Ever had a table close enough to the kitchen in a busy restaurant that you could hear the rhythm behind the meal?
From the dining room, it all feels effortless. Plates arrive, drinks stay full, the timing feels natural, and the whole experience just works.
But if you’ve ever peeked through the swinging door, you know better.
Behind that calm experience is a whole other world: callouts, timing, systems, handoffs, standards, backup plans, and a lot of people doing invisible work, so the guest experience feels simple.
That’s what I kept thinking during the LCBC conversations at Exponential’s preconference on multisite and mergers hosted by my friends and ministry partners Jim Tomberlin & Warren Bird.
From the outside, churches like LCBC can look like they simply “figured out growth,” effortlessly. As if being a bigger church with more locations, more reach, and more momentum inadvertently enables a slick operation.
But in the room, it became clear that this is not the actual story.
From the very beginning of the workshop, Mike Albon set an unusual tone. Rather than positioning LCBC as a model for everyone to follow, he was upfront that they were there to share what had worked for them, with no pretense that it would translate identically to every context. That kind of honesty is rarer than it should be in these settings, and it changed the feel of the whole room — less a polished presentation, more a genuine look behind the scenes at how things actually work.
It’s worth keeping that in mind when you look at a church like LCBC. Visible growth is easy to see and easy to admire, but what’s more interesting and more transferable is what’s sitting underneath it — the decisions, the culture, the way they think about things. That’s where the real learning is.
It’s a mistake I want leaders to avoid when they look at churches like LCBC: don’t just admire the visible result. Study the operating system underneath it.
Most churches don’t stall because they lack vision
Many churches still have big multiplication dreams. That’s not usually the issue.
The issue is that the leadership model, communication patterns, and ministry systems that get you to one or two additional locations often can’t carry you much further. The strain shows up before leaders even know how to name it.
LCBC talked about that tension with remarkable honesty. At one point, Mike Albon said they realized they were “breaking our people at four,” and he followed it with another line leaders need to hear: “Central is very expensive.” That’s such an important insight. Scale is not just about adding another room, another campus, or another merger. It changes the job. It changes the org chart. It changes what your best leaders need to think about every day.
That same pattern shows up in LCBC’s longer story as well. In the earlier unSeminary interview with David Ashcraft, one of the clearest lessons was that healthy growth kept forcing restructuring. The church went through six or seven major organizational shifts over the years because growth had blurred responsibilities and stretched communication to its limits. That kind of structural strain isn’t a sign that something is wrong with the mission or the passion behind it — it’s simply what happens when an organization grows faster than its systems can keep up with, and it has to be dealt with rather than papered over.
That’s what I kept coming back to as I listened to LCBC’s story. It’s easy to assume that churches plateau because the vision fades or the energy runs out. But what LCBC’s experience suggests is that the more common problem is structural — not a loss of heart, but an organization that hasn’t yet become capable of sustaining what it’s trying to do. That slow, expensive, behind-the-scenes work is what LCBC has actually done.
And they’re still doing it. Kevin Mahan said LCBC keeps coming back to the same conclusion: “we’re not done yet.” That line stayed with me. Not because it sounds ambitious, but because it sounds like leaders who still believe there are more people to reach and who know the system has to keep evolving if the mission is going to keep advancing.
LCBC is building more than campuses
Another reason this conversation felt so valuable is that LCBC isn’t treating multiplication as a one-format strategy.
Jason Hamlin described their current reality simply: they have campuses, community gatherings, and community groups. That matters because it shows LCBC isn’t asking only, Can we launch another full campus? They’re asking a better question: What kind of expression best fits this community, this opportunity, and this stage of growth?
That is a much more mature conversation about multiplication.
Some churches only have one answer for every geography: build the full thing, all at once, with the same footprint every time. LCBC has learned how to use complementary approaches.
- Full campuses carry the complete ministry model.
- Community gatherings create a smaller, more scalable expression led by leaner staffing.
- Community groups extend even further through volunteer leadership.
Their own breakout materials describe this as a complementary model designed to work together toward reaching the state.
That’s also why Warren Bird reacted so strongly in the room when he saw how campuses were reproducing campuses. He clearly viewed what LCBC is doing as an important step forward for multiplication-minded churches. And I get why. When a church moves beyond a single central hub doing all the sending and starts building locations that can reproduce new ones, that’s a different level of maturity.
It also creates options.
What stood out about LCBC’s approach is that they seem to have let go of the idea that every new context needs to look the same. Different communities have different starting points, different staffing realities, different timelines for what’s even possible. A system that can’t flex around that will eventually work against the very multiplication it’s trying to sustain. LCBC appears to have built something that can hold that variation without losing coherence, and that’s harder to do than it sounds.
The operating system is the point
This was the biggest takeaway for me.
The real story at LCBC is not just that they keep opening places. It’s that they have defined what must be true in those places.
They call it Core.
In their documents, Core is defined as the distinctive and essential environments, products, and processes that help them stay focused on mission, drive growth, lead people to deeper engagement, and empower leaders. They organize that Core into seven areas: main gathering, guest experience, kid ministry, student ministry, next steps, processes, and brand standards. They also use an “Engagement Scorecard” to evaluate whether their environments and systems are actually moving people toward fuller engagement, not just filling rooms.
That’s a huge shift.
Many churches talk about vision. Far fewer define the repeatable experiences, decision rules, and follow-up processes that make the vision transferable. LCBC has.
That clarity shapes how their leaders spend their time. In the workshop, Mike talked about using Core to tell campus leaders, in effect, this is the job. He even said that for location leaders, this is probably the majority of the role. That kind of clarity is healthy because it reduces side quests. It keeps local leadership focused on what actually drives mission and engagement.
It also changes the way central support works.
One of the most helpful phrases in the LCBC documents is the idea that Central treats campuses as their “first customers.” That framing does a lot of work. It reorients the whole purpose of a central team away from control and toward genuine service — the question stops being “how do we maintain consistency?” and becomes “how do we help our campuses actually succeed?” It means central teams exist to build products, systems, tools, standards, and support structures that help local locations win.
You can see the fruit of that in the details. Their Core materials describe things like centrally prescribed order of service, same-weekend teaching, shared next-step processes, consistent guest experience, and intentional follow-up so people feel “seen and known.” That kind of work rarely gets talked about in the highlight reel, but it’s what keeps multiplication from quietly drifting into fragmentation over time.
And there was one line from Kevin Mahan that made the whole thing feel even more real: “We all think we want creativity until we have to do it.” That is funny because it’s true. A lot of churches romanticize local customization without counting the cost. What LCBC has figured out is that standardizing the right things actually frees local leaders up to spend their energy on people rather than rebuilding the same ministry engines over and over.
Mergers are not magic
The merger conversation may have been the most helpful part of all because LCBC refused to make it sound easy.
Brad Travelpiece said it plainly: “People are going to leave.” He warned that, in their experience, it can be significant. Then he added the line that probably landed hardest in the room: “The death of your old church is painful.” You don’t hear language like that very often in a conference setting, and that’s exactly why it landed the way it did.
And that honesty kept going.
They talked about the loss of familiar programs, the loss of control, and the cultural disorientation that staff members feel when systems, tools, expectations, and norms all change underneath them. LCBC was clear that this kind of pain isn’t abstract or easily managed — it’s personal, it touches identity, and it tends to take considerably longer to work through than most leaders anticipate going in.
Mike Albon went even further and described a “drain on the organization,” noting that cultural alignment can take years and sometimes much longer than leaders want it to. That matters because it reminds us that mergers do not simply create opportunity; they also consume leadership energy, care capacity, and organizational attention.
That’s why one of the best lines from the merger workshop was so important: “Be ruthlessly honest.” If you are going to lead people through a merger, don’t oversell it. Don’t pretend it will be painless, don’t promise what you can’t sustain, and tell the truth early and often.
I also appreciated how pastoral LCBC has become in its approach to endings. In the merger conversation, Mike described one of the best practices they’ve learned: don’t forget what was. In one case, they actually created space for what he described as a kind of funeral, a moment to name and honor what God had done in the old church before fully stepping into the new future. There’s a lot of wisdom in that. Loss that gets acknowledged tends to heal better than loss that gets skipped over in the rush to move forward.
And yet, even with all that pain, LCBC continues to see mergers as effective. Their merger breakout materials point to concrete benefits: momentum with an existing core, greater market reach, and more opportunity for life change. That’s why their honesty was so compelling. They were not pitching a shortcut but inviting leaders to count the cost of a tool they still believe can serve the mission.
That’s why you should have been in the room
What made these LCBC conversations so valuable was not just the content, it was the candor.
There are plenty of conference sessions where you leave with a few good lines and not much else. This was the opposite scenario.
This felt like one of those rare moments when leaders were not just being inspired but also being let under the hood.
They were hearing from a church that has learned how to keep multiplying by defining what is core, building multiple pathways for expansion, restructuring when scale demands it, and telling the truth about the pain that comes with mergers. They were hearing from leaders who are still learning, still adjusting, and still committed to the mission. That combination is rare.
That’s precisely why this title fits.
You should have been in the room.
Because what LCBC offered wasn’t just a story about a large church doing impressive things. It was a working lesson in what multiplication actually costs, what it actually requires, and why it is still worth it.
If this is the caliber of conversation happening at the preconference Accelerating Multiplication through Multisite & Mergers, don’t hear about next year’s room secondhand. Register for Exponential Global 2027, grab your team, and be there for the conversation while it’s happening.
