I believe it was Peter Drucker who said that an organization has to change its structure with every 35% of growth. Regardless who said it, it is great advice.
Over the last 9+ years we have been around as a church, we have averaged over 35% growth per year, every year. So needless to say, structure change is nothing new for us. A good structure doesn't cause growth, but it allows for it. A poor structure though, restricts growth.
When I meet other Pastors who ask me about how to break through a growth barrier, I always ask about their structure. 9 times out of 10 the reason they stopped growing was because their current structure could not handle any more growth.
The best illustration of this principle is picturing a table. If you began pouring sand on that table, at some point that table could not hold the sand. Either the sand would start spilling over the sides, or the table would collapse. In order for more sand to be added, you would probably have to increase the size of the tabletop and add additional support underneath the table.
If you think about this in terms of church growth, at some point structure has to change or you stop growing. So the question then becomes, "what kind of structure changes do I make?" Well the first place to look is staffing. Do you have enough staff to not only service the existing amount of people, but another 100-150 people?
Where most churches make their mistake is that they have not hired ahead of the growth curve. They say, when we add another 100-150 people we'll bring on another staff member. Here's the paradox----you can't get the next 100-150 people to ever add that staff member, because the current staff can only service so many people.
In the early days of Foothills Community Church (we had around 200 people or so), I was pretty much flying solo as far as staff was concerned, but I knew that in order to go to the next level I needed another staff member to assist me. The problem was, that there really wasn't enough funding to cover the new person. I remember being out fishing with a wise businessman who was a member of our congregation. I told him my dilemma, and he looked at me and said, "you have to go ahead and bite the bullet and step out in faith and make the hire." I knew he was absolutely right, and we did make that next hire, and immediately we jumped up our attendance to over 300 people!
Well I am sensing that it's time to restructure internally again. I want to pro actively restructure now before we have our next growth surge. We know that when we move into our new building we are going to get slammed with new people, so we're making those changes now! It's not a matter of adding more staff (although that is part of it), but for us right now it's more of a cultural restructuring. We have always been pretty laid back as far as inner office type stuff. Now don't get me wrong, we have the most dedicated, hardworking staff that I've ever seen. If you don't have a strong work ethic, you wouldn't last long on our staff, but right now our need is changing things like, who comes to which meetings, who does the buck stop with in certain areas, and things like that.
I am meeting with our Executive Pastor Dick Schaffer and putting together a better organizational flow chart which we hope to begin implementing in the next month or so.
Here's a question for you Pastors who read my blog. Is your current structure able to carry you to the next level? If not start making changes today!
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