses
→ [00:10:32] The importance of meeting structure and clarifying purpose
→ [00:14:41] How to empower campus autonomy while maintaining alignment
→ [00:20:53] Creating consistent communication rhythms to avoid silos
→ [00:21:35] Why celebrating shared wins strengthens cross-campus unity
LINKS
→ Article: https://malphursgroup.com/302
→ Toolkit: https://healthychurchestoolkit.com
→ Facebook: https://facebook.com/malphursgroup
→ Instagram: https://instagram.com/malphursgroup
→ YouTube: https://youtube.com/themalphursgroup
→ X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/malphursgroup
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Building a healthy multi site leadership culture today on
the Church Revitalization Podcast. Hello and welcome
to the Church Revitalization Podcast brought to you by the
Malfers Group team where each week we tackle important
actionable topics to help churches thrive. And now
here's your hosts, Scott Ball and A.J. matthew.
(00:24):
Welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by
my friend and co host and A.J. Mathieu.
A.J. in 300 and some odd episodes,
we've never talked about multisite, which is crazy, or at
least not that I can recall. If we have, it's been
a long time. Yeah. Maybe some caveat here or there. I don't think we've ever
(00:47):
had a full episode on it. And we got several
questions. When we asked a few weeks ago if anybody
had questions for us, we got a handful of multi site questions. So we're trying
to address a few of those questions. I'm not going to read them off
because we kind of blended a few things together. But we hope that this is
helpful. As you're thinking about if maybe you're
(01:08):
thinking about going multi site or maybe you are a campus pastor or you
lead a church that has campuses. We hope that this is a
helpful thing because I'm going to be honest with you, this doesn't always work
very well. Sometimes there are some pretty unhealthy dynamics. And so
before we get too far into it though, I want to give a shout out
(01:28):
to healthychurchestoolkit.com those good, those
handsome gentlemen who are behind the Healthy
Churches toolkit. Go to Healthy Church. That's, that's us by the way.
Go to healthychurchestoolkit.com Sign up for a 7 day free
trial and enjoy all the fun stuff. Because a healthy campus,
healthy churches, that's what we're after.
(01:52):
A.J. before we dive fully into our key points, so we wanted to give a
couple of caveats. I'm going to say one and then I want you to say
another. The first caveat that I want to give is
the key to a healthy multi site
church in general is going to be knowing what
your multi site strategy is in the first place. So that's not the focus of
(02:14):
this particular episode. We could do a whole nother episode on top of types of
multi site strategies and maybe we will. But there
are different types of multi site. There's multi sites that are for
church growth. We want our church to grow. And so we're using
multiple campuses as a means of doing that. And then even within
that category, there's differences, live teaching, live local teaching
(02:36):
versus the teaching is piped in, etc.
There's another version of multisite where
you, you're adopting dying churches.
And even with that, within that there's categories, there's churches
that are, they're adopting them and they're going to become permanent
campuses. You're adopting them and then you're going to spin them off. Then there's the
(02:59):
strategy where you are going to be
planting campuses and they're going to be spun off
as autonomous churches later. So having a clear strategy up
front before you dive into camp, before you, before, before you
dive into being a multi site church is important. And,
(03:19):
and then the point, our key points for today will become more relevant. But if
you've not landed on a strategy, you're starting off on the wrong foot.
Yeah, yeah, you're definitely going to be behind and, and dealing with conflict.
But yeah, we'll get into to these things here in a minute. The other thing
is you've got to be a healthy church before you try to reproduce anything else.
So, and, and I don't just brush this off either because
(03:42):
I think if this discussion, if
you've reached a point where you're like, maybe we could be a multi side, we
could launch a campus, I think you would maybe
too quickly go, this is not even a question. I mean,
look, you know, we're running three services, we're full.
And it's easy to think full church equals healthy church. And that's
(04:04):
not always the case. We did an episode on this, I think back maybe in
May on why unhealthy churches sometimes grow.
And so take, I would say, be very open
to an introspective look and make sure that you're ready.
Because part of one of the things that can happen is you've been
this, you've been this entity, this church for a while. The people there
(04:27):
get it. They know your culture, they know how you communicate. But
to take that and move that into an external space,
you, you're going to have to over communicate. You're going to have to make
sure that everything is very clear and organized and understandable.
And sometimes that campus can end up with revealing things
that should have been perhaps different to start with.
(04:49):
So be healthy, ask for help. We'd love to help you do that.
Yeah, totally. Okay, so,
but we want to focus on, all right, let's assume that you've dealt with all
of those things. You have a strategy, you got a healthy culture
within your, your church and now you're Going multi site. So how can we have
a healthy multi site leadership culture among the
(05:11):
campus pastors and the staff at
the, at the main campus, we'll call it main campus for
ease. Although that language itself might not be helpful.
Original campus OG I don't know what you want to call it, but
having a good, good relationship there and a good culture there, that's the focus.
(05:32):
So let's dive into point number one. The first one would be this. I
think it's really important to just divide up the teams,
have really clear teams, staff teams,
for example, making a, a
distinction between say an executive team
and like
(05:55):
versus just general staff team. So you might have things like
central serve executive team, central services,
which serve all of the campuses equally and then campus
specific teams. I think a mistake that often
happens with these
churches is that it all kind of molds together. Hey, we're all one
(06:16):
staff. But the reality is you're not, you're not because everybody's dealing with different
things. And what can happen is
all of those meetings start to get dominated by that main campus and those,
those campus, those other campuses start to feel
like what are we even doing? Or if there's not
an executive team that includes people from the other campuses, then it
(06:39):
can feel like, well, we're just going along with whatever they say and they have
no voice. So just defining what those teams are.
Yeah, yeah. I mean I would call this the us and then us
and them syndrome. You really have to be careful and
monitor this because if you say we're only
an us, but your actions come down at the more
(07:01):
granular level of decision making is turns out to be an us and
them, then this is where I think you can end up with some conflict,
misunderstanding. So we just have to be really clear about that.
How us are we? Because if we're going
for full us, that requires seats at the table and
voices being heard and there has to be a common understanding of how we'd
(07:23):
make decisions. But, and I'm not saying you
can't be a healthy us and them, but, but
it still has to be clearly defined. People have to know, you know, where
their place is and what, what they're going to be a part of and what
they're not going to be a part of. So yeah, these are, these are
decisions that have to be made ahead of time to the extent that you can.
(07:45):
It's hard sometimes to consider every possible scenario, but
I think you should have a pretty solid framework at this point
for executive decision making, levels of autonomy, that kind of thing.
I think that, that maybe, maybe one of the challenges is not every
church that's going multi site these days is a church where,
hey, the, the, the original campus has 30
(08:08):
staff and then all of the other campuses have five
staff each. You know, it may be that the original
campus only has three staff and then they're planting campuses
that each only have one campus pastor. And so you,
you may wrongly think that adding
these different types of teams or defining these separate types of teams
(08:31):
is creating a degree of complexity that is beyond
what's necessary for where you are. But because you have
added a multi site strategy or moved that in direction, you
already are complex. And so you need to, you need to
define these different types of teams or sub teams.
Even if you don't have, you know, across all your campuses,
(08:53):
50 staff, even if it's just six or seven,
you need to subdivide and go. Here's this executive team that's making
decisions at the, at the sort
of visionary level, strategic level
versus tac. You know, these teams are making tactical decisions and so
on. Yeah, you're right. There's so much nuance to this because there's so many, it's
(09:16):
like infinite scenarios, you know. But I think kind of what you're
speaking to, depending on the size of the church, the original
campus before beginning its first or multi
campuses can affect what this relationship is going to look
like because the varying levels of complexity that already exist in the environment.
So yeah, this is this tough stuff. And so
(09:38):
I get maybe the point that we're driving at, that we started off even saying,
and that we're drive, continue to drive home here is do not enter
into this lightly. Have a plan to really think through this.
Yeah, all right, yeah, sorry. So number two here, clarify the
purpose of each meeting. This is, this is tied to number one.
But I kind of hinted at this already. You know, if you've got a situation
(10:00):
where, well, we just have staff meeting every week there's
staff meeting and all the staff from all the campuses come
and you know, let's say collectively across
three campuses, that's, I
don't know, let's call it 10 staff across three campuses. And then there's the main
(10:20):
campus and the main Campus alone has 15
staff. Hypothetically. Well, what do you think is going to
dominate that conversation? One, that's way too many people in a meeting.
And two, of course the discussion about what's going on in the main
campus is going to dominate because they, they are the
majority of the room. And so how does that make
(10:44):
those camp. I mean, at best, you could say
it makes the campus staff teams feel
marginalized and like it's a waste of their time. You
know, at worst, they feel like, well, what's going on in our campuses
doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what's happening at this main
campus. So don't do that. Don't have those kinds of staff
(11:06):
meetings. Or if you do, if you're going to have an all staff
meeting, then give it a clear purpose. It's for
camaraderie, it's for vision casting across campuses. But
you're not, you shouldn't get into the details of what's
happening at each campus because that wouldn't be appropriate in a meeting of that
size. So figure out, okay, this is an executive
(11:28):
team meeting. So this is the kind of thing that happens there. This is a
campus specific staff meeting. We're going to deal with our specific
campus issues. This is a cross functional meeting because maybe you
have some things that are in central services, like
here's our marketing plan and how we're going to be collaborating across all
campuses. You just, you need to have granular and strategic thinking about how
(11:51):
you're leveraging meetings so that you don't waste people's time and you don't make people
feel like they're stupid or insignificant. And again,
we're way too quick to plan a meeting, you know,
and not be thoughtful about what its point is. Yeah, right.
This, this naturally, you know, introduces some
geographic limitations as well. You know, I mean, are our campuses 20
(12:14):
minutes away? Is there an hour? Are they in another state?
So, you know, what, what is even the ability to meet in person versus
online meetings? We all know online meetings have
a different vibe to them. And the way people are able
to interact, especially large, large people, some online,
some not, is a huge change
(12:36):
in dynamic from everybody being in one place. Was that a fat shaming thing you
said? Large people?
Sorry. A.J.'s a nice person. Probably. I should probably cut that out
later. I don't know what I said, but I did. Large
group, physically large people. Large groups of people.
(12:58):
Like. Yeah. Have you ever met a large person on the
Internet, on Zoo? You know what that's like.
Sorry. To increase the resolution on that guy's camera.
I'm laughing because between, if you've ever met, if you ever meet A.J. and
I in person, it's
(13:19):
like Laurel and Hardy.
That's probably a, a little too far, but maybe
there's a hint of that going on. Totally. There's a hint of that
one time. Side story, side story. One time
A.J. and I were at a, at a conference in. We were
(13:40):
in Turkey for a ministry
conference and one of the pastors, he served at a church
in like Norway or someplace like that. But he was from,
Was he from Tonga or from Fiji? He was from Fiji,
that's right. And
he came up to me and he goes, you play rugby? And I was
(14:02):
like, nah. And he goes, you look like you could.
Which I thought was sideways. You're a big guy.
He didn't ask me if I played rugby, that's for sure.
Agree. Hey, I'm
sorry, that's a distraction. Your point though is a
(14:23):
good one. That if you've ever tried to have a meeting on Zoom
with a lot of people, it's a nightmare because
three people dominate the whole meeting. Or if you. Or if there's several people in
the room, I mean, forget it. You can't hear anybody. It's awful. Yeah.
All right, number three. Scott. Okay.
(14:43):
Empower campus autonomy. So you need, this goes back to
strategy. You need to clearly define
up front what decision
making capability does each campus have. So this
is maybe a crass example because I'm not
suggesting that churches are fast
(15:05):
food restaurants or the. In that multi site campuses are,
are franchises, but
it is a helpful analog to think,
all right, an individual McDonald's
does actually have some degree of autonomy.
(15:26):
They have some control over pricing strategy.
They have some control over limited time menu offerings
they will or won't have. So there, there are
some things that they can decide. They can, they can
hire and fire their own staff. They. There, those, there are all
kinds of things that they can do on their own. They don't have to get
(15:48):
anybody else's approval to do it. They can just operate. There
are other things though that they don't get to decide. Whether or not
they're going to offer Happy Meals is not up to them. What the Happy Meal
toy is isn't up to them. Like there are things that get just
decided for them and it's their responsibility to comport.
Now what is the. There, there is
(16:10):
a wide range that you can have on the spec. There's a
huge spectrum of autumn of autonomy to very
tightly controlled to very highly autonomous.
And none of them are right or wrong. That's what I want to just
clarify and say. There isn't one right strategy for that.
The right strategy is the one that you communicate clearly
(16:33):
and enforce. So
if it's tightly controlled, people should know what that is, what the boundary
lines are and know what they are up front. So if you
come on out as a campus pastor in a church and you know, it's a
tightly controlled environment, don't start complaining that it's tightly controlled.
You knew what the situation was when you applied for the role and were hired
(16:55):
into it. You know, like, like you don't,
you can't get mad as the, as the McDonald's operator that, like, you know, we
really ought to have sad meals here, not Happy Meals. You know, like, you don't
get to choose that. So
define, have. Be sure you're clear. But you, but my
experience has been very often these boundary
(17:18):
lines aren't clear and people don't know how
much autonomy do we have. And that's where
they're, that's where the friction comes and
the lack of trust and the frustration not just
felt by the way, by the leadership, but it can be
felt down at the congregational level too. When those
(17:40):
boundary lines aren't clear, people are like, what is, what is going on? I thought
we could just do, I thought we could do this. And so, yeah,
that's, that is true. Yeah. You can end up, you know, I mean,
people could be like, oh, I thought this would be simple for us to do.
And you know, your campus pastor, somebody's like, no, it's
not a decision I can make. Or this is going to have to go through
(18:01):
some channels for us to decide whether we want to do that or not. And
then people in the church are like, what? Something
that, you know, if you don't understand the structure, you think, well, this ought to
be easy and simple. Yeah, yeah. And then you learn that's
just not, not how this works. Yeah. So it's
so important that you clarify what those boundary
(18:23):
lines are. Enforce them. And then on
the ops, on, I guess on the other side of that is then trust.
So if you say you have autonomy within these boundaries,
don't be sabotaging them every five minutes. Yeah. Let
them, let them have that autonomy. If they make a mistake, deal with the
mistake. But don't micromanage campus
(18:45):
pastors within the boundary lines you've. You've set for them.
That's not going to create a healthy. I mean, that's going to create division.
If you say, hey, you can do X thing,
and then later on you go, oh, I don't. You, you hamper them in
some way from doing that. Now you violated that trust and now you've
created, like, now I don't want to, I don't want to share with you now.
(19:08):
I want to I've created this division. So set the clear
expectations clearly up front and force those
boundaries and then give freedom within the boundaries.
And then if there's a mistake, you can deal with the mistake. That's okay. People
make mistakes, that's how they grow. So that's all right. But don't
hound them. Yeah, yeah.
(19:30):
Our next point is sort of related, it's a little more nuanced to some of
these other things that we've kind of already talked about and that's establish consistent
communication rhythms. So similarly to
meetings, physical meetings that we might be having, we also just need
to think about our communication channels as well. And even, you
know, getting down to that campus level, who is going to communicate things
(19:53):
to the congregation, campus pastor, campus staff
person, or does everything come from, you know, a main
campus or what types of things? Who
will communicate what types of things? This starts to get really
granular and you probably aren't going to solve every
possibility, you know, with this on the front end,
(20:15):
but at least have some general guidelines already in
place before you launch a campus and then begin to make
decisions on these in conjunction with
leaders, all the stakeholders
as you begin to go forward. And again this, a
lot of this comes back to levels of trust
(20:38):
and predefined levels of autonomy versus, you know,
consistency as you
define the relationship between a main or a planting campus,
launching campus and subsequent multi site other
campuses. I got nothing to add to that. I think that's,
that's important. They just, you know, the key thing here is just to avoid
(20:58):
redundancy. You know, how could we just
streamline things? The last thing though, the last,
our last point here is to foster cross campus leadership
unity through shared wins. Bit of a word salad there, but
essentially,
maybe, maybe a pet peeve of some people would be
(21:20):
when you hear the one church, five campuses or whatever.
Maybe. Let's go back to McDonald's for a minute.
McDonald's is one brand, but it's not one restaurant.
It's, it's thousands
of restaurants that share some sense of
(21:42):
identity and the natural reality. I
know we like to say we're one church in three locations.
It's not true no matter what your multi site strategy,
is it, it's the, because it's in the nature of human
beings that, that we develop culture when, when a certain, when a
particular group of people come together, it
(22:04):
develops a distinct culture. That's the
just, just the reality. And
so maybe moving away from some of that language would be helpful.
You have, you can have shared DNA, you can have shared identity,
you can have shared goals, you can have shared,
you know, giving and you can have, there are all resources, you can have
(22:27):
all kinds of things that are shared. But
your identity is going to be a little bit different from place to place. And
rather than trying to pretend that that's not the case, maybe
lean into the fact that it is different. And where you can
build some unity though, is through recognizing that when
one campus wins, it's a win for the kingdom and it's a win for all
(22:49):
of us. And not minimizing the
smallest of the campuses or whatever, but really celebrating
how every campus is winning in a particular way. And
that starts to develop trust.
I know maybe moving away from McDonald's and moving to Chick Fil A. I know
for a fact that these, the Chick Fil A owner
(23:12):
operators, I, I'm friend, I've
have, I'm acquaintances with a couple of them.
The community among the owner operators is really intense
in a positive way. Like they, they spend a lot of time together.
The ones that are in the same regions will meet together and,
(23:32):
and nationally they come together on a fairly regular
basis and they celebrate one another and how they're all winning, but they're all different.
Um, all of those Chick Fil A's have a little bit of a different culture.
And I think, again, I'm not trying to say your multi site churches
are restaurants, but I am trying to just communicate
that you really want to be sure that you're regularly celebrating
(23:55):
wins from all the campuses and not trying to say you're one church
because you're not, you're, you're different campuses and
with different people and different challenges and different cultures and there are things that you
share and there are things that you don't, but we can all win together. And
the biggest problem with multi site churches is this feeling that
only one of the campuses matters and it's the main one.
(24:17):
And that does not have to be the case.
It doesn't have to be that way, but it often is. Yeah,
I mean it's, this is, I mean, slightly off but still in the, in
the, in the vein of this episode. Scott. I mean, you
know, considering even chick fil A versus McDonald's
and using the word culture, I think people, everybody's
(24:40):
been to both if you have these restaurants in your region
and Chick Fil a is known for speed of the drive through saying
my pleasure, you know, whenever they help somebody. And you find that
across every single Chick Fil A, you know,
because they're. Generally really involved in the community. It's,
it is a culture. It was a predetermined culture that
(25:03):
they've worked very hard to continue through the owner operators
who, who convey it to the staff at the restaurants. McDonald's.
Obviously, I have no idea how McDonald's runs their company,
but from a user experience you can determine and I
bet you would all agree with me. McDonald's does not talk about
culture down to the staff level at a restaurant
(25:26):
because everybody knows the experience. One McDonald's might be
awesome, one day terrible. Another day, one store might be
consistently pretty good. One store is consistently really bad. So, you know, I
mean, we use the word culture in the title of this episode. The food tastes
the same for the most part. They're producing the same product.
The experience of getting product or if it's even available
(25:47):
that day, ice cream, you just never know.
That's right. And you're right. And it's, I mean, it's not like you couldn't have
a bad Chick Fil A experience. I guess you could. But you're right. The culture
is theoretical space. There could be a magic
experience. But they,
they do care about culture and it's obvious that they do. And so.
(26:11):
But Chick Fil A would never say we are one restaurant in
a hunt in hundreds of locations. That's not language they would use
because it's not true. They are hundreds of restaurants
that have a shared culture. Yeah. So moving
away from this, I mean this wasn't in our notes, but I just, maybe it's
a pet peeve. I. Because I. You intrinsically know it's not true.
(26:34):
It's not possible to be one church in three locations. You can
be three. Three congregations with the same name
and shared a shared vision and a shared culture and
shared processes and shared resources. But you're not
one congregation. You're not. That's
right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how Chick Fil A, what kind of language they
(26:56):
use for their franchises, but I would almost venture to say it
would more likely be if they were going to use some kind of phrase, we
are one culture in a thousand locations.
Because that, I think the user experience would say that is probably
close to true. So yeah,
it's, it's interesting. Just, just something, just something to think about if you, I
(27:19):
mean, I'm not trying, I'm not trying to condemn any multi site church, but if,
if you started, we're like, hey, we're moving multi site. We're going to be one
church in three locations. Just stop saying that.
No one believes it yeah, yeah, yeah. You. You're going to run up into
barriers and challenges to maintain that motto.
(27:39):
Yep. Yep. Because it's not just never true. It's never. That's never the
truth. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. If
your church. Hey, you know what? Let's celebrate the fact that if your church is
growing and Lord willing, you're healthy and.
And will continue in that. And. And this has become a conversation, man. That is
something to be celebrated. What are we going to do with our growth? So I
(28:01):
hope that's how you're feeling or you know what, even you're a church of 200
and your sanctuary is full. You're like, what are we. What are we going to
do next? Man, this is awesome. I love that that might
be where you're at. So take the time to discern God's will
for your church, the right strategy, and I hope that
you do have a healthy culture, healthy systems, and. And leadership
(28:23):
development. So that'd be awesome. We would love that for you. We'd love to help
you. If you have questions about that, reach out to us. We can talk about
this. But yeah. Hey, the show notes
for this week down there in the YouTube description or on your podcast
app. You can read this week's article and any other
resources that we have available for you this week. We're glad you were here.
(28:44):
We'll see you again next time on the church revitalization Podcast.
Not franchised, but continuing week to week.
That's right. See you next time.
Building a healthy multi site leadership culture today on
the Church Revitalization Podcast. Hello and welcome
to the Church Revitalization Podcast brought to you by the
Malfers Group team where each week we tackle important
actionable topics to help churches thrive. And now
here's your hosts, Scott Ball and A.J. matthew.
(00:24):
Welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by
my friend and co host and A.J. Mathieu.
A.J. in 300 and some odd episodes,
we've never talked about multisite, which is crazy, or at
least not that I can recall. If we have, it's been
a long time. Yeah. Maybe some caveat here or there. I don't think we've ever
(00:47):
had a full episode on it. And we got several
questions. When we asked a few weeks ago if anybody
had questions for us, we got a handful of multi site questions. So we're trying
to address a few of those questions. I'm not going to read them off
because we kind of blended a few things together. But we hope that this is
helpful. As you're thinking about if maybe you're
(01:08):
thinking about going multi site or maybe you are a campus pastor or you
lead a church that has campuses. We hope that this is a
helpful thing because I'm going to be honest with you, this doesn't always work
very well. Sometimes there are some pretty unhealthy dynamics. And so
before we get too far into it though, I want to give a shout out
(01:28):
to healthychurchestoolkit.com those good, those
handsome gentlemen who are behind the Healthy
Churches toolkit. Go to Healthy Church. That's, that's us by the way.
Go to healthychurchestoolkit.com Sign up for a 7 day free
trial and enjoy all the fun stuff. Because a healthy campus,
healthy churches, that's what we're after.
(01:52):
A.J. before we dive fully into our key points, so we wanted to give a
couple of caveats. I'm going to say one and then I want you to say
another. The first caveat that I want to give is
the key to a healthy multi site
church in general is going to be knowing what
your multi site strategy is in the first place. So that's not the focus of
(02:14):
this particular episode. We could do a whole nother episode on top of types of
multi site strategies and maybe we will. But there
are different types of multi site. There's multi sites that are for
church growth. We want our church to grow. And so we're using
multiple campuses as a means of doing that. And then even within
that category, there's differences, live teaching, live local teaching
(02:36):
versus the teaching is piped in, etc.
There's another version of multisite where
you, you're adopting dying churches.
And even with that, within that there's categories, there's churches
that are, they're adopting them and they're going to become permanent
campuses. You're adopting them and then you're going to spin them off. Then there's the
(02:59):
strategy where you are going to be
planting campuses and they're going to be spun off
as autonomous churches later. So having a clear strategy up
front before you dive into camp, before you, before, before you
dive into being a multi site church is important. And,
(03:19):
and then the point, our key points for today will become more relevant. But if
you've not landed on a strategy, you're starting off on the wrong foot.
Yeah, yeah, you're definitely going to be behind and, and dealing with conflict.
But yeah, we'll get into to these things here in a minute. The other thing
is you've got to be a healthy church before you try to reproduce anything else.
So, and, and I don't just brush this off either because
(03:42):
I think if this discussion, if
you've reached a point where you're like, maybe we could be a multi side, we
could launch a campus, I think you would maybe
too quickly go, this is not even a question. I mean,
look, you know, we're running three services, we're full.
And it's easy to think full church equals healthy church. And that's
(04:04):
not always the case. We did an episode on this, I think back maybe in
May on why unhealthy churches sometimes grow.
And so take, I would say, be very open
to an introspective look and make sure that you're ready.
Because part of one of the things that can happen is you've been
this, you've been this entity, this church for a while. The people there
(04:27):
get it. They know your culture, they know how you communicate. But
to take that and move that into an external space,
you, you're going to have to over communicate. You're going to have to make
sure that everything is very clear and organized and understandable.
And sometimes that campus can end up with revealing things
that should have been perhaps different to start with.
(04:49):
So be healthy, ask for help. We'd love to help you do that.
Yeah, totally. Okay, so,
but we want to focus on, all right, let's assume that you've dealt with all
of those things. You have a strategy, you got a healthy culture
within your, your church and now you're Going multi site. So how can we have
a healthy multi site leadership culture among the
(05:11):
campus pastors and the staff at
the, at the main campus, we'll call it main campus for
ease. Although that language itself might not be helpful.
Original campus OG I don't know what you want to call it, but
having a good, good relationship there and a good culture there, that's the focus.
(05:32):
So let's dive into point number one. The first one would be this. I
think it's really important to just divide up the teams,
have really clear teams, staff teams,
for example, making a, a
distinction between say an executive team
and like
(05:55):
versus just general staff team. So you might have things like
central serve executive team, central services,
which serve all of the campuses equally and then campus
specific teams. I think a mistake that often
happens with these
churches is that it all kind of molds together. Hey, we're all one
(06:16):
staff. But the reality is you're not, you're not because everybody's dealing with different
things. And what can happen is
all of those meetings start to get dominated by that main campus and those,
those campus, those other campuses start to feel
like what are we even doing? Or if there's not
an executive team that includes people from the other campuses, then it
(06:39):
can feel like, well, we're just going along with whatever they say and they have
no voice. So just defining what those teams are.
Yeah, yeah. I mean I would call this the us and then us
and them syndrome. You really have to be careful and
monitor this because if you say we're only
an us, but your actions come down at the more
(07:01):
granular level of decision making is turns out to be an us and
them, then this is where I think you can end up with some conflict,
misunderstanding. So we just have to be really clear about that.
How us are we? Because if we're going
for full us, that requires seats at the table and
voices being heard and there has to be a common understanding of how we'd
(07:23):
make decisions. But, and I'm not saying you
can't be a healthy us and them, but, but
it still has to be clearly defined. People have to know, you know, where
their place is and what, what they're going to be a part of and what
they're not going to be a part of. So yeah, these are, these are
decisions that have to be made ahead of time to the extent that you can.
(07:45):
It's hard sometimes to consider every possible scenario, but
I think you should have a pretty solid framework at this point
for executive decision making, levels of autonomy, that kind of thing.
I think that, that maybe, maybe one of the challenges is not every
church that's going multi site these days is a church where,
hey, the, the, the original campus has 30
(08:08):
staff and then all of the other campuses have five
staff each. You know, it may be that the original
campus only has three staff and then they're planting campuses
that each only have one campus pastor. And so you,
you may wrongly think that adding
these different types of teams or defining these separate types of teams
(08:31):
is creating a degree of complexity that is beyond
what's necessary for where you are. But because you have
added a multi site strategy or moved that in direction, you
already are complex. And so you need to, you need to
define these different types of teams or sub teams.
Even if you don't have, you know, across all your campuses,
(08:53):
50 staff, even if it's just six or seven,
you need to subdivide and go. Here's this executive team that's making
decisions at the, at the sort
of visionary level, strategic level
versus tac. You know, these teams are making tactical decisions and so
on. Yeah, you're right. There's so much nuance to this because there's so many, it's
(09:16):
like infinite scenarios, you know. But I think kind of what you're
speaking to, depending on the size of the church, the original
campus before beginning its first or multi
campuses can affect what this relationship is going to look
like because the varying levels of complexity that already exist in the environment.
So yeah, this is this tough stuff. And so
(09:38):
I get maybe the point that we're driving at, that we started off even saying,
and that we're drive, continue to drive home here is do not enter
into this lightly. Have a plan to really think through this.
Yeah, all right, yeah, sorry. So number two here, clarify the
purpose of each meeting. This is, this is tied to number one.
But I kind of hinted at this already. You know, if you've got a situation
(10:00):
where, well, we just have staff meeting every week there's
staff meeting and all the staff from all the campuses come
and you know, let's say collectively across
three campuses, that's, I
don't know, let's call it 10 staff across three campuses. And then there's the main
(10:20):
campus and the main Campus alone has 15
staff. Hypothetically. Well, what do you think is going to
dominate that conversation? One, that's way too many people in a meeting.
And two, of course the discussion about what's going on in the main
campus is going to dominate because they, they are the
majority of the room. And so how does that make
(10:44):
those camp. I mean, at best, you could say
it makes the campus staff teams feel
marginalized and like it's a waste of their time. You
know, at worst, they feel like, well, what's going on in our campuses
doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what's happening at this main
campus. So don't do that. Don't have those kinds of staff
(11:06):
meetings. Or if you do, if you're going to have an all staff
meeting, then give it a clear purpose. It's for
camaraderie, it's for vision casting across campuses. But
you're not, you shouldn't get into the details of what's
happening at each campus because that wouldn't be appropriate in a meeting of that
size. So figure out, okay, this is an executive
(11:28):
team meeting. So this is the kind of thing that happens there. This is a
campus specific staff meeting. We're going to deal with our specific
campus issues. This is a cross functional meeting because maybe you
have some things that are in central services, like
here's our marketing plan and how we're going to be collaborating across all
campuses. You just, you need to have granular and strategic thinking about how
(11:51):
you're leveraging meetings so that you don't waste people's time and you don't make people
feel like they're stupid or insignificant. And again,
we're way too quick to plan a meeting, you know,
and not be thoughtful about what its point is. Yeah, right.
This, this naturally, you know, introduces some
geographic limitations as well. You know, I mean, are our campuses 20
(12:14):
minutes away? Is there an hour? Are they in another state?
So, you know, what, what is even the ability to meet in person versus
online meetings? We all know online meetings have
a different vibe to them. And the way people are able
to interact, especially large, large people, some online,
some not, is a huge change
(12:36):
in dynamic from everybody being in one place. Was that a fat shaming thing you
said? Large people?
Sorry. A.J.'s a nice person. Probably. I should probably cut that out
later. I don't know what I said, but I did. Large
group, physically large people. Large groups of people.
(12:58):
Like. Yeah. Have you ever met a large person on the
Internet, on Zoo? You know what that's like.
Sorry. To increase the resolution on that guy's camera.
I'm laughing because between, if you've ever met, if you ever meet A.J. and
I in person, it's
(13:19):
like Laurel and Hardy.
That's probably a, a little too far, but maybe
there's a hint of that going on. Totally. There's a hint of that
one time. Side story, side story. One time
A.J. and I were at a, at a conference in. We were
(13:40):
in Turkey for a ministry
conference and one of the pastors, he served at a church
in like Norway or someplace like that. But he was from,
Was he from Tonga or from Fiji? He was from Fiji,
that's right. And
he came up to me and he goes, you play rugby? And I was
(14:02):
like, nah. And he goes, you look like you could.
Which I thought was sideways. You're a big guy.
He didn't ask me if I played rugby, that's for sure.
Agree. Hey, I'm
sorry, that's a distraction. Your point though is a
(14:23):
good one. That if you've ever tried to have a meeting on Zoom
with a lot of people, it's a nightmare because
three people dominate the whole meeting. Or if you. Or if there's several people in
the room, I mean, forget it. You can't hear anybody. It's awful. Yeah.
All right, number three. Scott. Okay.
(14:43):
Empower campus autonomy. So you need, this goes back to
strategy. You need to clearly define
up front what decision
making capability does each campus have. So this
is maybe a crass example because I'm not
suggesting that churches are fast
(15:05):
food restaurants or the. In that multi site campuses are,
are franchises, but
it is a helpful analog to think,
all right, an individual McDonald's
does actually have some degree of autonomy.
(15:26):
They have some control over pricing strategy.
They have some control over limited time menu offerings
they will or won't have. So there, there are
some things that they can decide. They can, they can
hire and fire their own staff. They. There, those, there are all
kinds of things that they can do on their own. They don't have to get
(15:48):
anybody else's approval to do it. They can just operate. There
are other things though that they don't get to decide. Whether or not
they're going to offer Happy Meals is not up to them. What the Happy Meal
toy is isn't up to them. Like there are things that get just
decided for them and it's their responsibility to comport.
Now what is the. There, there is
(16:10):
a wide range that you can have on the spec. There's a
huge spectrum of autumn of autonomy to very
tightly controlled to very highly autonomous.
And none of them are right or wrong. That's what I want to just
clarify and say. There isn't one right strategy for that.
The right strategy is the one that you communicate clearly
(16:33):
and enforce. So
if it's tightly controlled, people should know what that is, what the boundary
lines are and know what they are up front. So if you
come on out as a campus pastor in a church and you know, it's a
tightly controlled environment, don't start complaining that it's tightly controlled.
You knew what the situation was when you applied for the role and were hired
(16:55):
into it. You know, like, like you don't,
you can't get mad as the, as the McDonald's operator that, like, you know, we
really ought to have sad meals here, not Happy Meals. You know, like, you don't
get to choose that. So
define, have. Be sure you're clear. But you, but my
experience has been very often these boundary
(17:18):
lines aren't clear and people don't know how
much autonomy do we have. And that's where
they're, that's where the friction comes and
the lack of trust and the frustration not just
felt by the way, by the leadership, but it can be
felt down at the congregational level too. When those
(17:40):
boundary lines aren't clear, people are like, what is, what is going on? I thought
we could just do, I thought we could do this. And so, yeah,
that's, that is true. Yeah. You can end up, you know, I mean,
people could be like, oh, I thought this would be simple for us to do.
And you know, your campus pastor, somebody's like, no, it's
not a decision I can make. Or this is going to have to go through
(18:01):
some channels for us to decide whether we want to do that or not. And
then people in the church are like, what? Something
that, you know, if you don't understand the structure, you think, well, this ought to
be easy and simple. Yeah, yeah. And then you learn that's
just not, not how this works. Yeah. So it's
so important that you clarify what those boundary
(18:23):
lines are. Enforce them. And then on
the ops, on, I guess on the other side of that is then trust.
So if you say you have autonomy within these boundaries,
don't be sabotaging them every five minutes. Yeah. Let
them, let them have that autonomy. If they make a mistake, deal with the
mistake. But don't micromanage campus
(18:45):
pastors within the boundary lines you've. You've set for them.
That's not going to create a healthy. I mean, that's going to create division.
If you say, hey, you can do X thing,
and then later on you go, oh, I don't. You, you hamper them in
some way from doing that. Now you violated that trust and now you've
created, like, now I don't want to, I don't want to share with you now.
(19:08):
I want to I've created this division. So set the clear
expectations clearly up front and force those
boundaries and then give freedom within the boundaries.
And then if there's a mistake, you can deal with the mistake. That's okay. People
make mistakes, that's how they grow. So that's all right. But don't
hound them. Yeah, yeah.
(19:30):
Our next point is sort of related, it's a little more nuanced to some of
these other things that we've kind of already talked about and that's establish consistent
communication rhythms. So similarly to
meetings, physical meetings that we might be having, we also just need
to think about our communication channels as well. And even, you
know, getting down to that campus level, who is going to communicate things
(19:53):
to the congregation, campus pastor, campus staff
person, or does everything come from, you know, a main
campus or what types of things? Who
will communicate what types of things? This starts to get really
granular and you probably aren't going to solve every
possibility, you know, with this on the front end,
(20:15):
but at least have some general guidelines already in
place before you launch a campus and then begin to make
decisions on these in conjunction with
leaders, all the stakeholders
as you begin to go forward. And again this, a
lot of this comes back to levels of trust
(20:38):
and predefined levels of autonomy versus, you know,
consistency as you
define the relationship between a main or a planting campus,
launching campus and subsequent multi site other
campuses. I got nothing to add to that. I think that's,
that's important. They just, you know, the key thing here is just to avoid
(20:58):
redundancy. You know, how could we just
streamline things? The last thing though, the last,
our last point here is to foster cross campus leadership
unity through shared wins. Bit of a word salad there, but
essentially,
maybe, maybe a pet peeve of some people would be
(21:20):
when you hear the one church, five campuses or whatever.
Maybe. Let's go back to McDonald's for a minute.
McDonald's is one brand, but it's not one restaurant.
It's, it's thousands
of restaurants that share some sense of
(21:42):
identity and the natural reality. I
know we like to say we're one church in three locations.
It's not true no matter what your multi site strategy,
is it, it's the, because it's in the nature of human
beings that, that we develop culture when, when a certain, when a
particular group of people come together, it
(22:04):
develops a distinct culture. That's the
just, just the reality. And
so maybe moving away from some of that language would be helpful.
You have, you can have shared DNA, you can have shared identity,
you can have shared goals, you can have shared,
you know, giving and you can have, there are all resources, you can have
(22:27):
all kinds of things that are shared. But
your identity is going to be a little bit different from place to place. And
rather than trying to pretend that that's not the case, maybe
lean into the fact that it is different. And where you can
build some unity though, is through recognizing that when
one campus wins, it's a win for the kingdom and it's a win for all
(22:49):
of us. And not minimizing the
smallest of the campuses or whatever, but really celebrating
how every campus is winning in a particular way. And
that starts to develop trust.
I know maybe moving away from McDonald's and moving to Chick Fil A. I know
for a fact that these, the Chick Fil A owner
(23:12):
operators, I, I'm friend, I've
have, I'm acquaintances with a couple of them.
The community among the owner operators is really intense
in a positive way. Like they, they spend a lot of time together.
The ones that are in the same regions will meet together and,
(23:32):
and nationally they come together on a fairly regular
basis and they celebrate one another and how they're all winning, but they're all different.
Um, all of those Chick Fil A's have a little bit of a different culture.
And I think, again, I'm not trying to say your multi site churches
are restaurants, but I am trying to just communicate
that you really want to be sure that you're regularly celebrating
(23:55):
wins from all the campuses and not trying to say you're one church
because you're not, you're, you're different campuses and
with different people and different challenges and different cultures and there are things that you
share and there are things that you don't, but we can all win together. And
the biggest problem with multi site churches is this feeling that
only one of the campuses matters and it's the main one.
(24:17):
And that does not have to be the case.
It doesn't have to be that way, but it often is. Yeah,
I mean it's, this is, I mean, slightly off but still in the, in
the, in the vein of this episode. Scott. I mean, you
know, considering even chick fil A versus McDonald's
and using the word culture, I think people, everybody's
(24:40):
been to both if you have these restaurants in your region
and Chick Fil a is known for speed of the drive through saying
my pleasure, you know, whenever they help somebody. And you find that
across every single Chick Fil A, you know,
because they're. Generally really involved in the community. It's,
it is a culture. It was a predetermined culture that
(25:03):
they've worked very hard to continue through the owner operators
who, who convey it to the staff at the restaurants. McDonald's.
Obviously, I have no idea how McDonald's runs their company,
but from a user experience you can determine and I
bet you would all agree with me. McDonald's does not talk about
culture down to the staff level at a restaurant
(25:26):
because everybody knows the experience. One McDonald's might be
awesome, one day terrible. Another day, one store might be
consistently pretty good. One store is consistently really bad. So, you know, I
mean, we use the word culture in the title of this episode. The food tastes
the same for the most part. They're producing the same product.
The experience of getting product or if it's even available
(25:47):
that day, ice cream, you just never know.
That's right. And you're right. And it's, I mean, it's not like you couldn't have
a bad Chick Fil A experience. I guess you could. But you're right. The culture
is theoretical space. There could be a magic
experience. But they,
they do care about culture and it's obvious that they do. And so.
(26:11):
But Chick Fil A would never say we are one restaurant in
a hunt in hundreds of locations. That's not language they would use
because it's not true. They are hundreds of restaurants
that have a shared culture. Yeah. So moving
away from this, I mean this wasn't in our notes, but I just, maybe it's
a pet peeve. I. Because I. You intrinsically know it's not true.
(26:34):
It's not possible to be one church in three locations. You can
be three. Three congregations with the same name
and shared a shared vision and a shared culture and
shared processes and shared resources. But you're not
one congregation. You're not. That's
right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how Chick Fil A, what kind of language they
(26:56):
use for their franchises, but I would almost venture to say it
would more likely be if they were going to use some kind of phrase, we
are one culture in a thousand locations.
Because that, I think the user experience would say that is probably
close to true. So yeah,
it's, it's interesting. Just, just something, just something to think about if you, I
(27:19):
mean, I'm not trying, I'm not trying to condemn any multi site church, but if,
if you started, we're like, hey, we're moving multi site. We're going to be one
church in three locations. Just stop saying that.
No one believes it yeah, yeah, yeah. You. You're going to run up into
barriers and challenges to maintain that motto.
(27:39):
Yep. Yep. Because it's not just never true. It's never. That's never the
truth. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. If
your church. Hey, you know what? Let's celebrate the fact that if your church is
growing and Lord willing, you're healthy and.
And will continue in that. And. And this has become a conversation, man. That is
something to be celebrated. What are we going to do with our growth? So I
(28:01):
hope that's how you're feeling or you know what, even you're a church of 200
and your sanctuary is full. You're like, what are we. What are we going to
do next? Man, this is awesome. I love that that might
be where you're at. So take the time to discern God's will
for your church, the right strategy, and I hope that
you do have a healthy culture, healthy systems, and. And leadership
(28:23):
development. So that'd be awesome. We would love that for you. We'd love to help
you. If you have questions about that, reach out to us. We can talk about
this. But yeah. Hey, the show notes
for this week down there in the YouTube description or on your podcast
app. You can read this week's article and any other
resources that we have available for you this week. We're glad you were here.
(28:44):
We'll see you again next time on the church revitalization Podcast.
Not franchised, but continuing week to week.
That's right. See you next time.
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