The Unstuck Church Podcast

The next time that you walk into your church lobby, pretend it's your very first time there. What does the room tell you about your church? Because it's telling people something. The question is whether it's the story that you meant to tell. Sean got the chance to sit down with Phil Taylor from PlainJoe Studios . Phil spent 20 years in lead pastor and executive pastor roles before joining PlainJoe...

People issues, especially people changes , can be incredibly divisive in a church. Suddenly, a staff member people love is no longer on the platform, and nobody's really sure why. Church leaders have had months to process the change, but the congregation and staff have to catch up in one conversation or announcement. And they rarely sit in that gap of information neutrally … they fill it with a st...

You've got a structure on paper. You have clean reporting lanes, ownership and a healthy span of care. But the boxes that make up each role are still empty. How do you determine who goes in which seat? How do you know if someone has the leadership capacity a role requires? What happens when a role grows past the person in it? What do you do when the honest answer is that someone isn't in the right...

Most churches build structure without ever naming what they're structuring around. Pastors want good structure for really good reasons. They want communication to work. They want to catch problems before they become a crisis. They want to know nothing's falling through the cracks. And honestly, most of them want their people cared for; they don't want anybody carrying more than they should. Those...

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 abou...

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 th...

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...

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...

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 ye...

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 in this episode. If you hav...

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 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 much to do. And when everything is on your plate, everything feels equally urgent. But there's a handful of things that only the lead pastor can do. An...

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 i...

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 groups, serve teams, disciples...

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 your volunteers and volunteer leaders. But all of that volunteer development work, as im...

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...

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 inte...

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.  We have some fun questions to address today—a few about space and adding service times and several about strategic planning and getting traction...

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 th...

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" series by getting into t...

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 committed to practic...

"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 Unstuck Process. Before engaging with us, the church was hitting a growth barrier—like many of the churches in our tribe. They had facility challen...

How do you know if burnout isn't structural...but is personal? We're closing out our "Structured for Burnout " series with something that doesn't always make it onto the agenda: caring for yourself and your soul while you're busy caring for everyone else. We invited Lance Witt, a member of The Unstuck Group's lead team and a respected voice to pastors all across the country on the topic of leading...

Noticing signs of burnout on your team? You could have the right people, just in the wrong roles. Teams work best when they're structured around each person's unique wiring. Understanding your own wiring, what each role requires and how your team's strengths fit together can help you lead and work in a way that is more effective, fulfilling and sustainable. In this episode, Amy and Sean sit down w...