Episode 383 - Why Your Leadership Pipeline Is Failing | David Ashcraft | Global Leadership Network

**David Ashcraft** (0:00)
You can have the money, but if you don't have the leaders, you're not going anywhere. People would always talk about this leadership pipeline, and I can't tell you how many workshops, how many people I've listened to, watch them drop on their board, their leadership pipeline. It never worked for me. I think it's more of a myth than anything else. But I think the whole idea of the leadership pipeline is a myth as well. It tends to be almost more of a class or a course. If you go through enough courses, then somehow you're gonna come out on the other end to train leader, and you've received training, but it doesn't make you a leader. It doesn't mean anybody's following. And so it's just been a frustration point. And if it would have working, then churches would be flush with leaders right now, but they're not.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
Bold visionaries, faithful disruptors. Some call them crazy, but they are called to create under his power for his glory. The Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast.
In this episode, Pastor David Ashcraft shares how LCBC Church grew to 25 locations. He shares his thoughts on authentic leadership and advocating for a culture-based approach for developing leaders.

**Justin Forman** (1:07)
So one of the things I love is when this infusion of entrepreneurship meets ministry, it's both exciting and admittedly, it's probably confusing for a lot of people because they've never integrated this idea of business and ministry.
And I think that that's so much of your story, both as pastor, but as people really understand the story of a church growing and scaling. There's a lot more similarities that people miss between the growth of churches, multi-sites, business people might call that franchises and license locations. But just take us into your journey and how you've experienced it.

**David Ashcraft** (1:51)
It's funny, Justin, where some people feel like if you start doing what we were doing as a church, you're dipping into business and somehow that's not godly, that's not biblical enough if you're going to be following business models. But we just said, God is in everything, and He's in the planning, He's in the organizational structure, and if our goal was never to be big, our goal was to introduce as many people to Jesus as we could.
And so if you do that and you do it successfully, and if people stay at the church, then it's automatically going to grow.
And so for us, it was constantly looking at other models. So early on, we would look at a lot of churches to say they were ahead of us.
The way we grew is we constantly would say, let's look at a church twice our size. So when we were 200 people, it was 400, then it was 800 And even today, we average about 28,000 people every weekend now. And so we look at organizations or churches that are 50, 60,000. And there's not a lot. And so what that's also forced us to do then is look outside the church and say, let's look at business models that have scaled or have multiple locations and let's learn from them. So that's been a good process for us.

**Justin Forman** (2:54)
So 28,000 people, how many locations does that represent?

**David Ashcraft** (2:57)
That's 25 locations.

**Justin Forman** (2:58)
Okay.
So when you start getting into those business principles and you start looking at those, you start listing, you start observing, you start maybe riding along with some of these businesses. What are some of the first things that you see in churches that think with scale and multi-site that are uncommon to other churches?

**David Ashcraft** (3:17)
Well, you know, when we went to Pennsylvania in 1991, the area of Pennsylvania we're in, and maybe it's just the Northeast, Justin, but it was different. I moved from Texas to Pennsylvania, and I don't know if it's the difference between the North culture and the South culture, and I know there's books written about that. And so for the first year, we were just friendly, and it was almost like people were thrown off by just being nice and so glad you're here to church and all.
People started coming to know Jesus. We had some neighbors that were well known in the community. They didn't know Jesus, and they came about six, eight months into our time there, and came to Christ, and about 40 of their family members did. And so this big wave came, and so it just kind of infused into church, okay, we can make a difference. We can introduce people to Jesus. And then it just started happening in groups like that, where it wasn't one person at a time, but if you'd reach one, you'd reach their family, which then would reach their extended family. And so it just started ballooning very quickly. And so right away, we had to figure out, okay, what are we doing? And each time we'd hit a wall, whether it was multiple services, whether it was needing new buildings, we'd say, are we done? Are we done introducing people to Jesus? Or do we need to keep figuring out ways to grow?