Caution Lights for Church Growth | Ep 26

Most church growth ideas don't stall because of bad vision.
They stall because leaders ignore the warning signs.

You can have the right ideas, set the right goals, and build a strong plan—and still fall short if you don’t account for what could go wrong.
Every team has “caution lights”—internal habits and external pressures that quietly derail momentum before you ever see it coming.

In this conversation, Mark, Scott, and Hunter break down how to identify those risks early and build a strategy that can actually survive real life.
This isn’t about coming up with better ideas.
It’s about executing them in a way that actually works.

Inside:
- The 4 internal habits that sabotage execution
- External threats most pastors never account for
- Why “this time will be different” doesn’t work
- A simple framework to make your plans anti-fragile
- How to eliminate vision whiplash on your team

Healthy systems create sustainable growth.
And sustainable growth requires leaders who plan for reality—not perfection.

Timestamps:
00:00 – Why growth ideas don’t translate into results
00:40 – The planning trap pastors fall into
01:20 – What “caution lights” actually are
02:38 – Why teams complicate execution
03:03 – Internal habits vs external threats
03:21 – 4 common leadership breakdowns
04:06 – Vision whiplash (and why it kills momentum)
05:12 – External realities pastors underestimate
07:03 – Why you shouldn’t trust your plan
09:12 – The 3-step framework to stay on track
10:14 – The rule that stopped team chaos
12:24 – Why accountability must be scheduled
14:01 – The power of a point person
16:27 – Caution lights change with seasons
17:27 – The risk every church must prepare for
19:31 – Why every church needs a contingency plan
21:34 – How to prioritize what actually matters

If you have a question or topic you’d like us to tee up on a future episode, email us at hey@readysetgrowchurch.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey Pastor, if you're facing growth challenges right now, you're trying to figure out how to scale, how to align your staff, and really how to get after the work that God's called you to do in that community, we would love to come alongside you. And I want you to know we just opened up a brand new mastermind specifically for churches under 500. And if that's interesting to you, go to ready setgrow.church to find out more information and see if this is a fit for your journey right now. We talk with a lot of pastors who get really excited about growth planning and setting the stage for where we're gonna go next. My new idea. New ideas. We've been whiteboarding, we're writing a bunch of stuff down. Yeah. But what we also have found that in that, oftentimes what's not baked in are the reasons why you might not actually be able to execute on that plan. And we call those caution lights.

SPEAKER_03 1:15

Yeah, it's such a good framing for it. Because I think what we do is why don't we think about this on an individual level? So if I was gonna create New York resolutions for myself, what are the most common reasons? Like, I know me. What are the most common reasons of like, all right, I'm just gonna place a bet. If this were to go wrong, it's probably because of blank, blank, or blank. I'm gonna get bored. Uh, this is gonna be too hard, and I'm trying to do this by myself.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

And oftentimes it's not like you have to dive into this deep dark cave of understanding to figure those out. You pretty much know what those are hundred percent.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Because if you know other people do, yeah, your wife can tell you.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Oh man, past your spouse. I know how my eating tasks are gonna get messed up. I am a stress eater. Yeah. I don't do a lot of egregious things, but man, one place it gets messed up is around chocolate. And and so I know that's a that's a pain point.

SPEAKER_03 2:10

I've never seen anybody eat chocolate chip cookies like you. Like if you are.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

You're gonna bring that up on this one, dude.

SPEAKER_03 2:15

It's still ringing too much. I really want to tell that story because it just freaked me out. We'll do it for another time. If you if you put in tell the chocolate chips uh cookie story, I will tell it. Um but inside of this, I think that what's really cool is on a personal level, it is why wouldn't I pull off this New Year's resolution? Think about multiplying that complexity by the number of staff members that you have on the team. Wow. So we're made up of a series of individuals with bad habits, and we're working together for a common good. You are one unit, one team. You just made everything feel like, wow, how do we ever accomplish anything? No, 100%. 100%. There are what I think of caution lights is is twofold. They're either internal bad habits or external threats. Exactly. So with the plan, it's either internally, instead of saying I know me, we're saying we know us. Yeah. Okay. We know us, and I'll just wrote down a couple of like the four that I see a lot, especially when the uh we're going with stereotypes and the lead pastor is a visionary leader with a lot of ideas. Here's some really common ones that we see. Uh, caution lights is internal bad habits. These are some of the common ones. We tend to overschedule because we think we can pull everything off. Another one is we get easily bored and and then we decide not to follow through on what we said we were gonna do. Number three is scope creep, which basically means here's what we said was the plan, but then we keep adding to the plan and it becomes like a zombie project that keeps getting it's like this is like, dude, we're never gonna be able to finish this thing. It's like half dead, half alive. Like, what are we doing? This thing is just dragging on. And then the fourth one that happens all the time is um we call it whiplash, which basically means, hey guys, everybody, pay attention. Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me. We're going this way. I I'm telling you, this is it. This is where we're going, this is it. Drop everything that you're doing, this is where we're going two weeks later. Yeah. That thing was stupid. That was dumb. We're we're we're going this way.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

We were actually really good. It some people are not good at vision implementation. We were good. We were so fast. Uh, we could have the vision on Friday, share the vision on Saturday, implement on Sunday, and then by Monday, we're ready for the next vision because we didn't fully bake it out, we didn't understand our caution lights.

SPEAKER_03 4:43

So those are some common like internal bad habits. I think of external threats are most vision is not made up of individual doing things. It's it's usually embedded in the church world of getting the people in the church to participate in the vision. Yeah. So what are the threats there? It's like, oh, I know how we can do this. All we gotta do is get all of our volunteers to show up four days a week to our church. It's like, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Not taking into account, hey, this is football season in Texas. Hey, this is Christmas, this is the new year. Uh, the economy has changed.

SPEAKER_03 5:17

We just got to get our volunteers to work 30 hours a week for the city. That's all we gotta do. That's all we gotta do. Yeah, that might be a threat. That might be a threat, right? So internal bad habits, external threats. What are you thinking about when we're talking about this?

SPEAKER_02 5:28

Well, I'm thinking of external threats that that can happen that that are it's all these things that are outside of our control. Yeah. I mean, like you just said, the economy. I mean, as we're going into a building campaign and say, I think we could reach this amount of money, I think we get this loan. But then wait a minute. Now, guess what happened uh with the economy and everything going on? That people who were building a building and they got a quote that was at 4 million to build the building and now it's eight. That's happening all over, happening over and over. Hey, the interest rate was going to be at that five, but now it's at seven. I mean, this changes the game. That's external. Yeah. And the problem with it is many times you don't even see that coming. And so that's what we're talking about is what are the caution lights? Well, if the economy changes, if oil prices change, I mean like that. But then you also got like political landscape. Like when an election's coming up in that season, you're going like, man, when our goes are red, that might be good for us or bad for us. If it goes blue, that might be good for us or bad for us. But even no matter which way it goes, we have both types of people, both Republicans and Democrats in our church that uh uh see things differently. We have people of ethnicities that could be hit with if there's a shooting or the ice thing. Yeah, I mean, all of these different things that are polarizing this stuff, I know that's like so far out there, but they impact the thing.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

It's actually happening right now in real time. Exactly. This isn't like ethereal fantasy land. So we're navigating through this a lot.

SPEAKER_03 6:54

The idea of this is to assume you're not gonna follow your plan perfectly. Because of these potential caution lights. Either internal bad habits or external threats. So what do we do with it? If all you had to do was follow your plan perfectly, then we'd all be millionaires and have six packs, but we don't follow our plans perfectly. That's right. Does that make sense? So you have to bake into the caution lights of if this were to go wrong and knowing us, we're not gonna be perfect, how do we not make this a fragile plan? Because the only way this is gonna happen is for perfection to happen.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

Okay, so you're saying as we're getting in the room and we're creating our growth plans and we're strategizing and whiteboarding, part of the execution of the plan is we have to bake in the potential cash of the colour.

SPEAKER_03 7:41

You gotta bake in if this were to go wrong, this is why it would go wrong. And if you can prescribe what could go wrong, you can mitigate the risk.

SPEAKER_02 7:49

Okay, exactly. And that's why I think, like you said, what are our tendencies or our problems in the same way it needs to be what can we anticipate could happen and what can we work together? I wouldn't have even thought of that. I need Mark and your help. We need the team's help to come up with it, you know?

SPEAKER_03 8:06

Let me show you the top three things because here's what Mark and I work with people on their growth plans a lot, and I think the number one thing that happens is the idea of this time's gonna be different, or I'll do better.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

We're gonna work harder, man. Now we know the air of our ways, we're just gonna work harder. We're gonna do that.

SPEAKER_03 8:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, one is like, I know I said, or I know I failed at every diet. Let's just do the chocolate chip cookie thing. Uh, I know I failed at every diet in the past, but this time it's gonna be different. Yeah. It's like, yeah, but why are you saying that? Said every one of us at some point. Yeah, or or I know I have to drive by the crispy cream in the morning, but like I'm gonna work harder and not pulling into the drive-thru. Does that make sense? So inside of this, I don't think that I'm gonna try harder or assuming the clean slate fallacy of, yeah, this is a clean slate though. Like this time is gonna take it. It's a new day.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

This is a new year. This is a new year.

SPEAKER_03 9:04

I'm I'm different now. It's like, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I think you should probably that's probably a fragile plan. So, how do we walk through this process? These are the three things that I like to teach people. One is I would create a new staff rule. I'm gonna break this down. Number two is I would create accountability check-ins at a set cadence. So, like every week we're gonna do an accountability check. Every two weeks, we're gonna check in on this. And number three is assign a point person. Let me break that down. Okay. Number one is assign a new staff rule. One of the staff rules that we talked about on a previous episode was the honesty policy, right? There's zero tolerance for gossip. It's a new staff rule. You're basically saying, like, we're abiding by this code, this law of ethics of how we do things around here. You know, it might not be that strong. It might just be like new staff rule. I'll tell you one staff rule that was really strong for us. Um, we dealt with, we're in an idea-rich culture. So one of the staff rules that we came up with is uh from people dealing with neck braces of the whiplash, is we do not create new projects mid-cycle.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

New staff rules. We can't help but have new ideas, but we are not going to allow those ideas to go from vision to implementation within the context of a cycle.

SPEAKER_03 10:24

Those are gonna be pitched to So that's gonna be in the ideas list that we're gonna bring up at our next growth plan. So for us, we're not saying we're doing growth planning once a year of like what are we doing this next year? What we do is we have a vision for the year and we break it down to every 90 days. Yeah. Okay. So if you're three weeks away, you can hold it. Like, you know, as an adult, I have a I have a four-year-old and a two-year-old. Sometimes they can't hold their pee. And it's like they've been putting it on issues. You know, they you're busy, you're doing other things, and it's hard to it's hard to be in it. If you still can't hold your pee, that's a different thing, right? You you can hold it, dude. You're good. Yeah, you're fine. Just write it down.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

For us as a staff rule is number one, we're not going to disrupt the current workflow with new ideas and projects. Yes. Number two, we have to have a trusted spot for that uh for those ideas to land so that number three, when we get back into our next growth plan, we're able to pull that list back up, but it's trusted. It's it's it's a place that that we know we can go back to.

SPEAKER_03 11:30

So that's a that's one of the ways we can go back to the street.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

So the caution light was we we have a tendency to have so many ideas and we whiplash and we go, oh, now we're gonna do this, now we're gonna do this. And so what we did is we set a staff rule, we don't do new things mid-cycle.

SPEAKER_03 11:44

So one of the things that we're doing is inside of our growth planning is we're gonna say, what is the caution light? We know us, right? Then we're gonna say, to mitigate that, what can we do? An accountability check-in, a point person, or a new rule. One of the best ways for the whiplash that worked for us was creating a new rule. And that was we do not start new project mid-cycle. Okay. Uh, the next one is an accountability check-in at a set cadence. All that basically means is maybe like let's just do a weekly cadence. Every week in our staff meeting, or every week in our executive leadership team meeting, we're gonna say, Did we or did we not add any new projects? Because sometimes you're just like, this is new for me. Like, I gotta set this up. I didn't even mean to, right? Yeah. And it could be on a variety of topics, right? So accountability check-in on a set cadence.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

So the key, the key on that that I'm hearing is if it's important, it must be on your calendar. If it's not on your calendar, then you haven't leveled up its importance. Because you gotta keep the plan in front of you.

SPEAKER_03 12:47

Yeah. You should not let motivation be your force behind uh remembering. Yes, one of you're not gonna remember.

SPEAKER_02 12:55

No, one of the things you've done so well for us is that we have caution lights we talk about every three months in our growth plan. We say these are our caution lights we're recognizing uh in this season and in this next. We're anticipating these are things that are tendencies. And every week in staff meeting, we actually look over the caution lights and say, okay, let's remember these are our cars, or we've created staff values that are counteracting those.

SPEAKER_03 13:22

There's a lot of ways that you can mitigate it, but uh accountability check-in to keep it in front of us. So, what I like to do is I never start a meeting agenda from a blank page. I always start from a template. So, my template for that meeting is this meeting agenda template is designed to accomplish the purpose of what that meeting is. So, if part of that all-staff meeting is to make sure that we're mitigating our caution lights, I'm gonna add it as a five-minute check-in to just go, are we doing what we said we were gonna do? Right? You're not gonna remember, and you're not gonna do it because you're motivated about it this week, because three weeks from now, it's probably gonna be like, hey, we're doing pretty good at that. You know, it's like, yeah, that's when it's gonna strike. That's right. Does that make sense? Yep. The last one is a point person. So I learned this one from kind of the idea of if somebody's choking in a restaurant and somebody's, you know, doing, you know, whatever. The Heimlick. The Heimlich, whatever, and or whatever it is, somebody's having a heart attack, and you don't shout at everybody and say, somebody call 911. Yeah. You look at a person and say, Mark or Mr. Yeah. You with the cell phone in your hand. 911. Yeah. Right. So the idea here is if it's everybody's responsibility to mitigate this risk, it becomes nobody's responsibility because everybody's looking to somebody to resolve the issue.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

That's so good because that would typically be how uh most organizations would get after it. Hey, we we we have called out our caution light. Uh everybody be on the lookout, head on a swivel. And that is that is beneficial. It's better than nothing. But what I'm hearing you say is do that and definitively have a point person that's on the hook.

SPEAKER_03 15:05

So what I would do is saying, hey guys, we have um, and it probably shouldn't be the person that is the offender, um, meaning this. If me and dad are the ones that create whiplash, me and him cannot be the person that is mitigating the whiplash, right? So it's like it would be like this. Hey guys, one of our things is it is so important for us to stay focused on our vision, even when we get bored, even when we don't feel like it. That this is so important that we're gonna try to create a new uh staff rule here that we're not gonna do uh any new projects mid-cycle. And what we're gonna do is I've asked Mark to help us on this every week. You see how I'm doing all three. Uh new rule, no new projects. Mark is gonna lead an accountability check-in every week in all staff. He's the person that's gonna make sure that we don't do this. Does that make sense? So you can stack these to ensure like we're triple checking, double checking, whatever, to mitigate the risk.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

And it often doesn't really take more than five minutes. And as you get better, uh it's like 30 seconds. Yeah. Uh but man, those five minutes have saved us 50 hours in a cycle or more because of the other stuff.

SPEAKER_03 16:20

And you did uh uh hint at something that I think is strong is caution lights are not your tattoos that you have to bear forever. It is in this season, which could be right now, we're not strong at this, and then we built muscle, now we're strong at it. And another season could be hey, it's the end of the year, it's November and December. People are taking off, there's holidays. One of our caution lights for this season is we have to be so good at communicating. Yeah, we're gonna under-communicate and just assume that people have got it. We cannot do that. That's a caution light for this season. So you can change them every growth plan to match the season that you're in or match where you currently have atrophy, but you need to build more muscle.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

Yeah, it may even be like this summer, we've got a lot of kids camp, youth camp, VBS, people on vacation, yeah, all kinds of stuff going on. Let's make sure we're communicating what you know, it's it's that type of deal and stay in focus. I I want to bring something up here that I think if I could say, because I right now we can say, hey, this could be yours, this could be yours. I want to make one right now that includes everyone on the external threat. Let me tell you an external threat that is facing every single person listening to it right now. You know what it is? A catastrophic event that the lead pastor got they died unexpectedly, which you go, oh man, that didn't happen. It happens all the time. Secondly, something happens, a moral failure, or something happens that you uh got hit in a car wreck and you didn't die, but you're in the hospital and you can't function as a pastor, or you have a long-term issue, you can't talk, you can't find whatever it is. You say, Oh my god, you're really getting dramatic on this. No, what I'm doing is I'm saying these things happen and you need to have a plan. Yeah. It doesn't mean you got to figure it all out, but you do need to have it. I just was at a friend, he passed away right after he just preached a Saturday night service and he passed away, large church. Do you know right when it happened in the green room, he passed away, and I'm just so grieved it's my friend. But one of the things that happened is the the the executive pastor called one of their overseers and said, What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? He said, You know what to do. Go look in his Google Doc. We have a catastrophic plan. They pulled it out. Here's who's supposed to be the interim leader, here's who's supposed to be preaching, these are these people, here's how you're gonna do a search committee. There was a plan in that moment. Right now, if you want to know a caution light, is it is inevitable. Something could happen. I don't say it's inevitable. These things could happen. Do you have a plan mitigate the risk? And have you put a plan together that your board, your staff could handle? If not, you need to. And they need to know where it is and how to get it. That got the executive even admitted, I forgot we even had one of those. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Because emotion, when you're in an emotional uh moment like that, it is difficult. But the key that I'm hearing you say is that is a potential external caution light that everybody needs to be prepared for. It's like at the biggest level. Yeah. And then a lot of them aren't at that level, but you still need to have a lot of people.

SPEAKER_03 19:37

That was a good one. I I'm glad you mentioned that. I would just say, as a final word on this, is if you know yourself and you know there's a tendency to for me to not follow through on my intentions I set for myself. How much more do you need to plan when you're including a multitude of people trying to accomplish a goal together? Yeah. There's so much complexity in internal bad habits, knowing us, we know us, that you got to prepare for that. And you got to pay attention to it not once and for all, like, oh, whiplash is us forever. It's like, no, that's where we're at right now, right? And the internal bad habits and the external threats, embedding that into your plan makes your plan so much more anti-fragile. And inside of this, you should not expect for your plan to go perfectly. How can you course correct and get back on track as fast as possible without derailing your whole project?

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Very good.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

I think it's so important, like I just said, catastrophic. But we deal with pastors all the time, not just in death, but in moral failures and uh things that happen uh with volunteers and stuff that. If you have not written out, if this scenario happens, how am I gonna handle this with a volunteer? If this happens and it happens with a staff member, how are we gonna handle that? You let me tell you something. These things happen every single week. We're in the middle of it with people all the time. The best thing you could do is as a leadership team, sit down and say, if this happens, when this happens, how are we gonna handle it? And it's and you talk that through with your board, you talk that through with your staff, and you have a plan that you can pull up that you've put together, not in the emotion of the event. You're you're you're not ahead of time.

SPEAKER_03 21:20

In this, just as a uh final word on this, because you're you're hitting on such important stuff here that we're dealing with all the time, is you are not trying to sit in a room and catastrophize. You are trying to say, where are we at? Where are we going, what are the biggest external threats, and what are the biggest internal threats? And then you triage them. Exactly. You say, Yeah, we have 25 bad habits, yeah, we have 25 external threats. What are the top ones that we need to deal with in this next cycle to mitigate, or we have no shot of getting where we need to be?

SPEAKER_01 21:56

Yeah, so good. And God will help you figure those out and triage those. Again, at the end, it's going to go to we have a rule, uh, we have a calendared accountability, and then we've got a point person for each of these. Hey, thank you for joining us here today at the Breaking 1000 podcast. If you have a topic that you'd like us to tee up and talk about, shoot us an email at hey h e y at ready setgrow.church. And thank you guys for this awesome talk today, and we'll see you down the road.