Brady Boyd lists traits consistent with good leadership:

I want to be a leader who is easy to follow, so I’ve been paying attention lately to those who seem to model this really well. We should not have an unhealthy desire to please everyone, but we should make it as easy as possible for others to follow us. There are some outstanding leaders I’ve recently bumped into who are doing just that. I’m certain there’s more at play in their lives than the five things on my list, but these traits seem to be consistent and common.

1. They are fun

Honestly, fun people are more fun to be around. Leaders who laugh have better meetings, tend to build camaraderie and vanquish the inevitable relational stresses that come from any organization that involves two or more people. All of us love laughter and it is good medicine.

2. They are predictable

Impulsive, unpredictable leaders may seem edgy and cool at first glance, but they are not easy to follow. I heard the story once of a leader bursting into the office one morning announcing to his team that they were all going to the beach for a day of fun. Of course, that sounds like the hero leader, but the team still had to meet their deadlines and get their work done. The day at the beach actually caused more stress to the team because it happened during a really busy time for them. Leaders who are easy to follow are not prone to whims or fancied by fads. They are not boring (See #1) but they are steady.

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Rich Birch uses Blockbuster Video as a cautionary tale for leaders within the multisite church movement.

Blockbuster video was amazing in its prime. Just 10 years ago, they had 9,000 locations and over 60,000 employees. [ref] It made renting a movie “simple and convenient” because they had so many locations. We only had to drive across town to access hundreds of movies from a wide variety of categories. They purchased the naming rights to stadiums. It was a household name. They won. As late as 2008 they were exploring expansion through leveraging their brand and cash flow into other businesses.

By 2010 everything shifted. In March of that year, Blockbuster’s own auditing firm published a report saying they doubted the business would be able to continue operation because of shifting markets and an inability to respond. They filed for bankruptcy protection just a few days later. By July they were delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. It all unraveled. Now they seem like a punch line to bad joke.

What happened? The internet.

People’s preferences for how they consumed content changed subtly at first but then exponentially grew. In particular, Netflix — a potent mixture of great marketing and fantastic execution — made movie watching simpler, more convenient and gave people a wider variety of choice.

From this side of the change, it’s hard to remember a time when Blockbuster was amazing. It’s difficult to recall when dropping in on a Friday night to pick up a movie was a national pastime. They had figured it out.They designed a system and approach to meet the needs of the people they were serving. It worked well and it was successful.

What does this have to do with church leadership?

The multisite church movement has figured out an unprecedented way to reach people and connect them to the local church. We’ve perfected a way to “take church to the people” and make it easier for people to get plugged into the local church. We’ve devised a systematic way of offering teaching and community that we spread from one location to another and it’s changed the landscape of the Kingdom of God.

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Cliff Lambert help you develop a plan of action.

If you’re part of a ministry whose vision is to reach as many people in your city as possible with the Gospel, your leadership has probably had the multi-site discussion.  Church multi-site expansion has exploded in the last ten years. Hundreds of articles have been written on the advantages as well as the challenges of moving from one campus to several.  Forums have popped up all over with information equipping church leaders to make the multi-site plunge. With that, we’ve seen many different ways churches are approaching multi-site expansion. As we sift through these approaches, it is important that each ministry within the church develop a specific plan of action with objectives pertaining to their area. This post will focus on how a worship ministry can approach multi-site expansion.

In 2005, I had the incredible and humbling experience of entering into the multi-site phenomenon as a worship pastor of a large metro Detroit church. Over the next six years, the church grew from one campus to six campuses in just six years. It was an exciting yet scary ride for a church that was 50 years old. It required not only a lot of preparation and planning but an incredible amount of simply trusting God along the way. Back then there wasn’t a lot written about multi-site expansion so we all learned a lot about what to do and what not to do along the way. For those of you looking to expand into a multi-site ministry, I hope you can learn from my experience.

First, the steps you take in planning for worship ministry multi-site expansion will depend on the factors going into starting your new campus. Some new campuses are “fresh starts” where there are no existing teams in place and you will have to develop and place an entire team to facilitate worship at the new campus. Other campuses may be pre-existing ministries where your church is going in to “merge” with an established group of worshipers already in place. These situations are a little more tricky and require more work because you could be dealing with a group of worshipers who have just been through a painful church split or a steady decline due to the lack of vision of previous leadership. While some of the process for expansion is the same for both situations, for the sake of this article, we’ll focus on developing a “fresh start” campus. Feel free to comment below if you’d like information on going multi-site as a merger. I’ll be happy to correspond.

So now we must consider the financial, personnel and equipment aspects of expanding the worship ministry to another campus. As you develop your game plan and proposals, here are some things to look at:

DUPLICATE YOURSELF

This is really something you should already be doing whether you’re planning for multi-site expansion or not. If you’re not, start now. The duplication process doesn’t happen overnight. I recommend at least six months. Duplicating yourself not only means training someone to lead worship but also making sure they experience and grasp your vision and what you do behind-the-scenes in preparation for corporate worship. Find 2-3 abecedarians in your ministry who have the gift set for leading worship and leading a team and begin to pour into them. One of those could be your candidate to lead the new campus. Duplication is so much better than trying to hire a new worship leader from outside of your ministry since the ones you duplicate will already understand and own your ministry’s mission and vision. When starting a new campus, there will be times when you, the worship pastor or main worship leader, will need to be available to personally invest time and energy into the new campus while it’s getting started. Sometimes you may need to meet with the new team to observe them at rehearsal or on a given weekend to offer feedback and training, or actually go lead worship for a couple of weekends. When that happens, you need to have depth in your leadership team to lead while you’re displaced at your campus.

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Ed Gentry says recovering the practice of lament will help us be more authentic, Biblically faithful, and culturally relevant followers of Jesus.

Lament And Praise Respond To Reality

Songs of lament and songs of praise are both a response to reality. In our songs of praise and adoration, we respond to the reality of God’s revealed character: His holiness, goodness, faithfulness, majesty and tender care. While God’s unchanging character is certainly the only ultimate reality – until the final consummation of the Kingdom of God – there is also the reality of our broken world, which constantly impinges on our lives. It is to this reality that the Psalms address themselves.

Laments face head-on corporate and individual grief, pain, suffering and the resultant alienation. Their shrill tone gives voice to this suffering and keeps us from responding to our pain with denial or unmerited guilt. Much personal psychological pathos could be more easily resolved if we would learn to express our pain, anger, guilt, frustration, and disappointment.

Laments encourage us to face our individual and communal pain and demonstrate that the first and best response to pain and suffering is to bring it before God. Laments help wrestle with suffering when we are relatively or totally blameless. Instead of feelings of vague guilt, lament give us form and language to bring our case directly before God. From the sublime to the horrific, the Psalms illustrate that we can and should respond to all our lived experience before God in worship.

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