The Unstuck Church Podcast

If your church is over 1,000 in attendance, you're just too big to run on relationships.

At some point, the way you've always led stops scaling—not because relationships don't matter (they do) but because the ministry is now carrying more complexity than your current structure can support.

This is where many churches get stuck—they don't make that transition. And if you don't get intentional about systems, roles and dec...

As a church getting ready to go multisite, you might know who you are, have the right people and have a clear, documented model. 

But at some point, going multisite really comes down to this: Can you fund it, and can you deliver it? 

Can you actually pay for a new location so that it's sustainable for years to come? Can you re-create the main thing people show up for—the weekend experience?

In the final episode of t...

A multisite model that's too complex can't be multiplied ... and a model that is only captured in your head can't be handed off.

To go multisite, you need something clear enough to repeat and captured well enough to share.

It's one thing to know who you are, but it's another to simplify and document it so well that someone else can actually run the same ministries and systems without the need for your constant input.

In this episod...

Multisite doesn't just stretch your building. It stretches your bench.

You can have clear DNA, full buy-in and real growth and still not be ready because you don't have the leaders to pull it off.

Before you launch a new location, you need to assess whether you have enough of the right leaders, healthy leaders and a deep enough volunteer bench.

In this episode, we're looking at three checkpoints that focus on your team: staff leade...

Here's a pattern we keep seeing: more and more churches are rushing into multisite.

Churches are launching campuses without doing their due diligence. And they're skipping the learning from the churches that have already gone before them—the mistakes they've made and the things worth repeating.

A move of God is not a substitute for doing your homework.

Because here's what we've learned over the years: The number one reason ca...

We're back with another "Ask Anything" episode!

How do you break through the 500 barrier? How do you decide which programs to prune? How in the world do you free up room in your middle service?!

Sean and Ron Baum, a long-time consultant at The Unstuck Group and ministry leader who has served in the local church for over 30 years, answer these pressing questions and more ...

The senior pastor owns vision. The ministry staff own execution. But who owns the space in between?

The gap between vision and execution—the strategy, the alignment, the ability to pull things together—is where churches get stuck. And the executive pastor is the person who can close that gap.

You may call this role something different in your church, but the best way to think about this role is as the integrator. Some p...

The job of the senior pastor is enormous. 

Prepare and deliver sermons. Ensure the spiritual health of the church. Model biblical priorities. And, roughly, 400 other items.

Whether it's in the written job description or not, senior pastors have too mu...

Of all the relationships in your church, there's one relationship that determines whether everything else runs smoothly or grinds to a halt—the relationship between the senior pastor and the executive pastor. 

When it's healthy, the whole organization feels it. And when it's not…the whole organization feels that too. And if this relationship isn't healthy, your staff is talking about it too.

We invited Jimmy McLou...

Fast-growing churches don't necessarily impress us. More often than not, growth reveals the areas where churches are actually stuck. But every once in a while, we run into a church that is both growing and healthy.

City Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, has seen 51% year-over-year growth. But they've experienced more than a bump in attendance. They're seeing growth in g...

The Q2 2026 Unstuck Church Report is here!

For this report, we are focusing on staffing trends in churches of various sizes.

In this year's survey, we asked pastors and church leaders to tell us about the biggest staffing and structure challenges their churches are facing. And it's clear that there are some big hurdles churches are working to navigate. These hurdles are real, but as many churches ...

"Where do we find great staff leaders? We need them, and we need them now."

If your only approach to finding staff leaders is to hire fully formed, fully capable leaders from the outside whenever you need them, you will always be reactive.

So far in this series, we've talked about the importance of developing yo...

You probably have people serving with more leadership capacity than you know, and you may have volunteers who have taken on more leadership than they actually have capacity for.

Often, churches hand leadership responsibility to volunteers who don't have the capacity for it. Or they fail to develop the people who do have leadership capacity because they're spreading attention evenly across everyone instead of investing deeply in a f...

You need great volunteers if you want to hire internally. But to develop volunteers, you need more great staff…

It can feel like an endless cycle. But it doesn't have to be.

Trying to find leaders as quickly as possible leads to high turnover and hard conversations. But when you develop leaders with a sustainable volunteer leadership pipeline, leaders are identified earlier and developed more intentionally, which ultimately ...

We're back with another "Ask Anything" episode!

Sean invited Ron Baum, a long-time consultant at The Unstuck Group and ministry leader who has served in the local church for over 30 years, to answer some questions that YOU, our listeners, have sent in. 

For many years, one of the main reasons for stuckness in the Church was that churches lacked discipleship steps. Instead, they just had a lot of programs for church people to engage in. 

Now, most churches have done the work of designing next steps for people. They've created a pathway instead of a program calendar.

So, why is it still not working? 

In this episode, Sean and Tiffany break down the most quietly misundersto...

Everyone has opinions about multisite. 

Advice often gets shared like it's one-size-fits-all, but multisite is complex; what worked for one church in one city at one moment may not work for another church.

There are best practices you can follow, but the truth is that multisite comes with a lot of nuance. 

In this episode, we're continuing our "This Isn't Working Anymore...

This isn't working anymore...

Too many churches keep running the same plays that used to work, even when the results have clearly changed. Ministry is a moving target, and what worked in 2010 doesn't automatically work in 2026.
The ministry landscape has shifted, and it's time to make some upgrades. 

At The Unstuck Group, one of our core values is "Make It Better," and we are committe...

"Structure changes have really changed our church... and it's changed me."

We're doing something different this week on the podcast. We invited Pastor Donny Wadley from Fountain City Church in Knoxville, TN, to share his experience of going through The U...