There’s a leadership voice void in church world right now. As we’ve shifted away from the hyper-corporate, over-produced church culture of the 2010s toward something more authentic, I’m concerned we might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The pendulum swing is real, and while I’m glad we’re moving toward more genuine ministry, we can’t lose sight of the valuable leadership principles that helped churches grow and scale effectively.
A lot of pastors don’t study leadership as much as they study the Word. And yes, studying Scripture is absolutely essential. But if we don’t understand how to lead people well, our churches are going to fall short of their potential. Leadership matters, and it matters a lot.
Jake’s grown Churchfront from a solo operation to a team of 10 people, with more hires on the horizon. We pray before our meetings. Our entire focus is on what we can do for the local church. The lessons he’s learned growing this team apply directly to pastors and church leaders navigating similar growth, so I wanted to sit down with him and pull out some of those insights.
Vision Comes First, Everything Else Follows
If there’s no clear vision of where you’re trying to take your organization, then everything else about leadership development and scaling becomes kind of irrelevant. Nobody knows where they’re going, so how can they help you get there?
When Jake first started making YouTube videos 10 years ago, he didn’t envision having a staff of 10 people. That would have been intimidating. But his vision grew naturally over time because he stayed focused on what Churchfront could become. Every step of the way, as the organization grew from just him to a part-time editor to a full-time coach, the vision kept expanding.
For church leaders, this means you need to spend serious time clarifying your vision. Jake took our team through a two-day workshop last summer specifically to get crystal clear on where we’re headed. We developed a clear mission statement, vision statement, and core values, and we come back to those things every single week in our meetings. That constant reinforcement matters.
Your vision doesn’t have to be fully formed from day one. But you do need to know the general direction, and you need to be able to articulate it clearly enough that your team can make decisions aligned with that vision even when you’re not in the room.
Only Hire A Players
This one sounds obvious, but it’s easier said than done. When you’re growing and you need help yesterday, the temptation is to hire someone who’s “good enough” just to get bodies in seats. Don’t do it.
Jake is ruthless about this, in the best way possible. When we interviewed Carey Nieuwhof a few weeks ago, his advice was simple: take your time in interview processes and only hire A players. Jake has taken that to heart.
So what does Jake look for when he’s hiring? First, are they truly excited about the mission and vision of Churchfront? We exist to equip church leaders and spaces with innovative solutions for thriving ministry. If someone doesn’t deeply care about that, they’re not going to fit here no matter how talented they are. By default, you have to love the local church to do what we do. The AV industry is huge, there’s corporate work, show production, all kinds of options. But we’re laser-focused on church AV and nothing else.
Second, can they lead themselves? This is huge. If someone can’t manage their own health, sleep, appearance, and basic life responsibilities, they’re not going to be able to lead others well. Those things your grandma got after you about, your hair, your hygiene, how you present yourself, that stuff matters because it demonstrates self-leadership.
Third, Jake calls references and actually talks to them. Not just a quick checkbox exercise, but real conversations that give him a full picture of who this person is and how they work.
And finally, we use the Working Genius assessment for everyone. This has been game-changing. You’ve probably heard of Enneagram or StrengthsFinder or Myers-Briggs. The Working Genius assessment is the most effective tool we’ve found for building a team where everyone is working in their zone of genius. It’s 25 bucks, there’s a book by Patrick Lencioni, and it breaks down six working geniuses using the acronym WIDGET: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity.
Every church staff should take this assessment. It will help you understand whether people should be starting projects, finishing projects, or somewhere in between. You can put people in the right seat on the bus where their natural strengths shine, and supplement their working frustrations with other team members whose strengths cover those areas.
Learning to Let Go Is Hard, But Necessary
If you’re the kind of person who starts a church or a business, you’re probably at least a little bit of a control freak. You have to be, in a way. But as you grow, that tendency to want your hands in everything becomes the very thing that limits your growth.
For Jake, this has been especially challenging in areas like media and marketing because that’s literally what built Churchfront from day one. That was his specialty. So when he hired me to lead that department, he had to actively work on stepping back. To his credit, over time he’s gotten much better at trusting the team he’s built.
What motivates Jake to let go is his long-term vision. He knows logically that he cannot have his hand in everything for much longer. He doesn’t want a life where he feels like he has to control everything because that sounds miserable. So he focuses his time on leader development and clarifying vision, because once that foundation is there and you’ve hired A players, those A players can execute better than you can anyway.
Now we have team members who are way better at their specific roles than Jake would be. Chris is a better installer. Spencer is faster at 3D modeling. James creates better schematics. That’s not a weakness, that’s the whole point of building a team.
For senior pastors, this transition is critical. You have to move from being involved in everything to being present without crowding into everybody’s business. That’s a fine line to walk, but it starts with building systems so everyone knows the mission, vision, and values. Those become the framework for decision-making when you’re not in the room. Then you also need to give your leaders clear decision-making authority around things like budget thresholds. Small fires should get handled without you. Bigger, higher-risk, more costly decisions should still involve you.
Show Up, Even If It’s Just Five Minutes
Here’s something that might surprise you: Jake doesn’t do formal one-on-ones with every team member every week. A lot of the conversations happen naturally, in passing, very practically. But we do practice a specific leadership rhythm as a team where everyone gets a chance to share what they’re working on, what they’re stuck on, and where they need help.
The key insight though is this: it’s important to be present as a senior leader for all of your team members, and sometimes being present is literally just showing up for five minutes, even in a week. That five minutes of interaction with one of your team members, no matter where they are in the org chart, goes a long way. They know you see them. They know you care. They can trust you.
I’ve heard this from other leadership experts too. One of the best practices I ever learned was to spend just 10 to 15 minutes with each team member every week asking, “What did you do last week? What are you working on this week?” That’s it. Sometimes it’s three minutes in passing. Sometimes it’s a more formal conversation. But the consistency of showing up matters more than the length of the meeting.
For Jake, this is especially important because Churchfront is a service business. The secret sauce of what we do is the team and the people. So he wants to make sure everybody’s doing well so they can perform well and deliver better products and services for our customers.
Focus on High Leverage Activities
As a leader, you have to constantly ask yourself: what are the highest leverage activities that only I can do, or that I’m uniquely gifted to do?
Leverage is about putting in lower input to get high output. That’s what a tool does. You put a little bit of strength into a lever and it multiplies your strength to have much greater impact.
For Jake right now, there are two main high-leverage activities. First, being involved in pre-design conversations with clients. These are large budget projects, so having the president and CEO involved early sets a really strong trajectory for the rest of the project. It probably takes him two to three hours per new job to go through meeting notes, look at the Matterport scan of the space, hop on meetings with the team, and engineer the best solution. That’s a lot of time, but it’s high leverage because it impacts everything downstream.
Second, creating content. We can spend 30 minutes to a few hours a week recording podcasts and videos, and that reaches thousands of people. That’s very high leverage, it’s something Jake has been doing for eight to 10 years, and it’s one of our competitive advantages.
For pastors, high-leverage activities probably include Sunday morning preaching. That’s you communicating the Bible and God’s vision for your community at scale, in person and online. But it should also include developing other leaders, especially in areas where you’re not as naturally gifted. If you want to supplement your strengths with other people’s strengths to serve the church better, you need to invest time in developing those people.
Church leaders should also take the time to understand the various departments they oversee. You don’t have to control or run them, but if you’re going to make any informed decisions, you have to understand what’s happening. That’s why Jake believes every senior pastor should spend just a couple hours going through Churchfront courses on our website. You would be way more informed about AV systems and technology than 99% of other lead pastors out there, and you’d be way better equipped to make decisions about the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars your church is investing in those systems.
Leadership Evolves From Productivity to People
When Jake started in 2016, his leadership style was all about personal productivity. Wake up, figure out a video idea, shoot it, edit it, market it, do the sales calls. Everything. That’s what you have to do as a solo entrepreneur to get something off the ground.
But as the team has grown to 10 people, his leadership style has matured. He’s focused much less on personal productivity and much more on people. That tracks with John Maxwell’s five levels of leadership: you start with position and title, which doesn’t really get you much. Then you develop relationships and permission. Then you produce results, which is where Jake has always been strong. People wanted to join Churchfront because it was producing results. Then you move into leadership development, where you’re equipping others to lead. And finally, you multiply leaders who can develop other leaders.
Right now with 10 people on the team, and potentially 20 or 30 in the not-too-distant future, Jake knows he needs to be focused on leader development. That’s the only way multiplication happens. That’s the only way the vision becomes reality.
For church leaders, this same progression applies. You might start out focused on proving yourself, producing results, getting the ministry off the ground. But as you grow, your primary focus has to shift to developing the people around you. Otherwise you become the bottleneck.
Start With Character and Show Up Every Day
If Jake could go back in time and tell his 2016 self anything, it wouldn’t be tactical shortcuts or business hacks. It would be this: you’re about to embark on a really fun journey. Focus on being a man of good character. Follow God. Maintain sustainable work-life balance. Care for your spouse and kids. Don’t rush. If you focus on the right inputs, the outputs are going to start multiplying like crazy, and God will take care of that growth.
Jake talks with a lot of guys in their 20s, and that’s the advice he gives them. Focus on self-leadership and the basics. Yes, there are better strategies out there than others. Fortunately, Jake was listening to the right voices when it came to building a business and doing online marketing, and he’s reaped the benefits over the past decade. But strategy only gets you so far. You have to show up every day and put in the work.
A lot of people see Churchfront now with 300,000 YouTube subscribers and a growing business and think it happened overnight. It didn’t. It’s the result of eight to 10 years of just showing up and doing it every single day. Nobody sees all the late-night Monday edits to make sure a video goes out on Tuesday morning. Nobody sees all the work that goes on behind the scenes. But that’s okay. Jake’s not doing it for the recognition. He’s doing it because he believes in the vision.
The Takeaway for Church Leaders
As churches continue to move away from overly corporate structures and back toward more authentic ministry, let’s not lose sight of these foundational leadership principles. Vision matters. Hiring well matters. Learning to delegate matters. Showing up for your team matters. Focusing on high-leverage activities matters. Developing leaders matters.
These aren’t corporate buzzwords. These are biblical principles applied to the practical realities of leading people and organizations. Whether you’re a solo church planter or leading a staff of 50, these lessons apply.
And if you’re looking to grow in your understanding of church technology and systems, seriously consider spending a few hours going through the free courses on our website. You’ll be more equipped to lead your team well and make better decisions about the technology investments your church needs to make.
Because at the end of the day, leadership isn’t about control or titles or being the smartest person in the room. It’s about serving the people you lead so they can do ministry more effectively. That’s what Jesus modeled for us, and that’s what we’re called to do.
