The Unstuck Church Podcast

We work with a lot of churches that are stuck.

And because that's our world, we spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the problems that churches are facing.

This series is a little different. We're going to talk about where churches are winning because celebrating what's working matters just as much as fixing what isn't.

Sean had the chance to talk with Christy Gibas, lead pastor of The Table Church in Pittsburgh, PA, about their groups strategy. The Table Church is so committed to being a church of groups...

Your staff culture shapes your congregation more than any set of values you've ever put on a wall.

People absorb values from watching how the people leading them actually behave. And whatever they're seeing, they interpret as "the way we do it here."

If culture development stops at your staff, you've only done part of the work. Because the culture on your staff team is going to shape your congregation, whether you push it out there on purpose or not.

We're wrapping up our series by talking about what happens when you cascade...

Every hire you make is a culture decision.

You're either adding somebody who makes your team more like who you said you want to be or somebody who pulls it a little the other way.

When you make your culture-shaping behaviors a normal part of your hiring, onboarding and staff evaluation process, you get better at hiring and managing. You'll see less turnover and more staff embracing and celebrating your culture alongside you.

In this episode, we're talking interviews, onboarding and reviews. We'll also share a bit of how Sun Valley does this...

Defining your culture-shaping behaviors is a quick project. Embedding them into your team is a multi-year commitment—but that's the part that determines whether any of this changes how your team actually operates.

What tends to happen is we come out of this meeting and return to the whirlwind of the rest of ministry. We put this list of behaviors on the wall or a desk calendar, and then go back to what we've always done.

In this episode, Sean and Paul talk about what it takes to keep your culture alive. 

And the...

Culture is difficult to define but easy to feel … and it's hard to overestimate the role culture plays in your team's health and efficiency.

A healthy culture can help turbocharge your vision and make progress toward the calling that God has for your church. But an unhealthy team culture will actually erode your vision and derail your strategy.

We invited Paul Alexander, the executive pastor at Sun Valley Church in Phoenix, AZ and a consultant on our team, to join us for this new series: Getting Practical on Developing Culture.

In this episode, we...

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, where he helps churches with building, design, branding, and web projects. 

In this episode, Phil and Sean talk through what telling your story through d...

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 story that's not about the decision but about the church itself. 

We're wrapping up Too Big to Run on Relationships, our series on...

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 seat anymore?

In this episode, the conversation shifts from charts to people, as Sean and...

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 are pastoral instincts—great instincts. But here's where it can go wrong.

A church feels the organizational pain, and they go straight to adjusting the org chart. They restructure without ev...

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 decision-making, you'll keep feeling the same pain: confusion, bottlenecks, burnout and frustration. Your staff is working hard, but it still feels chaotic.

In this seri...

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 this series, Sean and Jesse break down the last two Multisite Readiness Checkpoints: Financial Strength and...

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 episode, Sean and Jesse talk about what you do as a multisite church and how you...

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 leadership capacity, staff health and volunteer strength.

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 campus launches fail is that churches start too fast and too small.

That's why we're beginning this new series called "What Re...

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 have a question for the next "Ask Anything" episode, call our voicemail line at (615) 398-9171 or send us a message on social media. 

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 people think the XP role is the "associate" or "the person who does the stuff the lead pastor doesn't want to do."...

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. And the gap between that and everything else on the to-do list is where lead pastors get stuck. 

In this episode, Sean and Jimmy break do...

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 McLoud, lead pastor at First Christian Church in Canton, Ohio, and a consultant on our team, to speak into this topic. Jimmy has served in both the executive pastor role...

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, discipleship, baptisms—you name it. And if you're leading a fast-growing church, you know how rare that is.

In this episode, I sat down with Pastor Chris Fr...

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 have shown, there's also a clear path through them. And this year, it's visible in the data.

In this episode, Sean breaks down the staffing data a...

"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 important as it is, only pays off long-term if you know how to develop your staff leaders well, too. 

In this episode, Sean and J...

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 few.

The problem isn't a lack of leaders. It's a lack of a system to develop them.

In this episode, Sean and Jonathan break down...

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 results in a healthier, higher performing church team.

In this new series, we'll share a practical, repeatable pathway for increasing leadership capacity. We'll talk through cl...

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. 

If you've got a question for the next "Ask Anything" episode, call our voicemail line at (615) 398-9171 or send us a message on social media. 

T...

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 misunderstood thing in church ministry: the Spiritual Engagement Journey. 

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 the nuance that tends to get left out of conversations about multisite.

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 practicing what we preach. So, in this series, we're being honest about where we've had to upgrade our own thinking and why we think you should, too.

"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 challenges and questions about making room for all the people who were coming to their church, and they needed an outside perspective to guide them through it.

In this ep...

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 from a healthy soul, to share his wisdom and experience.

In this episode, Lance and Sean dig into the topic of personal burnout: what...

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 with Cody Thompson, Chief Operating Officer at The Table Group, to talk about how Working Genius can help your staff avoid burnout and serve in...

A personality might draw a weekend crowd, but it takes a team to create the healthy systems that foster sustained growth—that's the role of the Senior Leadership Team. Without it, you're depending on heroism at the top.

If the SLT is structured well, you can take the lid off your church and create space for sustained health. If it's not, you'll keep funneling everything back to the top. 

In this episode, Sean and Amy talk about the Senior Leadership Team—the team of people who sit at the top of your org chart. They'll help...

Pastoral burnout is one of the most critical issues facing church leaders today. And it's not just about overwork or lack of boundaries: Your structure might be the very thing that's creating the conditions for burnout—for both you and your staff.

We're seeing this pattern play out in churches everywhere. Lead pastors are drowning under impossible spans of care, unclear role definitions and organizational structures that create silos. Meanwhile, growth is creating momentum that feels exciting but leaves no time to build the systems that would actually sustain health.

In this series, we're going be...

Ever wonder how your church's metrics, wins and challenges compare to other like-minded churches?

This quarter's Unstuck Church Report shows what the "Big C Church" is looking like in 2026 so far.

The data covers the biggest barriers churches are facing when it comes to growth, gives perspectives on finances, informs how well churches are helping people engage in their churches, and many other interesting, helpful learnings. 

Sean and Amy dive into all the data of the Q1 2026 Unstuck Church Report in this episode:

You can start multisite for all the right reasons: healthy momentum, strong mission and a genuine desire to reach more people. But then a few years in, you find yourself looking around thinking, "Wait… is this actually producing what we hoped it would?"

Alignment feels harder. Decision-making feels heavier. Outcomes aren't quite matching the vision you had in mind when you started.

And that's where a lot of churches begin asking a really honest question: Did we choose a model that's leading us to different results than we were hoping for?

In this ep...

No one goes into multisite thinking, "This model isn't going to work." 

Everyone starts for the right reasons: more people reached and more communities engaged.

But over time, tensions begin to show up. But it's not just normal complexity; it's the kind that starts to impact clarity and limit effectiveness if you don't pay attention to it.

Last week, Sean and Amy interviewed three leaders about their experience with multisite. All three pastors made the case that how you start multisite doesn't have to be your model forever.

In this episode, S...

"Are we doing multisite right?"

The truth is that many churches launch multisite with great intentions but eventually find themselves stuck—operationally overwhelmed, financially strained or culturally fragmented across locations.

In this series, we're pulling back the curtain on what it really takes to build a healthy, sustainable multisite strategy. We're starting with something a little different—we're letting some church leaders we've served tell their multisite stories in their own words.

In this episode, you'll hear from three pastors who have had very different experiences with multisite: Nick Cleveland from Grace Church in W...

We're trying something different on The Unstuck Church Podcast. 

It's our first ever "Ask Anything" episode!

The idea for this came from our free webinars, where we typically save time at the end for live Q&A. Some of the best takeaways from those events often happen in that live conversation, and we wanted to bring that fun and magic to the podcast.

In this episode, Sean and Amy respond to questions YOU, the listeners, submitted by leaving a voicemail on our Ask Anything phone line at (615) 398-9171 or by messaging us on so...

​​Two common issues in churches tend to show up together, even though at first glance they don't feel related at all: first engagement steps and physical capacity.

On the surface, they sound like two completely different problems. But, in reality, they're way more connected than most leaders realize. You can't grow sustainably if you're not engaging people well, and you can't engage people well if you don't have the space to serve them. These are two of the most common barriers we see; however, the good news is that these have proven solutions. 

We're wrapping up ou...

Churches everywhere, no matter the size, are struggling with this: the lack of a deep leadership bench. 

One of the most common pain points we see in churches is not having enough leaders in the pipeline. This puts them in a constant reactive mode, often filling positions out of desperation rather than developing leaders intentionally.

New leaders don't identify themselves; you won't drift into success here. You have to be intentional to take the time to work on your leadership bench. We'll show you how.

In part two of our series, "Five Common C...

After serving more than 750 churches, we've noticed a clear pattern: No matter the size, style, or model, many churches wrestle with a similar set of challenges. They show up in different ways, but the root issues are surprisingly common across the board.

That's good news for pastors and ministry leaders—because if the challenges are common, the solutions can be too.

You're not alone. And you're not the first church to navigate these obstacles.

In this series, we're taking a closer look at five of the most common challenges that consistently show up in...