How Flatirons Strengthened Their Staff

If you lead in a church, you already know the truth: The work of building teams never stops.

Team members shift. Ministries grow. Needs evolve. Leaders are stretched into new responsibilities. Even in healthy churches, there’s always another seat to fill, another leader to develop, another culture habit to reinforce.

Flatirons Church, a multisite church across Colorado’s Front Range, lives out this reality every day. God is moving in powerful ways. People are meeting Jesus. Ministries are expanding. The staff is full of passionate, gifted leaders.

Yet, the leadership team still faces the same ongoing tension every leader knows well. Executive Lead Pastor Jesse DeYoung summarizes it clearly: There’s always somebody that needs to be trained up. There’s always a role that needs to be filled. There’s always a team that needs to be coached.

The work doesn’t pause because the mission can’t pause. Flatirons has learned this firsthand as they’ve intentionally rebuilt—not just staffed—their team.

Growth is Good … But Hard

Growth is exciting. But it naturally exposes the places where a team, culture, or structure needs to mature. As Flatirons expanded, they entered a season where culture, clarity, and leadership expectations needed fresh attention. It wasn’t a crisis—just the normal organizational pressure that shows up when a church grows quickly.

Jesse describes that season with honesty: Some of the growing pains we’ve had came down to culture, strategy, and our mid-level leaders. Our culture had gotten unhealthy for a season, and we had to fix that first. Then we realized people liked the culture—but they were unclear on the strategy. So we had to rebuild both.

Rebuilding culture and strategy simultaneously is no small task. It required slowing down, listening, and realigning their leadership rhythms. Jesse added: As we grew, we started to feel gaps in culture, strategy, and support for our mid-level leaders. We had to take an honest look and rebuild some things so our team could be healthy and aligned for the future.

At the same time, the broader reality of church staffing was shifting. The pool of candidates was no longer what it used to be. Executive Pastor of Ministry Development, Carl Romas, put words to the challenge: Fifteen years ago, the pool of people we could pull from was huge. Today, it’s just harder. The pool feels smaller and smaller.

Flatirons needed a strengthened culture, clearer strategy, and a sustainable approach to staffing—all while maintaining the week-to-week work of ministry.

Getting Outside Help

The Flatirons team is highly capable and deeply invested in developing leaders internally. Like most executive leaders, they carry full plates. Weekly ministry pressures often leave little margin for the proactive, strategic work of building the team behind the ministry.

    • Hiring takes time.
    • Coaching takes energy and supporting leaders takes consistency.
    • Restructuring or clarifying roles takes focus.

In this reality, Flatirons began leaning on Slingshot Group for support. Watch how that played out:

Executive Pastor of Campuses, Karen Berge, put it simply: We work hard to develop our people. But some roles require a greater level of experience or a broader network than we have. That’s when I know it’s time to call Slingshot.

Over time, that relationship deepened. Karen stated, They’ve gotten to know us—our culture, how we work. It feels less like starting from scratch and more like partnering with people who understand how we’re wired.

More than twenty staffing engagements and multiple coaching relationships later, the partnership has become a meaningful part of how Flatirons continues to strengthen its team. Jesse shared: The thing that sets Slingshot apart from different people we’ve worked with is they take time to get to know us, not only as leaders, not only as an organization, but us as people. They know the type of people who are going to fit here. They have become such a trusted partner for us that it goes beyond just search and finding people for our team. We look at it as—these are partners in ministry who specialize in this area that we can reach out to when it comes to questions about compensation, questions about strategy, questions about what’s happening in the kingdom. We feel Slingshot is a true advocate for our ministry here at Flatirons.

Tim Foot, CEO of Slingshot Group, adds a perspective rooted in experience: We have this burden for leaders leading teams, knowing that the team is never fully complete. You either need a new person on the team or you need to develop the leaders that you have. How do we know this? Because we’ve been in those seats, and it can be a lonely place. So it is such an honor to serve churches and nonprofits who are feeling the burden of building their team, and help them find and hire great leaders who fit and stay.

Conclusion

The work isn’t finished—and that’s the point. Jesse captured something many executive pastors feel but rarely say out loud: So many executive pastors feel alone. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The work of building teams is demanding and ongoing. But it is never wasted. Every hour invested in culture, clarity, coaching, or staffing is an investment in the people who carry the ministry forward—and in the future of the church.

Flatirons’ journey is a reminder that while the work never stops, it is work worth doing. And wise leaders know when to bring others to the table as they do it.