LCBC: 19 Campuses in the Rust Belt with 25,000 Attendees? Keys to Multisite at Scale

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast during our All About Multisite month. Today we’re talking with David Ashcraft, CEO and President of the Global Leadership Network (GLN), and former Senior Pastor of LCBC Church in Pennsylvania.

Are you wrestling with growing pains as your church multiplies? How does an expanding multisite church keep its vision clear and equip its staff and leaders? Tune in as David shares his invaluable experience leading a thriving multisite church and now, leading an organization that is equipping leaders worldwide to make a lasting impact.

• From rural roots to statewide reach. // David recounts LCBC’s growth from a church of 150 people in Manheim, Pennsylvania, to over 25,000 attendees across 19 campuses in the state. A major turning point was the township’s refusal to allow further expansion of their original campus, leading LCBC to embrace the multisite model in the early 2000s.
• Be the gatekeeper of the vision. // Clarity of vision and consistent messaging are critical for keeping a growing church aligned. Vision leaks and leaders must repeat the core mission often and creatively to keep it alive. Weave the vision naturally into communication, culture, and decision-making. David served as the gatekeeper for the vision, helping the church discern between “good” opportunities and those which truly aligned with their mission. One key filtering approach was the 90/10 rule: LCBC aimed to excite 90% of their people and accept that 10% might be unhappy. This mindset protected the church from trying to please everyone and allowed leaders to stay focused on their mission.
• Take strategic risks. // Young leaders sometimes want to try new ideas that could be detrimental to try throughout the whole church. David advocates for testing innovative ideas on a small scale—at one campus—before rolling them out church-wide. This mitigates risk while fostering a culture of experimentation.
• Structure for scale. // As LCBC grew, so did the need to restructure. The church went through six or seven major organizational shifts over 32 years. These changes were often prompted by rising communication challenges or blurred responsibilities. Simplifying communication lines and reestablishing clear reporting structures helps the church maintain momentum.
• Utilize video teaching for alignment. // David holds a strong bias toward using video teaching as the backbone of multisite strategy and believes that if you want to expand beyond 6 locations that video teaching is almost a necessity. Video becomes a core teaching strategy when a church branches out because it helps maintain alignment among multiple congregations and prevents campus drift.
• Strong teams, thriving church. // A cornerstone of David’s leadership was hiring people better than himself in specific areas. From kids’ ministry to communications, his goal was to empower others to lead beyond what he could do alone. That culture of excellence and humility helped LCBC build a team-driven organization. Hire people with the potential to become experts and give them room to grow.
• GLN’s Summit as a tool. // Today, David leads the Global Leadership Network, home of the Global Leadership Summit. His goal is to be an “advantage to every pastor,” helping churches raise leadership capacity and thrive. GLN offers world-class leadership development from both church and marketplace leaders, equipping churches leaders to grow their influence and mission. LCBC Church hosts the Global Leadership Summit annually as a way to equip and inspire staff and community leaders at their church.

To learn more about the Global Leadership Network and register for the upcoming Summit, visit www.globalleadership.org and use the promo code GLS25UNSEM to get $10 off the registration rate online or at local host sites.

EXTRA CREDIT // Is your structure built for where your church is—or where it’s going?

Inside unSeminary Extra Credit, we’ve created the Restructuring Readiness Checklist—a powerful tool to help you assess whether your current staff model and systems are holding you back. Inspired by LCBC’s journey to 19 campuses, this resource helps you:

• Spot signs it’s time to restructure
• Ask the right questions with your team
• Avoid common mistakes that slow growth
• Realign your structure for long-term health and scalability

This resource is exclusively available through unSeminary Extra Credit, our affordable membership that fuels the podcast and provides you with valuable tools like this and many others!

Click here to join unSeminary Extra Credit and get instant access to this resource and more!

Thank You for Tuning In!

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. You’ve reached us during our All About Multisite Month, where we’re having conversations with leaders from prevailing multisite churches. And today, we’ve really got a two-for-one. We’ve got a leader who has been in the trenches leading an incredibly prevailing multisite church, and now is leading an organization that’s literally making difference all over the world. It’s our privilege to have David Ashcraft with us. He is the CEO and president of GLN. If you’re unaware, GLN is the Global Leadership Network, is a global organization passion about inspiring and equipping leaders to transform the world for the better.

Rich Birch — David was formerly the senior pastor of a church, LCBC, which is in Pennsylvania, a multi-site church with—if I’m counting correctly, although it’s hard to count, they have so many—19 campuses, and he’s also involved in lots of other great stuff. David, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.

David Ashcraft — Thank you, Rich. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. It’s fun to talk to you and your audience. So thank you.

Rich Birch — Oh, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to be here. Well, for folks that are unaware, why don’t you kind of share a bit of the story of LCBC’s growth, from a single location of less than a couple hundred people to 19 locations serving 25,000 plus people. Give us I know it’s like, summarize all that in three minutes. I get that’s hard, but kind of tell us a little bit of that story for folks that are unaware that don’t know LCBC.

David Ashcraft — Yeah, definitely. Well, Rich, LCBC stands for Lives Changed by Christ. And so we just say that’s who we are. We’re a community of people whose lives have been, continue to be changed by Jesus Christ. And in 1991, I had opportunity to come to this little church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, actually Manheim, a small town in Pennsylvania, about 150 people.

David Ashcraft — And I had been a pastor in Dallas, Texas. And so God brought us here to what all of my friends in Texas called the Rust Belt. And they thought, why in the world would you go to the Rust Belt? But you God brought us here.

Rich Birch — Why are you going there? Can anything good come from Manheim?

David Ashcraft — Exactly. Yeah. So the first five or six years were incredibly difficult. Just trying to figure out who we were, what we were trying to accomplish as a church. Had three different board chairmen over three years get up in the middle of meetings and resign.

Rich Birch — Wow.

David Ashcraft — And so I’d say that only to say I understand what it’s like to have turmoil with the board, and turmoil in the church. There was there was a guy named Abe, and every time I would speak, he would tell me all the things that I was doing wrong. He would stand up in congregational meetings back then. And back then, congregational meetings were well attended because there were going to be fireworks so they wanted to be there to see what was going to happen.

Rich Birch — Right.

David Ashcraft — And so anyway, we somehow survived those first five or six years and God began to really work and do amazing things. So ultimately over a 32 year period, we grew from 150 people to 22,000. Two and a half years ago, the church has continued to grow. And so it’s about 25,000 people now. And we got into multisite in about 2003 or ’04. We had grown to about 8,000 people in our first location. And several things were happening.

David Ashcraft — One, our little town of Manheim has about 4,000 people in it. And so there were people driving 45 minutes, an hour to come. And then the township told us that we were taking up too much space. We were creating there were problems on the roads. And so they said, we couldn’t expand our facility anymore. And we were devastated and thought, oh man, you know that’s going to kill us as a church. And yet multisites were just kind of starting then.

David Ashcraft — And so we went around the country, looked at several different models and landed on one and thought, okay, we can do this. And so the fun thing is now, if there are 25,000 people attending LCBC, 20,000 or so are at other locations.

Rich Birch — It’s amazing.

David Ashcraft — And so it’s just fun to watch that see.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s amazing.

David Ashcraft — Yeah, so God’s been doing cool things. It’s just been fun to be a part of that. And one of our kind of unwritten rules all the way through it was let’s not do anything stupid to mess up what God is doing. And oftentimes I think church leaders do stupid things and it messes up what God’s doing and they miss out on being a part of what God really wants. So.

Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. There’s there’s a ton to unpack here. And I like I feel like we could do five episodes on the stuff you just talked about there. And friends, I’ve had a chance to visit multiple locations of LCBC and you just rolled over it. You were like, well, you know at that point we were 8,000 people. Manheim has 4,000. I remember the first time I was at that that location, it is a mind bender to be like… This is not like I’m used to suburban, large, you know, population areas. And the fact that LCBC has thrived and continues to thrive is I love it. It’s a great story to to kind of just to be a part of.

Rich Birch — Now, you’ve pivoted to this new role as president and CEO of the Global Leadership Network. Connect those two together. How does leading at LCBC connect with what you’re currently doing?

David Ashcraft — Yeah, so probably about 10 or 12 years ago, Rich, had opportunity to sit in a group with Jim Collins, the good to great author and other books. And in that group, there were probably about 15 of us. And so he’s talking about his levels of leadership. And in my mind, I’m hoping that I’m his level five, which is his highest level. But as he’s talking, he said, you’ll never be a level five leader until you’ve actually left your organization, the organization you’re leading.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

David Ashcraft — And when you’re gone, it’s actually better when you’re gone than when you’re there. And so that kind of messed me up because I was hoping that one, that I was already a level five leader.

Rich Birch — Right.

David Ashcraft — And I was probably on the dark side of my mind, hoping that when I stepped away from LCBC, that there would be a little bit of turmoil and people would be crying. I told the congregation I was hoping for weeping and gnashing of teeth when I stepped away. And he just said, if that happens, then you’re a bad leader. And so it started me on a trajectory to say, how do I need to be setting things up for LCBC so they’ll thrive when I’m gone?

David Ashcraft — So that was kind of the first step. And so I mapped out a 10 or 12 year plan to kind of work to that direction. And so about two and a half years ago, it just was the right time for me to step away. And Jason Mitchell, who’s the new pastor, was ready. He’d been a part of our team for a long time. And had spent six or seven years getting him ready for that leadership role. And the church was ready and so I stepped away. And told the congregation, I’m not retiring, but I don’t know exactly what I’m going to be doing.

David Ashcraft — And so I had been on the board at the GLN for a number of years. We’ve hosted the summit for a long time. There was a change in leadership there. And, So they invited me to step into that role. It was one of those kind of things where um I was wrestling, trying to think, okay, is Ruth, my wife, is she how’s she going to receive this? Is she going be happy? Is she not?

David Ashcraft — And so you know how when you have something to say at home and and if things are going real well, then you don’t want to say anything because you don’t want to disrupt that it’s going really well and you’re connecting well. If you’re not connecting well, then I don’t want to anything because I don’t make things worse. So I was kind of hem-hawing around for three or four days to bring it up to her. And once I did, she was like, oh, it’s a no-brainer. It’s like you’re made for this.

David Ashcraft — And um and then the other thing she had told me probably two or three weeks before that, I’d been away from LCBC for about three or four months. And she just at one point sat me down said, you need to go find something else to lead. And then she followed that very quickly with, but it’s not me.

Rich Birch — That’s great.

David Ashcraft — I was trying to give too much direction to the house and she wanted to me out. So so anyway, um so stepped into that role.

Rich Birch — I love that.

David Ashcraft — Yeah.

Rich Birch — I’ve joked in other contexts about my wife, Christine. I’ve said, you know, the voice of the Lord and the voice of Christine, they’re they sound very similar. Like there’s ah there’s definitely a rhyme there between ah those two. I love that.

David Ashcraft — Rich, it’s funny you say that because one of our early decisions at LCBC, we would meet as a board on we met every third Monday night of the month, and um we would bring up a decision, it discussion, would make a decision that night. 

David Ashcraft — And then we would go home and we’d come back the next month and would all say, oh, that probably wasn’t the best decision. And so we would like to say that we went home and prayed about it for a month. What really was happening is we were going home telling our spouses. And they were going, that’s a terrible decision. And then we’d all come back and say, yeah that probably wasn’t such a good decision. So we came up with an unwritten rule that we’ll discuss something one month, come back after praying about it and after talking to our spouses about it and make the decision the following month. So, yes, it’s amazing how the Holy Spirit, the voice of the Lord, whatever you call it, seems to speak through our spouses as well.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. That’s so good. Well, I’d love to kind of dig in a little bit on the LCBC story. As as a lead pastor, part of your role is to cast vision, provide clarity. And and there’s been a tremendous amount of change from that, you know, you know the town of Manheim saying, hey, you can’t keep growing, all the way to, okay now what it appears like as an outsider, and and I’ve said this behind your back, behind the church’s back, I’m like, there’s lots of churches that talk about wanting to reach their entire state. LCBC is getting busy doing it. Like, you know, there’s all kinds of great things going on.

Rich Birch — Discuss you know talk me through when you’re in that kind of lead role, keeping your team aligned and keeping them around the vision, how, what were some of the things that you did as a communicator, as a leader to ensure that people were aligned? To, you know, to help things, you know, continue to kind of stay focused as a church?

David Ashcraft — Yeah, well, Rich, one of the things, and it’s been said countless times, I don’t know who said it first, but vision leaks. And what we tend to do as leaders is we say it once, and we assume everybody’s gotten it, and they’re not ever going to forget it. But it does leak. And I think probably when I first heard that statement, maybe 20 or 30 years ago, the idea was you needed to repeat it every 28 days or so. And I think the reality now is you have to say it a whole lot more because what happens…

Rich Birch — It’s true.

David Ashcraft — …you know, the number of weeks that people actually show up in church. I mean, I’ve heard everything from it used to be 1.6 times a month to now I hear a lot of people saying once every six weeks people show up. And so if you don’t say it a lot, then people aren’t going to hear it. And if you don’t say it a lot, they’re going to forget it, even if they’re there.

David Ashcraft — And so, and we always just focused on let’s be very clear of what we’re about. And it’s just introducing more people to Jesus and then together fully following him. And so we’d find different creative ways to say it, but we’d say the same thing over and over and over. And I think sometimes people worry about if you repeat it too much, they’re going to get tired of it. But that wasn’t our case. And sometimes we try to get too creative and people don’t even know it’s the same vision or you’re saying the same thing.

Rich Birch — Right.

David Ashcraft — So I think redundancy is real important.

Rich Birch — And and what how did that work its way into your rhythms as a communicator? Like, were you finding ways to weave that in on Sunday morning through, is it just kind of every way possible? What did that look like? How did you kind of think about that? How do how do we keep that in front of people?

David Ashcraft — Yeah, so I don’t know that it’s so much saying, okay, let’s talk about our vision, but you just kind of weave it in a natural conversation…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

David Ashcraft — …and just becomes who you are, I think. And so even with the staff, I think the leader’s responsibility is kind of set the boundaries or the guardrail of where you’re going as an organization. And then my job if I saw starting to get out of the boundaries or out of the guidelines, guardrails that were going to take us towards introducing more people to Jesus, or fully following him, then it’s my job to say, oh wait a minute, we’re straying some. And because what happens, Rich, is everybody in the church has some good idea of what you ought to be doing as a church. And so they’ll come and I mean, just umpteen different. Your imagination can run wild of what it is. And they will say God spoke to them and this is what we ought to be doing as a church. And so we would constantly evaluate and say, okay, that may be a good thing, but it’s not best for us.

David Ashcraft — And so I felt like one of my jobs was to kind of be the gatekeeper. And so we just say to people, man, that’s a good thing you’re involved in. It’s cool that God put that on your heart, but here’s where we are as an organization. This is what we’re striving for. And son man, we’ll do everything we can to encourage you as you go do that good thing, but we’re going to stay focused on what’s best for us. And so I would say the last 10 years or so at LCBC, for me, a lot it was just saying, man, that’s good, but it’s not us.

Rich Birch — Right.

David Ashcraft — And we’re not going to kind of step but into that that area you want us to step into.

Rich Birch — Let’s double click on that because I think that is um that’s a real tension ah for particularly senior leaders to hold this balance of because there are sometimes those ideas are actually great and and they’re innovative. And LCBC is, as an outsider, I would say that’s an innovative organization. You guys have tried a bunch of different stuff, but have been able to stay aligned. How, what kind of filters were do you use or have you used to try to filter out that? Okay, what’s just a good idea or what’s maybe a God idea that, Hey, we should take a risk on ah to to try something here, that and we’ll see maybe it’ll change the trajectory of what, where God’s leading us.

David Ashcraft — Yeah, you know, it’s funny, Rich, when when we were small, 150 or 200 people, it was easier to try new things because if it didn’t work, it’s not like we’ we’re going to hurt all that much. And yet it was hard then, too, because if we tried something and it failed, the church wasn’t big enough to bounce back from from a failure.

David Ashcraft — But some of the guiding principles for us, I mean, one, we constantly talk about the 90-10 rule for us. And I know everybody’s heard of the 80-20. For us, 90-10 means that you can’t keep everybody happy. And what I watch a lot of pastors do is they try to keep everybody in the church happy. And so if you come to me with a good idea, then I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Rich. And so, yes, we’ll do your idea. But then somebody else comes along, yes, we’ll do your idea. And then all of a sudden, you’re doing so many things…

Rich Birch — Right.

David Ashcraft — …that you’re not doing anything well. And so when we talk about 90-10, we just said we’d rather 90% of the people be wildly enthusiastic about us. 10% of the people can be wildly upset with us and we’re okay with that.

Rich Birch — Love it.

David Ashcraft — And so we just kind of operate that way. And and so we say, here’s who we are. Here’s how we behave. Here’s how we’re, where we’re going. If it’s not for you, that’s totally okay. But if it is for you, then jump in. And so it pretty well works out.

David Ashcraft — I don’t know that we’ve ever hit 10% wildly upset with us. Where that rule has helped us is we’ll do something and it doesn’t quite go the way we think, or there may be people upset with us and we’ll get all worried about it. And then we’ll say, okay, wait minute, let’s stop. We’ve 22,000 people, or now 25,000. We just got 40 or 50 emails from people that weren’t happy. So let’s say 10% of 25,000 is 2,500.

Rich Birch — Right.

David Ashcraft — So we got 40 or 50 emails. We’re fine.

Rich Birch — Yes.

David Ashcraft — We’ve got another couple thousand to go and then we’ll start getting worried about it. So just not trying to please everybody was a big piece of it.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

David Ashcraft — And then constantly, is this is this a good thing or is it a great thing? And let’s focus on the great things.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. yeah I had a mentor early on in my ministry talk about, he said the exact same thing, he but the way he cast it was he was like, we really should have about 10% of the church upset with us at any given moment. If we’re not, then we’re probably not taking new ground.

David Ashcraft — Amen.

Rich Birch — They, you know, and I was like, oh – that that has stuck with me for sure.

David Ashcraft — Exactly. Yeah. And we would definitely say the same thing where, man, we’re not getting much, many complaints. So maybe we need to be trying some different things.

Rich Birch — Yeah, let’s try something new.

David Ashcraft — The other thing we kind yeah, the other thing we kind of learned as we went, Rich, is you know, a lot of times young leaders want to try things that could be devastating to the church. And what’s nice is we’ve gotten bigger and we’ve got more locations. If we’ve got an idea…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

David Ashcraft — …then let’s try it in a location and see how it goes there. And instead of doing something that’s going to sink the whole ship, then it might have a negative impact on that one location, but at least it’s not going to hit all of the locations.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

David Ashcraft — And if it works well, then we’ll go ahead and spread it to the whole church. So there’s some advantages of multisite from that standpoint.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Well, kind of sticking with that same theme, you know, LCBC has experienced incredible growth, you know, in a lot of ways. It’s like your history is, you know, the the shift to multisite was a transformative moment. You know, the the the growth of the church has accelerated, um you know, beyond Manheim and all these other locations.

Rich Birch — That has, I’m assuming, has forced a certain amount of organizational change over the years. You’ve had to make some shifts. What what did some of that restructuring look like? Very few churches, you know, some of the stats show that um close to 50% of multisite churches aren’t getting beyond three locations.

Rich Birch — And so, and some of that, I think, is because of some of this restructuring. What were some of those that was that restructuring that you went under, that you led the church under, that you think were particularly helpful as you look back on it to accelerate the mission?

David Ashcraft — So Rich, early on, I used to listen to Carl George. Fuller Institute used to have a number of different people. And so they would, back then they were cassette tapes.

Rich Birch — Yes. Love it.

David Ashcraft — Carl George was one. And he had a thing he talked about where churches are kind of like animals and animals are animals, churches are churches. But then he would say, um not all animals are alike. And so he would talk about a mouse and he’d compare a mouse to a cat, to a dog, and say they’re all animals, but they’re very, very different. A cat is very different from a dog that’s different from a horse or and so on. And he would say churches are the same thing. Just because you’re a church doesn’t mean all churches are equal.

David Ashcraft — And so he’d say a mouse church might be 35 people, a cat might be 75, a dog 200 and so forth. And his whole point was, as you grow from a mouse to a cat…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

David Ashcraft — …to a dog, to a horse, you’ve got to restructure every time because you’re a whole different animal.

Rich Birch — Yep.

David Ashcraft — And so I would say over the course of 32 years, we restructured probably six or seven times at least.

Rich Birch — Right.

David Ashcraft — And we could tell when it was time. And it was some of it was just feeling, but you’d start noticing that communication wasn’t going well in the organization, that people were frustrated with each other. And it wasn’t, you know your tendency is to think, oh it’s just some bad actors on the team. And it really wasn’t that, it was a lack of clarity. What are we trying to do? It was a lack of communication lines.

David Ashcraft — And so we would simplify and say, okay, let’s go and simplify. Let’s make sure everybody has direct lines of communication and redundancy. And so we did that probably, like I said, six or seven times in the process.

Rich Birch — Well, that’s a good insight. Even the fact that because I think we can if we’re the people that led the restructuring last time, we can really love our restructuring. We think, hey, that was a great you know that this is the perfect system. We took all this time, effort and energy, pain, all this pain to get to this restructuring. And then now here we are two years later…

David Ashcraft — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …and it can be hard to give that up. I think that’s a great insight. Hey, we had to restructure six, seven times over all those years. And, you know, that’s that’s a pretty regular cadence to be thinking about that.

David Ashcraft — Yeah.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

David Ashcraft — Rich, I don’t know. You made the comment that a lot of multisite churches are struggling and don’t get past three or four. And I don’t know if we’re sharing strong biases or if you want to hear strong biases…

Rich Birch — Sure. Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

David Ashcraft — …but I have a strong bias towards that.

Rich Birch — That’s why we have you on.

David Ashcraft — Yeah. Well, what I watch happen all the time is guys decide, churches decide they want to go multisite. Typically, they go multisite. One, they want to see their reach expand. But oftentimes, they’ll also be somebody else on staff. So if I’m the senior pastor and you’re one of my associate pastors, I start thinking, okay, Rich has strong leadership gifts. He’s got strong speaking gifts. Rich is getting antsy to go and lead on his own. And so I’ll send him out and he can start a new location for LCBC.

David Ashcraft — And you want, Rich wants to do it so badly. He says, yes, I’ll, you know I’ll follow the party line and I’ll, I’ll be LCBC, whatever. And I’m wanting it to happen so badly. Then I’m that’s a great way to send you out. And so we do that and you go out, maybe somebody else on staff, and all of a sudden we’ve got three locations.

David Ashcraft — But what happens over a couple of years is you drift apart and you start realizing you do have speaking gifts, you do have leadership gifts. And before you know it, you start thinking, even though our communities are only 20 miles apart, we’re just different in this community than you are in your community, 10 or 20 miles away. And so I really need to lead differently than what you did at the original location.

David Ashcraft — All of a sudden you get this split, this divide and frustration. And I just, um my strong bias, Rich, is I think if you want to scale, if you want to go beyond three, four, five, or six locations, um video teaching is almost a necessity.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

David Ashcraft — Otherwise you’re going to have, and to my knowledge, I don’t know of any churches that are truly multisite, um, that have more than six or seven with live teachers. There are some that say they do, but they’re almost like little denominations. Their churches all have the same name…

Rich Birch — Right.

David Ashcraft — …but each church is very independent, doing its own thing. And so I just have a real strong bias towards video teaching and, and replicating the model, not just sending out new people.

David Ashcraft — And there’s nothing wrong with me sending you out to a new location if I know that essentially what I’m doing is planting a new church 20 minutes away. And that’s…

Rich Birch — Right, right. But that’s different than multisite.

David Ashcraft — Yeah, and that’s a great strategy for planting churches, but it’s not multisite.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

David Ashcraft — And if you really want to scale, then you’ve got to replicate the model.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. And statistically, that’s true. The larger a multisite church is and the more locations it has, the more it implements video as a core teaching strategy. So you statistically, you see it’s it it is, um and I’ll say that because but lots of even teaching pastors have this bias against video teaching because it feels like, oh, no, we should find someone to do that.

Rich Birch — And I’m I’m not a teaching guy. And I’ve had this conversation, ah you know, hundreds of times with with teaching guys where I’m like, no, like this, the what you’re doing is super unique. And it is core to what the church is doing. It’s three quarters of the reason why people attend, statistically. Man, we’ve got to, you know, I think that’s great. That’s a good I would I hold the same strong bias. So I agree, um which is.

David Ashcraft — Yeah. And Rich, I would say it also just helps you clarify everything…

Rich Birch — Yes.

David Ashcraft — …if you know you if you know you’re doing that, because then you know what kind of campus pastors to hire.

Rich Birch — Right.

David Ashcraft — And so we’ll just say if if you’re wanting to be a teacher, and we’ve got a couple of our campus pastors that are great teachers, and so they’re part of our teaching team.

Rich Birch — Yep.

David Ashcraft — But if you really want to be a teacher, ah campus pastor for us, it’s not where you ought to land.

Rich Birch — Yep.

David Ashcraft — And um our campus pastors are incredible leaders. We say so they’re the strongest leaders in our organization, but they’re not wanting to teach on a regular basis. And that’s not, it shouldn’t even be in their skill set for most of them. So they’ve got to communicate and talk from the stage. They’ve got to teach in smaller environments, but if they want to preach, it’s not the right place.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Let’s pivot in a slightly different direction. Talk more about your kind of own, your own personal leadership leading through all of that and your, and and about how you balanced all that out. Just, want to honor you in front of our audience. You know, they’re good things radiate off of LCBC when people talk about you behind your back. They are thankful to lead, to be led by you. You know, there, people don’t have to say nice things to me, but they do. And, and that is, unfortunately is ah is a notable exception. And and you seem to, you’ve you’ve held your life together. You know, you you haven’t train wrecked, you know, your family, ah you know, and and all of that. I honor you for all of that. That…

David Ashcraft — Thank you.

Rich Birch — That’s incredible. But talk us through what practices have you adopted to balance the demands of leading an aggressively growing ministry and your own life, your own kind of internal life, family wellbeing, that sort of thing. What what have you done to try to keep that all together?

David Ashcraft — So I’ll go in a couple different directions, Rich. On a professional level, ah just realizing I can’t do it myself. I need a team around me. And so my practice was always to hire the best possible person I could. And there’s a tendency sometimes to if you are on a scale of 1 to 10, if you see yourself as an 8, then there’s a tendency to hire 5, 6 and 7s, people that you can still be a little bit stronger so that you’re perceived to be the leader. And for me, I just said, I’m looking to hire people that can be better than me…

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good.

David Ashcraft — …in their specific area of expertise. And so when we were smaller as a church, we didn’t have the money to hire experts yet, but we hired people that we thought could become experts. And so then I would meet with them and we’d go visit other churches and we’d figure out what style we wanted to be.

David Ashcraft — I would keep them pretty close to me the first 6 months or so, maybe even 12 months. And um then once they were able to take off, I would just say, and the mantra we always had that I had with everybody we hired was I really want you to be the best kid min person, the best student ministry person…

Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s good.

David Ashcraft — …so that people are going to come from all around the country to learn how to do student ministry from you. And I want you to take it way further than I ever could possibly take it.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

David Ashcraft — And so I think part of our, and I don’t want to use the word success, part of our growth was that we just kept hiring people, I kept hiring people better than me. And didn’t want to limit it that way. So from a professional standpoint, we would do that.

David Ashcraft — And then personally, um you know, sometimes people complain about the busyness of ministry, but one of the beauties we have is we’ve got flexibility. And so we’re not locked into an eight to five schedule. And yes, we have to work on the weekends, but we get to take other times off. And so like when my son was fourth, fifth, sixth grade, he was into baseball. So I coached as a little league team for three years. I knew nothing about baseball, but I got other people to help me with that. But I was, I was able to do that. And so another kind of job I might not have been able to. So yeah, we work a lot of hours and, you know, 55, oftentimes 60 hours a week, but we’ve got flexibility.

Rich Birch — Yep.

David Ashcraft — And so I think really putting the family first that way was real important. My kids now are grown. Our, my son is one of our campus pastors. My daughter just stepped away from being a student min director at one of our locations for 10 years. And it’s real fun to have them involved and be a part of that.

David Ashcraft — And, the one other thing I’ll just say real quick is…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

David Ashcraft — …one of our mantras at LCBC is let’s not do anything stupid to mess up what God is doing.

Rich Birch — Right. Right.

David Ashcraft — And so, I mean, stupid is a lot of things. It could be just relational issues where you and I get crossways and we don’t resolve it quickly.

Rich Birch — Right.

David Ashcraft — And so one of our unwritten rules is keep short accounts and don’t let things fester.

Rich Birch —That’s good.

David Ashcraft — Stupid could be crossing or playing with lines around morality or sexuality that we shouldn’t be playing in. And so we get burned all of a sudden. So we’re just constantly saying, man, let’s not do anything stupid, not to mess up what God’s doing because he’s doing great stuff.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. You know, kind of tagging on, just double clicking on that. Sometimes you’ll see it’s like, well, the lead person, they seem to have life balance, but the rest of the team, like that, not so much. But that isn’t the case with what I’ve seen. And obviously, I don’t know all your team, but with the people I know in your orbit, that seems to have rippled out Anything that you’ve done to model that for your people, to try to ripple that down? I love that, you know, let’s not be stupid. Or is there anything else on that front to kind of model that with your team?

David Ashcraft — Well, so even in the early days, I was a senior pastor when I came. And it’s always funny that I was a senior pastor. I was the only pastor…

Rich Birch — Sure.

David Ashcraft — …for the first about four years.

Rich Birch — Yep.

David Ashcraft — And we were gonna hire a worship leader. And we did hire a worship leader. When he came in, he, like a lot of worship leaders, he’s not most creative early in the morning. He’s most creative late at night.

David Ashcraft — And so his hours, I gave him lots of freedom. And as long as he was putting in the 45 hours or so that we were asking, then it was fine. But I had an elder come to me and say, well, I come by the office on Monday or Tuesday morning and you know it’s 8:30 and—his name was Brian—Brian’s not in the office, and we need him in the office. And so I just said, well, so wait a minute, let’s think about this. Did we hire him to be a sit in his office from 8:30 to 5, Monday through Friday? Did we hire him to be great on the weekend and great to lead people in worship? And so my philosophy is always whatever it takes to be best at your job. So we try to get flexibility that way.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

David Ashcraft — And there’s certain times, usually Mondays and Tuesdays, everybody needs to be in for team meetings. After that, we, you know, once we know that you can manage your time well, then we’ll give you lots of flexibility.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

David Ashcraft — And so I think that’s but something that permeates through the whole staff. And then, now, as we’ve gotten bigger, then we have lots of opportunities to help staff in a variety of ways so that they stay strong in their marriage, stay strong in their relationship with Christ.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. Love that. Okay, pivoting to your current ah your current role, talking a little bit more about Global Leadership Network. When you talked about cassette tapes, that took me back. I, early on in my ministry, I was a monthly subscriber to the Global Leadership Network tapes, and those tapes would come in, and and literally, I can say, they were like this encouragement, that I I I still think of like talks…

David Ashcraft — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …from 30 years ago that that still impact me. And then I remember the first time I had, like thousands of leaders, I had an experience in the Lakeside Auditorium where I just came on a weekend. It was not and it wasn’t a conference, and it was a transformative experience for me where I I literally the experience I had was, oh church doesn’t have to suck. Like I I, and I was working in a church at that that that point. Like it it was ah and and GLN has had has influenced so many people has had, you know, it’s ah has it had monster influence, done incredible work for years.

Rich Birch — But let’s talk a little bit about it. What’s kind of bring bring us up to speed on what’s going on with the summit? What’s kind of the most recent things? You know, what are your aspirations for the Global Leadership Summit? There’s a lot there. But but what what do we think of these days when you think about Global Leadership Network?

David Ashcraft — Yeah. So Rich, yeah, like you, it has had a huge impact on my life. I think I’ve only missed one in 31 years. And so, like you, I would listen to cassette tapes, especially early mid nineties. And so whether it was Bill Hybels or whether it was John Maxwell and my kids, my family would complain whenever we’d go on vacation because we’d get in the car and I had all these cassettes we were going to listen to. And so they always say, oh man, does John have to come with us again on vacation? And so they grew up on that, but real impactful for me.

David Ashcraft — And um there’s been a couple of hard years at the summit after just leadership situations, 2018, COVID, was hard on the summit. And so when I stepped in, there were a couple of things we wanted to correct. We just wanted to get back in balance with our vision, mission, and then just get us sound again financially.

David Ashcraft — And our mission, our vision is really to be a tool for pastors. And when I say that, it’s not meant to be a pastor’s conference, but it’s meant to be a tool so that a pastor can come in, he can get better, she can get better as a leader, but so that they can lead their church and leaders in their church to thrive as a church, so ultimately more people can come to know Jesus.

David Ashcraft — And so not a pastor’s conference. We bring leaders in from around the world, business leaders, nonprofit leaders, educators, things like that, church leaders as well. And it’s also a huge evangelistic tool for people in the community that are strong leaders, want to grow in their leadership capacity. Would never come to your church for anything else, but they come for the summit because it’s so strong.

David Ashcraft — So bottom line, we just say, we just want to be a tool to more more pastors, help your churches thrive, help them reach their community. Ultimately, so more people can come to know Jesus. And that’s, that’s the real focus. Though it’s, I would talk about about it as being more pre-evangelism where again, it just begins to soften people’s hearts towards Jesus. We don’t do altar calls. We don’t do worship. It truly is a leadership training development thing, but we love it when um leaders, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are there, they’re speaking, and they just happen to say, I’m a follower of Jesus, just subtly in their in their comments. So it’s that kind of thing.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s it’s and obviously the centerpiece of the strategy is the summit. It’s obviously not everything that GLN does, but that’s kind of the the core of it. We’re coming into summit season. Friends that are listening in, this is like—and David didn’t ask me to do this; it’s like unabashed—you should get to the summit this year. If it’s been a couple years since you’ve been there, like go to a site close by, go join the studio audience, you know, in, in Barrington there. It really is. It’s going to be an incredible summit.

Rich Birch — When, when you would say to a church leader, they would say that this is the kind of church that’s benefiting the most from a partnership with GLN. What does that look like? Like what the people that are kind of leveraging it, if you were to have like a hundred more of these churches, you were like, man, we could change the world. What what would be some of those things that you’d say like, Hey, that that’s a church that’s really kind of on board with what we’re doing and and we’re, it’s a good partnership. What’s that look like?

David Ashcraft — Well, I’ll use LCBC as an example because we’ve hosted for over 20 years. We typically have between 2,500 and 3,000 people attend the summit at our different locations.

Rich Birch — That’s amazing.

David Ashcraft — And so, if as a church you think, oh, let’s have the summit, but you just view it as an event where somebody wants to come in and use your building to put on this event, it’ll be a flop. It’ll be a failure because it needs to become part of your, just who you are as a church. And so for us, it’s kind of the capstone of how we do leadership development at LCBC.

Rich Birch — Love it. Yep.

David Ashcraft — And it’s not going to tell you a church model and how to do church or how to do kid min. That’s not the purpose of it. You’re going to have to teach your people that. But what it’s going to do is bring leaders in that’ll speak at the summit. They’ll say, this is how to create culture. And it’s up to you to create your culture, but this is why you need to have a healthy culture. Here’s how to create a healthy culture.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

David Ashcraft — And it’s going to look different from church to church, but we’ll talk about culture. Or we’ll talk about you know why it’s important to cast vision and here’s how to cast vision. But your vision is going to be different than my vision. And so we don’t tell you how how your church ought operate. We just tell you how to be better at all those different areas that are required for a leader. So what it’s done for LCBC, we teach the basics of how we want it to happen at LCBC. The summit though, just kind of gives you this overarching, man, if every leader that’s in the church can be there, it just raises the capacity for them.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s good.

David Ashcraft — And so then everybody’s better. And what it does, you know, a speaker will talk, they’ll tell a story, they’ll tell a joke, they’ll make a point. And all of our leaders are there. And so then all I have to do as the leader of the church is just, man, remember when so-and-so said this and everybody’s got it. And it just seems to just catalyze and move you forward faster.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

David Ashcraft — So huge from that standpoint.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. And, you know if you just go to globalleadership.org, you can see, ah like, you know, obviously, it’s too late to host this year, I think, it’s still too late to host, but you could get a group of leaders together and say, hey, let’s go to what let’s go to there’s, there will for sure be a church that’s within a reasonable driving distance of you to go and, ah you know, to go be a part of it.

Rich Birch — And I love that. I think the common language thing is a massive deal. I know over the years, it’s been really helpful to have like the same people in the room to be like, hey, when, you know, Craig Groeschel talked about that thing, or, you know, Christine Cain there this year, or John Maxwell, John Acuff. You know, any any of the folks that are there this year, incredible leaders, ah David Ashcraft, when he spoke, you know, ah yeah all of that to then link back to that and say, okay, let’s talk about what difference that makes at our church, man, what a gift that is. And it’s so incredibly inexpensive.

Rich Birch — I’ve always thought that about the GLN stuff. I’m like, I can’t believe we’re getting this. Like if this was a normal business conference, it would be 10X what the cost is. And so…

David Ashcraft — Oh yeah.

Rich Birch — …it’s it’s incredible. So I just want to honor you for that. I think it’s a great, great thing. Is there a particular speaker this year you’re you’re looking forward to? Anything, you know, kind of a highlight this year or something behind the scenes we can be we should be looking forward to?

David Ashcraft — Yeah. And I’ll just comment on the price real quick. It is incredibly inexpensive. And so oftentimes the board will say we need to raise our prices, need to raise our prices. But one of the things in our in our bylaws is we want to make it accessible to as many people as possible in the local church.

Rich Birch — Okay, that makes sense.

David Ashcraft — There’s actually another organization that pretty much waits each year for us to announce our speakers. Then they get the same speakers, but they charge $4- or $5,000 a person…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

David Ashcraft — …where we charge $150, $170 a person…

Rich Birch — Yes.

David Ashcraft — …and they sell their [inaudible] out.

Rich Birch — Yes.

David Ashcraft — So we could charge more, but that’s not our goal. So yeah.

Rich Birch — Yes.

David Ashcraft — As far as speakers, we’ve got great speakers. And one the things that’s fun at the summit, we’ll have people that are well known in different environments, but then we’ll also have people that are kind of unheard of yet at this point…

Rich Birch — Yep. Yep.

David Ashcraft — …but they’ve got great, great content, great experience. So we’ve got several of those that would be new or unheard of. But we so one of the real fun ones, we try to have somebody that’s just kind of a fun but great leader. And so Nick Saban, the Alabama coach, will be that speaker this year, which I think is going to be incredibly exciting.

David Ashcraft — We’re going to recognize John Maxwell. We do last several years, a what we call a legacy leader and and just thank them for, honor them for the difference they’ve made.

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s great.

David Ashcraft — And so John’s going to be honored that way this year. So yeah, we’ve got a great lineup. It’s it’s going to be real good and excited about it.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

David Ashcraft — And you mentioned different sites. We’re actually at about 450 sites the United States.

Rich Birch — Wow. Wow.

David Ashcraft — And then around the world, another 700 more. So about 350,000 people take part in the summit around the world.

Rich Birch — That’s amazing.

David Ashcraft — And so, yeah, it’s just really exciting to see.

Rich Birch — This has got to be one of the largest of this type of event, right? Like I don’t know anything else that runs that size. That’s um that’s incredible.

David Ashcraft — It is. And especially to do it for 30 years now…

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah.

David Ashcraft — …is also not the norm. So, yeah.

Rich Birch — No, that’s amazing. Well, that’s, that’s great. So friends, again, I would strongly encourage you to go over, go over to globalleadership.org. You can see all the local sites. You can, they’re, you know, still announcing some speakers. You’ll see there’s lots of information there. Again, I wouldn’t do it by yourself. Don’t just go you and and one person like, pack the car out, get a van, go with 10 or 15 people. That will exponentially make it more valuable to you as a leader as in what you’re doing. The more people you have around you doing this, ah it will help you as you lead at your you know at your organization. Well, just as we as we come to land, any kind of final words you’d have for us today, David?

David Ashcraft — No, I just, you know, one of the things that changed for me probably seven or eight years ago was coming across a passage in the book of Acts about Apollos. And Apollos, it describes in very glowing terms. And so as I’m reading that, I’m thinking, I’m nothing like Apollos. And was almost discouraged. But then there’s just one little phrase that was at the bottom of a passage I’m sure I’ve read many times before. It just said he was a great benefit or advantage to every believer that he came in contact with. And reading that, I thought, okay, I can do that. I can be a benefit. I can be advantage. And specifically, I said, I want to be an advantage or a benefit to pastors.

David Ashcraft — And so just kind of at that point said, that’s what I want to do the rest of my life. And so um doing that here in Pennsylvania, we work with the largest churches in Pennsylvania, but also with a GLN and just a real natural tie in to say, whatever I can do, we can do to help pastors thrive and their churches thrive. Then that’s a win and more people come to know Jesus. And so I just encourage each person listening, whatever their role, whatever capacity they can be as well a benefit or an advantage to others. And so I hope that’s really their focus as they step away from this.

Rich Birch — That’s great. Well, thank you, David. Thanks for your leadership. And, you know, I’m cheering for the GLN, cheering for your leadership there. Thanks for for leading and thanks for being on the show today.

David Ashcraft — Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Good to talk to you, Rich.